Memorial Day

by The Last Hollywood Star



Memorial Day symbolizes three things: summer’s official beginning, the baseball season’s swing into the heart of its schedule and the long weekend when we honor Americans who sacrificed their lives in our major conflicts.

Those three variable interact meaningfully.

During World War ll baseball, like other professions, lost many of its key personnel to the draft. The Selective Training and Service Act signed by President Roosevelt on September 16, 1940 required that every American male between the ages of 21 and 36 register for 12 months of military service "to ensure the independence and freedom of the United States."

By the end of 1941, the draft had put nearly two million men in uniform.

To research baseball’s relationship with World War II, I relied on two sources that I wholeheartedly recommend to fellow baseball fans and history buffs: Gary Bedingfield’s Baseball in Wartime and Graham Womack’s Baseball Past and Present

I’m moved by the enormous patriotism that inspired so many of the baseball stars who nobly served America. Although only two active major league players were killed during World War II, Elmer Gedeon and Harry O’Neill, many of the best players fought.

According to Bedingfield, more than 500 major league players “swapped flannels for khakis” during World War II, and such well-known stars as Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams served their nation off the diamond.”

Another was Detroit Tiger future Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, drafted on May 7, 1941. "Hammerin' Hank" had played in three World Series and two All-Star games. In 1938, Greenberg hit 58 home runs (just two short of Babe Ruth's 1927 record) and in 1940 was the American League's Most Valuable Player.

Greenberg gave up his $55,000 yearly salary for $21 per month Army pay and reported to Fort Custer, Michigan. He told The Sporting News, "If there's any last message to be given to the public, let it be that I'm going to be a good soldier."

Baseball sacrificed at other levels, too. The military summoned 4,076 from the minor leagues which ranged in classification from “AAA” down to “D” . Players exchanged their uniforms to learn to fly planes, shoot weapons and maneuver tanks. No more than 12 minor leagues survived during the war years compared to 44 circuits that operated in 1940.

Even manufacturers of baseball equipment contributed to the war effort. Hillerich & Bradsby, who produced the famous Louisville Slugger baseball bats, converted their production lines into manufacturing stocks for the M1 carbine rifle.

In one of his blogs, Womack offered this starting line up made up of some of the best World War II veteran players. Included are:

Second Base: New York Yankee Jerry Coleman who saw combat in two wars. Coleman flew 57 missions in World War II and another 63 during the Korean War. In between, he finished third in the 1949 American League Rookie of the Year voting and was an All Star for the Yankees in 1950.

Shortstop: Washington Senator’s Cecil Travis is one of the few players who may have missed the Hall of Fame because of his World War II service. A .314 lifetime hitter, Travis entered the army at 28 following his best season, 1941, when he hit .359 with a league-leading 218 hits. Travis suffered frostbite on his feet during the Battle of the Bulge and played just three more seasons after the war concluded, never again hitting .300.

Outfield: Coleman’s Yankee teammate, Hank Bauer whose war credentials are almost as impressive as his 21-season long big league career. In 32 months of World War II combat, Bauer earned eleven campaign ribbons, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. Bauer debuted in the majors in 1948, was a three-time All Star with the Yankees who hit .277 with 164 home runs.

Outfield: Ted Williams, a flight instructor during World War II, who flew 39 combat missions during the Korean War and might have otherwise hit 700 home runs.

Pitcher: Cleveland Indians Bob Feller refused a World War II non-combat playing assignment but insisted on being sent into battle. Feller got his wish, serving 26 months as chief of an anti-aircraft gun crew on the battleship Alabama.

Although many of today’s major league players are of the age where they could have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan, the all volunteer military spared them.
If you watch baseball this weekend, don’t forget about our many heros who thrilled you on the diamond but also fought for your freedoms.

Little Miss Atilla has some thoughts on the mess in the Gulf

The Parallels with the RMS Titanic Continue

James O'Keefe

So his arrest in Sen. Landrieu's turned out to be something less than Watergate, Jr.

On the other hand, Patterico and Ace of Spades have a couple of posts on the interesting way the prosecutors handled things.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Screenshots of the Government’s Admission That James O’Keefe Did Not Attempt to Tamper With Landrieu’s Phones



Shocker: Court Destroyed Evidence That Landrieu's Phones Were Working Fine, Just As O'Keefe Endeavored to Establish

Ace makes a good point about journalists, leaks, and the narrative:

This is very similar to the basic rules of leaks: If a leak damages a Republican, the leak is considered legitimate and the story is the content of the leak itself.

If, however, a leak damages a Democrat, the leak is considered illegitimate and not fit for public discussion and the story is instead about the lack of ethics and political maneuvering and general skullduggery that resulted in the leak.

(See also:On leaks, bias and truth)

Vacation all I ever wanted

Had to get away

Obama to Skip Wreath Laying Ceremony at Arlington on Monday

Obama will alter vacation plans slightly and travel to the Gulf on Friday in a desperate attempt to “plug the damn hole” in his approval ratings.

Obama Blows Off Arlington Visit on Memorial Day

Sad news from the city that doesn't work

Historic warship's future may be sunk


The old warship has been part of Philadelphia’s waterfront for 50 years and left lasting impressions on thousands of visitors who heard gripping stories of its role in the Spanish-American War.

Now the Olympia – the last surviving vessel from that 1898 conflict – could face an ignoble end as an artificial reef off Cape May if a new benefactor cannot be found.

HT: Wyatt Earp who rightly call this a national disgrace

Jack Cashill connects some dots

The Senator from Sandy Berger

Should Democrat Joe Sestak be elected the next United States senator from Pennsylvania -- he beat Arlen Specter handily on Tuesday -- he might best be known as the "Senator from Sandy Berger." Sestak owes his political career to Berger.

Bobby Jindal is not Kathleen Blanco

Louisana Gov. Jindal blasts Obama inaction, moves on sand booms

Related:

Hysterical Left Flipping Out Over Oil Spill While Obama Talks Hoops With Marv Albert
He's been refusing interviews with the White House press corps lately and won't answer a simple question, but he sure has plenty of time to talk hoops.


If Obama isn’t in Bed with Big Oil then what is his excuse for moving so Slow?


Obama Golfs as Oil Gushes

Who is Joe Sestak?

It seems he is either a preening liar or he is abetting a criminal cover-up.

Joe Sestak: Um, yeah, Obama tried to buy me off by offering me a job

This ain't gonna help at the trial

No bail for men charged in officer's death


His Facebook page — on which he refers to himself as "Payroll McGee" — lists his hobbies as "basketball, dice and robbin." In a box dedicated for a personal description, he wrote: "I hav no promlem wit pullin da trigger!!!!!"

Attention morons who want to be thugs....... social media is not your friend.

When she is good, she is very very good

Ann Coulter on the hapless Republican establishment:

Republicans on Track to Snatch Defeat From Jaws of Victory

Republican consultants are doing a wonderful job raising expectations sky-high for the November elections, so that now, even if Republicans do smashingly well, it will look like a defeat (and an across-the-board endorsement of Obama's agenda). Thanks, Republicans!

That's what happened in the 1998 congressional elections, nearly foiling Clinton's impeachment. It's what happened to the Conservative Party in Britain a week ago.

Ace on fire

A Little History For Rand Paul


But what does the Constitution actually say? It says to me -- in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments -- that slavery, vile from the outset, is finally, after long years and bloody civil war, finally outlawed.

I cannot believe that at this late date we're still having an argument over whether it was legally permissible to back-door it back in through Jim Crow.

Why on earth would we even have this argument? We've got live, critical controversies happening right now, but we have to keep an open mind over the question of whether the federal government has the power to eradicate slavery and its badges and incidents? Really?

An important distinction

From Beldar:

If I'm looking at my son Adam and I call him by his older brother Kevin's name, I've "misspoken." If I say to him, "Adam, I served in Vietnam," then I'm a liar.

Until yesterday, Richard Blumenthal was a well-educated lawyer praised for his ability to make cogent and powerful arguments in court. Now, he wants us to believe that he is a toungue-tied rube when he talks a about his military service.

BTW, did either Bushes, widely mocked for their tortured speaking style, ever make a similar mistake about their military service?

Maybe the best quote of the day from a commenter at Hot Air:

What’s the difference between Blumenthal and Jane Fonda? —- Fonda has actually been to Vietnam.

UPDATE: More at In from the Cold. Poor Blumenthal can't get out of his own way. At the press conference he brought along "Elliot Storm, a.k.a. William Joseph Trumpower, a veterans organizer for the Blumenthal campaign." Unfortunately, as noted at IftC, Mr. Storm has his own stolen valor issues.

Funny stuff

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

HT: Michael Williams

Good take on the birth certificate mystery

Kenya Believe it? NY Times Toddling Towards Truth On Obama's Birth Certificate

So why won't Obama just release the file? My guess is that there is nothing of interest or consequence in the file, but that Obama is concealing it simply because he conceals everything. His political success is centered on his biography and he controls the presentation of that biography the way the Walt Disney people control Mickey Mouse. As a matter of brand management Obama won't release his birth files, his college transcripts, his law firm billing records, or anything else - go buy a copy of "Dreams From My Father" and he will tell you his story, and thanks for asking.

Related:

Soothing the MSM's fears about the birthers

"JaMarcus Russell reminded Mel Kiper Jr. of John Elway"

Worth remembering when ESPN's pompous draft "expert" holds forth on the WWL:

Three years from now you could certainly be looking at a guy who is certainly one of the elite top five quarterbacks in this league . . . Nobody has an arm like JaMarcus Russell. . .
Obviously, he'll need a little time. But you're talking about a 2-3-year period. Once he's under center, look out, because the skill level he has is certainly John Elway-like.

A forgotten classic and the future of journalism

The Reporter Who Time Forgot
How Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day changed journalism


Meanwhile, The Longest Day was reissued in 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. It still sells—a fact that belies the glaring omission of Ryan’s work from so many anthologies of literary journalism, and also offers a powerful lesson for a trade trying to figure out what people will pay to read. There is nothing, it turns out, like a densely reported story propelled by the palpable sense of a reporter chasing his story.

It makes for interesting reading in light of print's economic woes.

For one thing, i wonder if a big part of Newsweek's problems stem from a "cool kids" syndrome. Back in 1989, Newsweek tried to reinvent itself by emulating Spy magazine (which itself went under in 1998) Last year, its preferred role model was The Economist. Were these the best models for Newsweek given its current and potential readership? Or did they reflect a desire by the staff to improve their street cred within the guild?

A comment at the CJR suggests the latter.

Some very astute points. Narcissism, to some degree . . . NEWSWEEK was not alone in wanting to tell us what its writers were interested in, but the tone belied the title of the publication. After the 1960s a lot of magazines went after a demographic that didn't get much of its news from, you know, 'reading', while stiffing the demographic that did. So you had younger, pop-culture drenched writers trying to tell older, more conservative news consumers a lot of stuff that the latter knew to be rubbish, and calling it 'news'. I still don't think the inbred NY/DC media-political echo chamber gets itself .

As the article on The Longest Day notes, Ryan got his backing from "the least hip of all magazines, Reader’s Digest."

So the unhip magazine helps create "new journalism" and produces a work that sold at tens of millions of copies (and still sells to this day.) Yet that model of journalism languishes.

Aki Iwarmura!

by The Last Hollywood Star


Last year, the Pirates dumped off one of the teams most popular players and all around good guy, Freddie Sanchez, to San Francisco for a questionable prospect, Tim Alderson (6.00 ERA at Altoona) and replaced him at second base with a fat, non-English speaking Japanese who can neither hit (.175) nor field. To rub salt in our wounds, Aki Iwamura is the highest paid player on the team.

Why?

These are the things that when repeated season after season drain faithful fans of all their interest. Given his salary, the Pirates are committed to playing him. But, if he continues significantly below the Mendoza line, Iwamura could become Neil Huntington's Matt Morris.

A hundred million bucks can buy him the mayor's office

but a couple of billion dollars can't buy Michael Bloomberg a clue.

Unreal. Mayor Bloomberg Says Car Bomber Could Have Political Agenda… Against Health Care Bill

Day of Remembrance

Remembering the victims of communism at Distributed Republic.

The wrong man for the Court of Appeals

Judicial Activist

In 2005, serial murderer and rapist Michael Ross found an unlikely sympathizer -- federal judge Robert Chatigny, who called Ross's sexual sadism a mitigating factor in his case. He threatened and berated Ross's lawyer into further postponing his death sentence against this client's own wishes. Judge Chatigny sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee today as President Obama's nominee to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

(HT: Power Line)

Cross-cultural studies: Non-citizens in Mexico

Open borders for thee but not for me.

Michelle Malkin:

– The Mexican government will bar foreigners if they upset “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” How’s that for racial and ethnic profiling?

– If outsiders do not enhance the country’s “economic or national interests” or are “not found to be physically or mentally healthy,” they are not welcome. Neither are those who show “contempt against national sovereignty or security.” They must not be economic burdens on society and must have clean criminal histories. Those seeking to obtain Mexican citizenship must show a birth certificate, provide a bank statement proving economic independence, pass an exam and prove they can provide their own health care.

Ace of Spades has some interesting observations.

Follow the discussion on Memeorandum.

UPDATE: Jammie Wearing Fool shows why Arizona should ignore the posturing of the Mexican government:

'Migrants in Mexico are Facing a Major Human Rights Crisis'

Where reporters get their stories

First Discredit, Then Sue

This is the best reporting the Times has done so far in its coverage of the pope's "scandal." They are revealing the fact that they uncritically passed along a report straight from the most interested party imaginable, Anderson. In doing so, they created the perfect political atmosphere for him to proceed with his case against the Vatican and his various other lawsuits against the Church.

In case there's any doubt about how much Anderson stands to gain from discrediting the Church, the article provides some detail about how much he's personally benefited from suing the Church in the past:

He will not say how much he has made from his pursuit of the church (he says he does not know). But he insists that the cases, which number more than a thousand (he says he has not counted), have never been about the money.

Yet in 2002, he estimated that he had at that point won more than $60 million in settlements from Catholic dioceses, and he acknowledges that in the most complicated cases, he may receive as much as 40 percent of a settlement or judgment.

Clinton, politics, and the exploitation of death

Byron York reminds us of the political calculation that guided Bill Clinton's response to the OKC terror attack:

How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain

It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted. In the months after the bombing, Clinton regained the upper hand over Republicans, eventually winning battles over issues far removed from the attack. The next year, 1996, he went on to re-election. None of that might have happened had Clinton, along with Morris, not found a way to wring as much political advantage as possible out of the deaths in Oklahoma City. And that is the story you're not hearing in all the anniversary discussions.

The cynical exploitation of tragedy was one of the defining characteristics of the Clinton style. It was not just OKC.

The White House blamed Vince Foster's suicide on those who demanded answers to Travelgate and Waco. Normal politics and vigorous journalism became a "bloodsport" that drove good men to their graves.

Later, Clinton happily poured fuel on the fire when the press created a hysteria over racially-motivated church burnings. (Michael Fumento's great work demonstrated that the MSM got almost everything wrong on this story.)


Clinton's sank to his lowest when he dragged out his dead mother to explain away the Lincoln Bedroom fundraising scandal:

We've had a lot of work going on in Washington and we've had, both of us had lost a parent, and we just hadn't kept in touch with people like we should have.

As Ann Coulter put it:

Classic Clinton. He needed to start selling the Lincoln Bedroom because both he and Hillary had 'lost a parent" that year.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

An interesting sidelight-- Howard Kurtz takes time out from his press critic gig to spin for Clinton. He wrote this as part of his "reporting" in York's piece:

Okay, but the fact that a political adviser offered political advice doesn't mean the president was thinking just about his poll numbers. Keep in mind that 168 people had just died. Was George W. Bush thinking only about his poll numbers with his aggressive response to 9/11?

I like how he dismisses the evidence that York presents and equates it to the hypothetical calculations of Bush after 9/11. York cites the memo Dick Morris wrote for Clinton. Where is the Rove memo explaining how Republicans could tie Democrats to bin Laden? Until Kurtz produces said document, he looks like nothing more than a dishonest partisan.

I've Seen Worse---But Not Lately!

by The Last Hollywood Star

It's not much comfort to me as a lifelong Pirate fan to recall that I have seen worse major league baseball than the current edition of the Buccos.

I lived in Seattle during the Mariners' first years 1977-1986 and the team was more painful to watch. During that ten year period the M's average winning percentage was about .400

The M's had some good players like Leon Roberts and Richie Zisk. In 1982, Hall of Famer Gaylor Perry had a cup of coffee with the Mariners. Perry's stop over was long enough for him to record his 300th career victory. I still have my ticket stub.

Most Mariner players however were rejects with limited skills. A good example is one-time Bucco Mario Mendoza whose batting ineptitude created the term "Mendoza Line," a reference to hitting at least .200

The M's bumbling play drove another Hall of Famer, manager Dick Williams, out of baseball. After managing the team in 1986, 1987 and half a season in 1988, Williams left baseball for good.

A more insurmountable problem for Seattle baseball fans than the Mariners' poor play was the team's venue, the awful Kingdom.

On beautiful Pacific Northwest summer evenings, when the sun didn't set until 10:00 PM, a fan's choice was to enjoy the magnificence of Puget Sound, the view of Mt. Rainer or pay to enter the gloomy, empty Kingdom to watch the M's lose again.

For most of the Mariners' first 18 years, their poor play (they didn't have a winning season until 1991) combined with the Kingdome's design, led to poor attendance. Most games I saw had less than 5,000 people.

At one point the Mariners covered "the Tombs" right-center field seats in the upper decks in to make the stadium feel "less empty". Additionally, the Kingdome's acoustics created problems for stadium announcers who had to deal with significant echo issues.

At least Pirate fans don't have to worry about ambiance when they go to PNC Park. While the Kingdom was the dreariest place I have ever watched baseball (with Three Rivers Stadium not far behind), PNC is at the other end of spectrum. Despite the Pirates' struggles, a game at PNC is always a good way to spend time.

Of floppy disks and Dead Sea scrolls

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

A decade later in the 1980s I was in high school making backups of the hard drive of my PC onto 5-¼-inch floppy disks. I thought that because digital copies were “perfect,” and I could make perfect copies of perfect copies, I couldn’t lose my data, except by accident. I continued to believe that until years later in college, when I tried to restore my backup of 70 floppy disks onto a new PC. To my dismay, I discovered that I had lost the floppy disk containing the backup program itself, and thus could not restore my data. Some investigation revealed that the company that made the software had long since gone out of business. Requests on electronic bulletin board systems and searches on Usenet turned up nothing useful. Although all of the data on them may have survived, my disks were useless because of the proprietary encoding scheme used by my backup program.

The Dead Sea scrolls, made out of still-readable parchment and papyrus, are believed to have been created more than 2,000 years ago. Yet my barely 10-year-old digital floppy disks were essentially lost. I was furious! How had the shiny new world of digital data, which I had been taught was so superior to the old “analog” world, failed me? I wondered: Had I had simply misplaced my faith, or was I missing something?

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Many (most?) of us have given up writing messages on paper, instead adopting electronic formats, and have exchanged film-based photographic cameras for digital ones. Will those precious family photographs and letters—that is, email messages—created today survive for future generations, or will they suffer a sad fate like my backup floppy disks? It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

Daryl Gates , RIP

The L. A. Times does its usual sloppy and biased job. Patterico, as he often does, helps us out by setiing them straight.

L.A. Times Editors Spit on Gates’s Memory and Botch the Facts in the Process

The LAPD officer who writes as Jack Dunphy offers a view from inside the force.

The Los Angeles Times Smears Memory of Former LAPD Chief Gates

A couple of old posts are relevent here.

LAPD

Worse than Jayson Blair

A classic and well-deserved putdown of FNC's biggest on-going embarrassment

Tea Party Leader Blasts Geraldo Rivera For Airing Anti-Tea Party ‘Hit Pieces’

“You seem to be attacking me,” Rivera finally astutely noted. That prompted Williams to actually attack Rivera, personally: “you’re Geraldo Rivera; William Randolph Hearst winces at some of the work you do.”

Not to be missed

A Long Reply to the Epistemic Closureites

God bless Texas

It's San Jacinto Day

Reading the tea leaves at CIA

Powerline gets an assessment from a former case officer:

On the departure of Stephen Kappes

The retirement of Steve Kappes, the CIA's number two, is significant because he represented the status quo at the CIA. He was a fierce defender of CIA bureaucracy.

Kappes apparently had some responsibility for the operation which resulted in the suicide bomb attack at Khost. That catastrophe "helped push Kappes out the door." If this is true, then the disaster Khost may have been preventable.

According to this Newsweek story from 2006, one of the issues between Porter Goss and Kappes was the bureaucracy's refusal to hold officers accountable for grievous failures in operational security. Goss won the battle but the bureaucrats won the war when the director resigned and Kappes came back as Hayden's #2.

Tea parties: not so fringy after all

Gee, even the NY Times is catching on:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll .

(HT:JWF)


The Times has a way to go, though. Don Surber looks at some of the poll results that The Paper of Record skipped over:

NYT hides who the Tea Partiers really are

Media junk food

ESPN and other sports outlets spend hours discussing the NFL draft. Mel Kiper and Todd McShay are on the air year round discussing which team will draft this player, which team should take that one.

The only problem is that these draft gurus are not very accurate.

Kiper the klown: our annual mock-draft scorecard!

Generally speaking, the most well known mock drafters get just 1 in 4 first round selections correct! They generally get one or two picks correct in the second half of the first round, and zero picks correct in any round beyond the first.

Tea parties and the MSM: Bob Dylan nailed it decades ago

In the movie Don't Look Back, the cameras catch Bob Dylan taunting a reporter from Time magazine:

Do you really care about what you say? I know more about what you do than you'll ever know about me.

Much the same could be said about the people who attend the Tea Parties. They baffle the carefully cocooned reporters who venture out to cover them. But they are neither baffled nor impressed by the "elite" journalists from Time or CNN. Internet-fueled press criticism and fact-checking have stripped away the mystique of the MSM. It has rebalanced the information flow.

Actually, it may tilted the advantage toward Tea Parties and other political insurgents.

Dylan again:

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Scott Shane of the New York Times on CSPAN2 September 27, 2007:

"I'm a jounalist whose job it is to explain to others things he doesn't understand himself."

"A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day."

Cathy Seipp from 2004:

One of the election lessons for Democrats is that while the Left doesn't understand the Right, the Right can't help but understand the Left, because the Left is in charge of pop culture. Urban blue staters can go their entire lives happily innocent of the world of church socials and duck hunting and Boy Scout meetings, but small-town red staters are exposed to big-city blue-state values every time they turn on the TV.

This strikes me as odd

What Crisis?
Pulitzers pass over financial reporting

If you had to pick a single story that has shaped our recent times, it would be the financial crisis and the economic collapse that was its result. Once-august brokerages and banks have shuttered, unemployment and foreclosure rates are sky high, and debt-ridden states and nation states threaten further disruption.

This year, no Pulitzer winner explored these topics. And last year it was the same.

Understanding the electorate

Steve Sailer has a couple of interesting discussions that look at the voting public in new ways:

Politics of Cable Network Audiences

The Politics of Sports Fans

Good read

The Five-Pound Butterfly Revisited

Several years ago, the WSJ wrote about the tendency of many companies to do hiring based on a long string of highly-specific (and excessively-specific) requirements. One person interviewed remarked that “Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn’t mean there is a shortage of butterflies.”

Since that article was written, the five-pound butterfly effect has probably gotten worse rather than better in the business world. But hunting for five-pound butterflies also seems to be increasingly affecting other areas of life, including college admissions and the search for love and marriage.

An almost unbearable tragedy

President of Poland Killed in Plane Crash in Russia

I agree wholeheartedly with Michelle Malkin:

Prayers for Poland

As Cynthia Yockey reminds us the Polish national anthem is “Poland Is Not Yet Lost”. Fitting for a redoubtable people.

Vern Law: Cy Young Award Winner, 1960

by The Last Hollywood Star


On Thursday, I went to PNC Park to watch the Pirate-Los Angeles Dodger game but also to get Vern Law’s autograph.

Yesterday was one of the regularly scheduled Alumni Autograph Days at PNC. Law, Rich Reuschel and Manny Sanguillen were all there chatting with a long line of fans and signing away.

Law is the last Major Leaguer to pitch 18 innings in a game. One evening way back in 1955 Law, on two days rest, not only pitched the equivalent of two full games against the Milwaukee Braves, he allowed only nine hits while striking out 12. Bob Friend picked up the win in the 19th.

Four days later, Law pitched 13 more innings against the Cincinnati Reds, this time picking up the win. The Reds game brought Law’s four day total to 31 innings or three and a half full games.

When I approached Law, I reminded him of his famous game against the Braves and suggested that 18 innings is more than most pitchers today register in any three consecutive starts. Or, for that matter, any three straight starts by three different pitchers from the same team.

And by the end of the afternoon that was the case with the Pirates.

During the Bucs three game series with the Dodgers, Zach Duke threw five innings; Ross Olendorf, five and Paul Maholm, six.

Combined line for the three days: 16IP, 17H-8ER, 6SO, 5BB, ERA 4.50

Even in this era of watered down standards, that’s sub-par. And if it’s representative of what Pirate pitching will be for the season, it will be a long year.

The (conservative) case for financial reform

Matthew Continetti:

Because the Republicans have paid no cost for opposing this president, they may be tempted to stand athwart any financial reform bill that comes up for a vote, no matter how sensible some of its ideas may be. That would be misguided. The public may not like the solutions the Democrats have put forward to address America's problems, but that does not mean it suddenly has fallen in love with Vikram Pandit, Jamie Dimon, and Lloyd Blankfein.

When Joe Six Pack reads the paper, he learns about a group of insiders at one end of the DC-NYC megalopolis bailing out insiders at the other end. He has little affection for both. If the GOP is serious about becoming the party of the people, serious about shifting power from Washington and New York, serious about unleashing competition and favoring the innovator over the incumbent, why not back free-market measures against an entrenched financial elite?

Arnold Kling:

Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called “crony capitalism,” “corporatism,” or, in Jonah Goldberg’s provocative phrase, “liberal fascism.” There is a free-market case for breaking up large financial institutions: that our big banks are the product, not of economics, but of politics.

Saving CNN

Politico took a look at the ratings and thought the guys at the most trusted name in news could use a little help:

How to fix CNN

The future of CNN, never exactly bright the past couple of years, suddenly looked dire this week when ratings came out showing a 40 percent decline in prime-time viewers since 2009.

Jon Klein, the network's president, has consistently defended its down-the-middle news strategy, despite the increasingly large ratings leads opened up by MSNBC and particularly Fox, with their ideological slants and big personalities.

So is it time for a radical rethinking of “the most trusted name in news,” the network of Larry King Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown and Wolf Blitzer? We asked a dozen or so prominent media watchers, former industry executives and CNN personalities for their recommendations.

Both Jay Rosen and Michael Hirschorn posted longer discussions of the question on their websites.

What CNN Should Do With Itself in Prime-Time
A media beat reporter asked me if I had any advice for CNN about what to do in prime-time. Just so happens I do. Ditch the View from Nowhere but don't go aping your rivals. Here's my alt line-up for CNN from 7 to 11 pm.


Don't Cry for CNN
Thirty years ago, CNN, now in decline, was as revolutionary as Google. It had a pretty good run.

The blogger Spook86 at In from the Cold also had an astute post that raised a couple of relevant points not made by Calderone’s panel.


Like most formerly great organizations, CNN’s Big Problem grows out of a bunch of smaller problems.

1. It has rejected or forgotten some of the things that made it great in the first place.

2. At the same time, it clings to useless artifacts of its glory days.

3. It has been slow to cope with changes in the external environment (technology, competitors, demographics). This may be the inevitable consequence of being the market leader: there is no where to go but down. As I’ve argued before, outside changes occur more rapidly than organizations can transform themselves or even understand what is happening outside their office walls.


4. The people who lead CNN are woefully out of touch with their customers (current, former, and potential) and how those customers perceive their product.

Hirschorn reminds us of what CNN once represented:

it was, in terms of cultural impact, the Google of its day. Its gonzo “fluid news” style, low-cost methods, and disdain for the woolly orthodoxies of traditional TV news- gathering terrified the big three, and attracted their most forward-thinking journos.

Spook86 makes the important point that this broadcast style grew out of a new business model and it was driven by the personnel strategy of that business model.

When the cable network made its debut 30 years ago, it offered extended newscasts in prime time and even late night. If there was breaking news, CNN was inevitably on top of it, and stayed with the story for hours (or days) on end.

And more importantly, the network generally played it straight. Back in those days, most of the anchors and producers were graduates of local stations, more concerned about getting the story on the air than providing a particular a particular slant or perspective. The network also recognized that some outlets could do a better job in covering a story and occasionally carried newscasts or special reports from its local affiliates.

Now CNN uses the same obsolete model that has failed at CBS, ABC, and NBC. The anchor as star attraction just does not seem to work for anybody any more. Not for CBS with Katie Couric and not for CNN with Anderson Cooper, Rick Sanchez, et. al.

Spook86 thinks the problem started with the first Gulf War (usually seen as the start of CNN’s glory days):

But all of that changed with the first Gulf War, when CNN's round-the-clock coverage was a media sensation. With critical acclaim (and a bigger audience), the cable news outlet began acting like the rest of the MSM. Many of the original anchors and reporters were replaced by talent that previously worked for the broadcast networks. And the long slide began.

The Gulf War had another deleterious effect on CNN’s mindset. They fell in love with and then became addicted to “LIVE--Breaking News” and real time on-the-scene reporting. They tried to cover everything the way they “covered” Baghdad the first night the bombs fell.

Unfortunately for CNN, most stories do not demand that sort of treatment and in many cases it is counterproductive. The technology is expensive (driving up the CNN’s costs) while the resulting stories are often disjointed, devoid of background and context, and plagued by technical glitches that annoy any sentient creature who actually cares about the matter under discussion.

(The addiction to “Live!” Real Time Reporting left CNN vulnerable to opportunistic infections such as Twitter Fever. Why does the “most trusted name in news” waste its viewer’s time with Fabgrl98’s 140 character effusions on the economic consequences of cap-and-trade?)

Worst of all, the audience is unimpressed. The more CNN strove for immediacy and spotlighted their commitment to journalism, the more viewers fled to its talk radio competition (FNC and MSNBC) with their canned talking points.

CNN probably blames the audience for rejecting quality journalism. Hirschorn explains why CNN is wrong:

In an era when news flows like water--available everywhere, all the time, instantly--a network devoted to providing headlines topped with a touch of analysis no longer seems quite so useful. If anything, sitting down for 22 minutes to watch a middlebrow mix of politics and weather that’s too proud to dabble more than passingly in the latest Hollywood crack-whoredom seems … inefficient. What was very urgent in 1980 or on 9/11 no longer seems crucial when we’re drowning in news. CNN’s decline may be, in Wall Street analyst-speak, secular as opposed to cyclical.

The Web makes CNN look foolish as it covers a breaking story. By the time a story is an hour old, a reader can learn more by clicking her mouse than she can from the breathless irriatated gushing droning snarky ignorant knowing monologues of CampbellAndersonWolfRickJohn.

On a normal newsday, the audience already knows what CNN strives to tell them. They’ve been reading about it since noon. At least Fox and MSNBC offer more than an abbreviated recapitulation; amid the flood of partisan talking points there is a dollop of smart commentary. CNN seems constitutionally afraid of smart partisans so their commentators tend toward the Brooksianglib, boring, and ill-informed or the Carvillianclownish, irritating, and unthinking.

I actually think CNN could rise again. There is a substantial audience for non-fiction television that currently ignores the news channels. Networks like National Geographic, The History Channel, The Military Channel, A&E, manage to attract an audience interested in factual stories and biographies. CNN could try to become their television news source.

CNN’s biggest millstone lies within their corporate headquarters. As with most companies, the men who must solve the problems are the same ones who created them. No surprise that success is rare.

Hirschorn:

But it’s always easy to pontificate when you’re not weighed down by decades of process, staff, relationships, and cash flow. Would you want to tell Larry King it’s time to retire?

Exactly.

Add to that the problem of convincing a skeptical, information saturated audience that CNN really is worthy of their time and trust.


Small changes are not going to help CNN. Big, sweeping changes cause too much pain.

Sounds like a recipe for "catastrophic failure" as described by Cohen and Gooch.

Catastrophic failure produces an eerie calm at the highest levels of an organization-- a calm which grows out of disbelief, helplessness, and cognitive overload. Because of this, the end is no fiery Gotterdammerung. Instead, there is resignation and surrender to the inevitable.

The Times and the Pope

The End of History and the Last Pope

For an elite drunk on its own enlightenment, the ends will always justify the means against religion. So what, Keller figured, if my reporters could only come up with straining, half-baked pieces that cast fragments of information about Benedict in the worst possible light? Let's run them anyways, so that the forces of tolerance can triumph over the forces of absolutism!

And if it turns out that the forces of tolerance are largely responsible for mishandling these abuse cases (the ousted homosexual Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the subject of flattering profiles over the years in the New Yorker and New York Times, is the person most responsible for dereliction in the Milwaukee case the Times claims to find so outrageous), well, let's blame it on Benedict anyways. He could have done more!

Too big to fail means big enough to bully

Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan on the Dole

How the bank puts politicians and taxpayers over a barrel

It's a must read.

What a difference a -D makes

Red States has an almost unbelievable post:

The Left-Wing World is Upside Down

Tim Russo was charged with and convicted of being a felony sex offender, charged with importuning (a fancy way of soliciting sex with a minor), attempted disseminating matter harmful to a juvenile, and possessing criminal tools.

Yeah one little detail — how could they ever have forgotten to put that in. But it’s okay. Russo wants everyone to know he did not have to register as a child predator. Seriously.

So because he did not have to register as a child predator, it is okay now? It is okay to serve in elected office?

Funny thing, Arianna was not nearly this forgiving when she had Mark Foley in her sights.

UPDATE: [4-8-10] Excitable Andy actually gave this guy Quote of the Day honors for a piece Pope-bashing blather.

News flash: The Times gets sloppy and shows its bias

The Pope, the Scandal, and the Crib Notes for Journalism 101

But in trying to undercut the moral witness of the pope by suggesting that as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he was too forgiving of the monstrous Fr. Murphy, Goodstein committed errors of fact, interpretation, context, and journalistic procedure that together make nonsense of any claim to objectivity on the part of the New York Times.

Here (for the benefit of Maureen Dowd and others who have forgotten Journalism 101) are some of the ways that Goodstein and her editors botched the "Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys" story

He is Risen

This passage is from Martin Bell's remarkable little book The Way of the Wolf: The Gospel in New Images.

God raised Jesus from the dead to the end that we should be clear-once and for all-that there is nothing more important than being human. Our lives have eternal significance. And no one-absolutely no one-is expendable.

Colored Eggs

Some human beings are fortunate enough to be able to color eggs on Easter. If you have a pair of hands to hold the eggs, or if you are fortunate enough to be able to see the brilliant colors, then you are twice blessed.

This Easter some of us cannot hold the eggs, others of us cannot see the colors, many of us are unable to move at all and so it will be necessary to color the eggs in our hearts.

This Easter there is a hydrocephalic child lying very still in a hospital bed nearby with a head the size of his pillow and vacant, unmoving eyes, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs in his heart, and so God will have to color eggs for him.

And God will color eggs for him. You can bet your life and the life of the created universe on that.

At the cross of Calvary God reconsecrated and sanctified wood and nails and absurdity and helplessness to be continuing vehicles of his love. And then he simply raised Jesus from the dead. And they both went home and colored eggs.

Another victory for justice

Pressler Lawsuit Settled

Duke has settled its lawsuit with former lacrosse coach Mike Pressler. Having tried (and failed) to get the case thrown out before discovery, the University had little choice--I can't imagine the discovery in this case would have been pleasant.

More Frum Fall-out

Odious Conservatives

A major proposition that I advance in a book that will be published later this month, After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery, is that there exists an odious subgroup of conservatives who since the beginning of the conservative movement have made their way to prominence in the mainstream media by a cheap act. They disparage with great melodrama other conservatives. Liberals love it -- and for a while love the disparagers. In the late 1990s Arianna Huffington exploited this instrument of self-promotion brazenly. For several years David Frum has been doing it haltingly, even timorously. However, in the last two weeks he has been pulling a Huffington with unusual boldness.

First he smeared Sean Hannity. Then he reproached conservative opponents of the Democrats' healthcare monstrosity. Now he is claiming martyrdom at the hands of Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that housed him as a resident fellow for seven years, reportedly at a salary of $100,000 a year. Brooks was willing to let him stay on at AEI but without a salary. Very theatrically Frum(p) quit, and the Liberals pronounced him a great man. My thesis is again vindicated, and you will understand my satisfaction in reporting that in Hangover I have embalmed Frum(p) as a perfect example of the conservative hustler, manipulating Liberal approval. I call his type the Reformed Conservatives (RCs).

Frum’s Firing


By now, many Chronicles readers have no doubt heard that David Frum was fired from his cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute, following an online column claiming that the passage of Obamacare was the GOP’s “Waterloo,” which could have been avoided if the GOP had been more willing to negotiate with Obama. Frum is now charging that AEI tossed him because it was responding to pressure from its donors, a charge eminent AEI scholar Charles Murray has denounced at National Review Online as “despicable,” since it is unsupported by evidence and is calculated to appeal to the leftist media. But if Murray is only now discovering the nature of Frum, he has not been paying attention.

From the beginning, the Canadian carpetbagger has sought to climb the greasy pole by attacking those on his right, in ways designed to curry favor with the left. As an undergraduate at Yale, he joined leftists at Yale in urging the university to take control of the Yale Literary Magazine, then run by future Chronicles editor Andrei Navrozov.

A bad news, good news sort of thing

Last year i wrote this about David Frum:

Frum, on the other hand, is still trying to get on board the conservative-bashing gravy train. We can expect plenty of mischief from eDF as he tries to catch the attention of the MSM.

That turned out to be correct and Frum has become a regular on cable. (That's the bad news.)

The bad news is that he is the leading resercon for a cable news network.

The good news is that it is the ratings-challenged CNN.

The essential Tucker Carlson

William Jacobson notes that Carlson's website The Daily Caller isn't quite living up to its mission statement:

Daily Caller A Failure

A commenter summed up Carlson's career nicely:

But dude, it's Tucker Carlson. He's made a career of being the frat boy liberals have in mind when they talk about Conservatives.

See also:

Tucker Carlson: The willing degradation of the reservation conservative

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

Unfortunately for Joy Behar, she can't be silent and make a living at the same time.

Joy Behar questions John McCain's courage for declining her TV invite

Especially timely

From last fall, but even more relevant today.

The Paranoid Center

How the panic over right-wing violence is being used to marginalize peaceful dissent

When panicky centrists aren't willing to draw an unbroken line from peaceful conservatives to the violent fringe, they posit a somewhat subtler link. The killers, they acknowledge, aren't taking their marching orders directly from Fox News and AM radio. But by giving serious attention to theories associated with the fringe right—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing concentration camps, that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen—Glenn Beck and other broadcasters are validating the grievances of potential killers, giving them the impression that they aren't alone. This validation is buttressed by the sweeping, sometimes violent rhetoric about "liberals" that you hear from partisan celebrities, such as Ann Coulter's joke that McVeigh should have blown up the New York Times building instead. In The Eliminationists and on his blog, David Neiwert tries to establish a chain linking "eliminationist" behavior in American history (lynchings of blacks and Asians, the slaughter of American Indians), eliminationist rhetoric on the mainstream right (the Coulter wisecrack), and von Brunn–style efforts to eliminate people directly.

The theory is interesting, but it has two enormous problems. The first is that it ignores the autonomy of people on the fringe. Not just the radicals who commit the crimes, but the radicals who don't commit crimes. There's a complex ecology at work here, one demonstrated most clearly in those cases when militiamen alerted authorities to terrorist plots in their midst. Words have influence, but they influence different people in different ways; you can't reduce media effects to simple push-pull reactions. Accusing Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly of validating right-wing violence isn't so different from accusing pornography of validating rape, Ozzy Osbourne of validating teen suicide, or Marilyn Manson of validating school massacres.

Related: Paranoia also makes you stoopid:

Charles Johnson "Fairly Sure" the Tennesee State Flag is a Neo-Nazi Logo...

Gee, ya' think?

[Human Rights Watch] is an association that is all about influence — an influence that depends on a carefully honed image of objectivity, expertise and high moral tone. So it was perhaps a little awkward that a key member of staff was found to have such a treasure trove of Nazi regalia.

More here.

Perspective (or lack thereof)

Howard Kurtz takes a look a Gerald Boyd's posthumous memoir:

Faced with what would become the greatest fraud in the history of the New York Times, Gerald Boyd did not want his own reporters to investigate.

"A handoff is a dereliction of duty," he told his boss, Howell Raines, as they grappled with the fallout from Jayson Blair's fabrications. Boyd could not have been more wrong.

In Kurtz's mind, Jayson Blair is the worst fabricator in the hisotry of the Times.

Remind me again, which genocide did Blair cover-up?

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

Frum-smacking: A game everyone can (should) play

The Conservative the Right Loves to Hate

He is a good and energetic man, and has, in the years since he left service at the White House, dedicated himself to being what I call a “polite-company conservative” (or PCC), much like David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus at the New York Times (where the precocious Ross Douthat is shaping up to be a baby version of the species). A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio. The PCC, in fact, distinguishes himself from other conservatives not so much ideologically—though there is an element of that—as aesthetically.

Ace:

I have a somewhat different take on Frum. I notice that Frum is not actually terribly policy-oriented or policy-informed. He is not a wonk. Or, if it is, he seems to hide it well enough on his blog. I don't see a lot of deep policy analysis on his site.

Frum, of course, is constantly castigating conservatives like Limbaugh for supposedly-simplistic thinking, sloganeering, etc. Not doing their homework. Not pouring over the policy details and arriving at a good policy position, but instead preferring easier, gut-level attitudinal posturing.

The thing is -- That's all that Frum does, too. He may criticize Limbaugh for simplifying arguments into easy-to-repeat gut-level impulses and attitudes, rather than going into great detail about policy, but that's all Frum does, too. Except instead of copping one attitude -- "Don't negotiate; stay firm; remain true to principles" -- he cops the opposite attitude -- "Always negotiate; stay flexible; compromise on principles."

But because his attitude is viewed more favorably by the liberal retardentsia whose approval he so craves, he deems that his attitude is the more sophisticated and intellectualized one.

Here's something i wrote a year ago:

The recent Tea Parties really put the lie to Frum’s posturing. By all rights, he should love this essentially libertarian grass roots movement. His great bugaboo--the Religious Right--is not driving the movement. The Tea Parties focus on economics not the social issues that Frum detests.

But Frum is luke warm. Fox News jumped on the board the bandwagon, you see. The people at MSNBC and CNN are making fun of the demonstrators. People might think that David Frum a dork like Sean Hannity if he supports the Tea Parties.

That really is the bottom line with Frum. He cares a lot about what the right people think.

Not Right as in conservative. Not Right as in correct. No, right as in popular in the cool circles and cool in the popular circles.

A broken system

In California, Killers Sit on 'Symbolic' Death Row for Decades, Costing Billions


The state of California is losing billions of dollars keeping hundreds of prisoners on death row -- but the ultimate punishment is mostly symbolic in the state, where inmates ply the appeals process for decade after decade and are more likely to die of old age than by execution.

It seems that California has created a perverse system of capital punishment appeals. It let's a monster like Richard Ramirez spend decades on death row. At the same time, a truly innocent man is likely to spend decades on death row.

By law, every death sentence in California has to be appealed and reviewed by the state's Supreme Court to ensure that no one who is innocent faces the ultimate penalty.

It is a slow process that begins with a very long delay. According to Minsker and other experts, it generally takes as many as five years after a conviction before a lawyer is even appointed to file a mandatory appeal. "Nothing happens in those five years," she said. The reason, according to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a panel appointed to look at the state's death penalty system, is that there are just too few experienced lawyers available to handle the growing number of appeals.

Bug or feature?

Joe Katzman:

Amazing! It turns out that putting people through "training" modeled on political indoctrination programs in dictatorships is productivity-draining make-work for a subset of the political class. Fortunately, it impairs its own stated objectives, thus creating more "demand" for the political class' "work."

Credit where due

Mad About Obamacare? Blame Bush

The question conservatives should be asking though, is how did we get in this position in the first place? How come, over the course of two elections, Democrats were able to take back the White House and amass substantial majorities in both chambers of Congress, allowing them to enact this sweeping legislation with no Republican votes – and huge defections in their own party? How could a generally right-of-center nation be taken over by liberals from Chicago and San Francisco?

The answer, of course, is that none of this would have been possible without George W. Bush -- or more broadly speaking, Bush era Republicanism. While they were in power, Republicans squandered an opportunity to push free market health care solutions. When they did use their power to pass major legislation, it was for policies like the big government Medicare prescription drug plan, which was (until today) the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society. They took earmarks and doled out farm and energy subsidies. They earned a reputation for fiscal recklessness and corruption and incompetent governance. President Obama ultimately forced through the health care bill in spite of the political consequences to his party because he’s ultimately a true believing liberal. But it was only because of the failures of Bush-era Republicanism that an ideological liberal with little experience was able to capture the presidency on the abstract notion of change.

(HT: R. S. McCain)

Related:

GWB:The man in full

UPDATE: Klein left out maybe the biggest Bush failure of all: his inept handling of the two wars he launched but did not win.

UPDATE (3/24): Stand by your man was a great song; it is lousy politics.

Many of the comments at Am Spec and TOM attack Klein for criticizing Bush. I don't know which worries me more: the whiff of totalitarian party-lining implicit in the idea that true conservatives must only attack liberals and never Republicans or mounting evidence that for most commenters the 'net brings out their inner idiot. (Fortunately, the only commenters i have are reasonable or spam-bots. I delete the latter and appreciate the former so read what CJinPA wrote on this post.)

If conservatives and free-marketers don't criticize the Bush/Rove record, then three bad things happen. One, we look like hypocrites when we criticize liberals and Democrats. Two, the Bush years (and their disasters) get chalked up conservative ideas. Who could be surprised if the public was less than eager for a repeat. Three, Bushites end up appearing on TV as conservative spokesmen and get their heads handed to them.

For item 3 check out this:

Karl Rove appeared on ABC's This Week with a chart full of facts about the Obama health care bill and what it would do to the U.S. economy. Obama political consultant David Plouffe appeared with several humorous talking points provided him by the White House.

"We wanted him to be ready," says a White House communications aide. When Rove raised the issue of the damage the health care bill would cause the U.S. economy, Plouffe jumped in, saying, "Karl and the Republicans would be familiar with that. Under their leadership, they took us from big budget surpluses to a $1.3 trillion deficit."

Later, he used the line: "Karl and the Republicans have zero credibility -- about as much credibility as the country of Greece does to talk about fiscal responsibility."

Rove may have had the facts on his side but television is all about soundbites. Right now, any Democrat will win the soundbite battle if the issue is economics and his opponent made his bones serving Bush II.

I prefer The Blues Brothers myself

But R. S. McCain is apparently an Animal House fan:

Democrats in the Deathmobile

Here is your headline of the day

Cinderella smacks Georgetown in the mouth

Ohio, a team that had posted a losing record in its Mid American Conference, snuck into the Big Dance by putting together a four-game conference tournament championship run.

And on Thursday, the suddenly unstoppable Bobcats seemed a step quicker than the Hoyas on offense and defense all night. The Hoyas had no answer for two Bobcats guards who delivered a couple of steely-eyed Big Dance performances that will be talked about for years.

Remembering the glory days of the Pirates

by The Last Hollywood Star



As the Pittsburgh Pirates embark on the team's 50th Anniversary celebratory season of its historic 1960 World Series triumph over the New York Yankees, fans have good reason to reach back in time to when the Buccos were truly great.

For too many fans, a 17-year sub-.500 Pirate record has blotted out the Bucco's rich history.

Others of a younger generation know nothing of previous Pirate glory days.

The place to begin your review of the early Pirates is a wonderful new book by James Forr and David Proctor, "Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography"

The book naturally focuses on Traynor and his sixteen-year Hall of Fame playing career from 1920 to 1937 (BA: .320) during which time he was widely considered to be baseball's best third baseman. The honor was officially bestowed on him in 1969 when Traynor was voted as the third baseman on baseball's all-time team.

In most of Traynor's Pirate seasons the team contended for the National League pennant.

An extraordinarily skilled fielder and a great hitter, Traynor once drove in more than 100 runs in five consecutive seasons (1927-1931). The only other third baseman to match that feat is the Atlanta Braves' Chipper Jones. I'll save you the trouble of looking it up. Neither 500 home run sluggers Eddie Matthews nor Mike Schmidt did it.

Forr and Proctor also devote chapters to Traynor's post-playing years as the Pirates manager, an evening sports talk show host and an announcer for the old "Studio Wrestling" program back in the days when wrestling was more or less legitimate.

Traynor was a widely recognized and beloved figure in Pittsburgh. Since he never learned to drive, Traynor walked everywhere and was more than willing to stop and chat with his admiring fans. Unlike many of today's stars, Traynor never turned down a request to appear at a youth group or address a charitable organization.

The book is rich with Pirate history that will fascinate even the most casual fan.

Here are two examples:

-- For years, some baseball analysts claim that when the Pirates met the New York Yankees in the 1927 World Series, the Bucs were so overwhelmed when they watched "Murderer's Row" take batting practice that they knew they would lose and played accordingly.

Traynor debunks that theory completely. According to Traynor, the Pirates took batting practice first and never even watched the Yankees warm up.

Lloyd Waner, Traynor's Hall of Fame teammate, confirms it. According to Waner: "We had our workout first and I...was just leaving the field as they were coming onto the field."

--- In 1938, when Traynor was manager and the team badly needed pitchers and catchers, Chester Washington of the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier sent Traynor the following telegram: "KNOW YOUR CLUB NEEDS PLAYERS STOP HAVE ANSWER TO YOUR PRAYERS RIGHT HERE IN PITTSBURGH STOP JOSH GIBSON CATCHER FIRST BASE B. LEONARD AND RAY BROWN PITCHER OF HOMESTEAD GRAYS AND S. PAIGE PITCHER COOL PAPA BELL OF PITTSBURGH CRAWFORDS. ALL AVAILABLE AT REASONABLE FIGURES STOP WOULD MAKE PIRATES FORMIDABLE PENNANT CONTENDERS STOP WHAT IS YOUR ATTITUDE? STOP WIRE ANSWER"

Years later, that Traynor never answered Washington puzzles many especially since if the Pirates had acquired Gibson, Leonard, Bell and Paige they likely would have run off a string of World Championships.

But in retrospect, the consensus is that Traynor's silence was not motivated by racism but that he acting individually did not have the authority from the Pirates' administration to integrate baseball.

Not quite a decade later, when Traynor was working as a sportscaster, he urged the Pirates to follow the lead of the Brooklyn Dodgers and sign black players.

What I also enjoy about Forr and Proctor's book is the insight into less well known early Buccos who had enormously productive careers.

Have you ever heard of Lee Meadows? In addition to being the first major league player to wear eye glasses, Meadows was the fastest working pitcher ever to take to the mound. In 1919, as a Philadelphia Phillie, Meadows was the 6-1 loser in a 51 minute complete game (!) against the New York Giants. Meadows anchored the Buc's staff from 1924 to 1928 when he won 20 games once and 19 games twice.

Did you ever wonder how Trayner's Hall of Fame teammate Hazen Shirley Cuyler became known as "Kiki"? Some think it was because of his slight speech impediment that often made it difficult for Cuyler to pronounce his name completely on his first attempt.

Others say that Cuyler was such an outstanding outfielder that players would call "Ki, Ki" for any fly ball within his reach.

How about the left-handed Cy Blanton who debuted for the Pirates in 1935 and after two and a half weeks had a 4-0 record with a 0.75 ERA. By the season's end, Blanton was 18-4 and led the league in ERA with 2.58.

Banton's story ends sadly, however. He never matched his early success and after being traded to the Phillies, was released in 1942. In 1945, Blanton died in a mental institution.

"Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography" is the first comprehensive study of Traynor's career. And the book offers many interesting and amusing anecdotes about the great Pirate teams and players from those wonderful days gone by.

Copies are available from Amazon.com and can also be ordered at http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/ or by calling 1-800-253-2187

Today on Sesame Street: David Brooks

Brooks is turning out to be like Big Bird to Obama's Snuffaluffagus! He's the only one who can see the real Obama and nobody believes him.

Jonah Goldberg in The Corner.

Anthrax doubts

The Department of Justice and the FBI think the anthrax letters case is now closed. Dr. Meryl Nass disagrees. She has posted a series of valuable questions and rebuttals to the FBI's case against Dr. Bruce Ivins.

Federal Bureau of Invention: CASE CLOSED (and Ivins did it)


Actually, the 96 page FBI report is predicated on the assumption that the anthrax letters attack was carried out by a "lone nut." The FBI report fails to entertain the possibility that the letters attack could have involved more than one actor. The FBI admits that about 400 people may have had access to Ivins' RMR-1029 anthrax preparation, but asserts all were "ruled out" as lone perpetrators. FBI never tried to rule any out as part of a conspiracy, however.

That strikes me as a serious blindspot in an eight year investigation.

Additional details emerge to challenge the FBI's anthrax letter scenario

The point, as one scientist specializing in fine particle chemistry told me, blows a large hole through the 92-page summary of the investigation released last week by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, the main conclusion of which is that Bruce E. Ivins, a scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, was the anthrax mailer.

“Note that the proprietary azeotropic drying technique and the pneumatic mill are both superspecialized pieces of equipment, neither of which is at Detrick,” the specialist in fine particles, Stuart Jacobsen, said in an e-mail message.

But the F.B.I.’s entire case against Mr. Ivins is that he was able to manufacture the anthrax used in the attacks at his Fort Detrick lab, working late at night on the days before the actual anthrax mailings so nobody would see what he was doing.

In the aftermath of the FBI report, Ivins "therapist" hit the media trail with tales of the evil Bruce Ivins and his twisted psyche:

Jean Duley emerges from undisclosed location after 18 months to bolster FBI's case against Ivins


Remember, Duley had only just received a Bachelors Degree when she was put in the position of counselling Ivins for substance abuse. She has neither the training nor experience to comment to the media on Ivins' psychological pathologies, let alone treat them. She was not qualified to do anything more than substance abuse work, and as someone who had fallen off the wagon, was not even qualified for that.

Nass also notes that Duley is the only medical professional to come forward with these tales.

She has a round-up of other questions here:

My summary of unresolved issues in the anthrax letters case

Amanda Knox

Tabloid TV generally displays a "guily when charged" mentality. For some reason, they made an exception in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

The cable screamers were convinced that Amanda Knox was a poor innocent girl railroaded without evidence.

One journalist who broke from the pack was Barbie Latza Nadeau of The Daily Beast. Unlike the cable pundits,she actually attended the trial in Italy.

Amanda Knox was not convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher because she did cartwheels in the police station or owned a vibrator, as her supporters suggest., Knox, 22, along with her 25-year-old former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty by a jury in Perugia, Italy, based on hard forensic evidence, according to the sentencing judge’s 427-page reasoning, which was issued Thursday and obtained by The Daily Beast. The two judges and six jury members for the 11-month trial agreed with the prosecution’s case, calling it a “comprehensive and complete picture without gaps and inconsistencies.

And this:

[The jury] convicted her unanimously, the disagreement was only on whether or not to give her a life sentence. “A life sentence would have been a death penalty,” one juror said. “They were too young and there was no motivation for the murder.”

Still, they believed wholeheartedly that she was involved. They valued the forensic evidence that Amanda’s parents say does not exist. They wondered why Amanda’s DNA and Meredith’s blood was wiped away and recovered with Luminol. They thought it was Raffaele’s bloody footprint on the bathroom rug and his DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp. They believed the prosecutor’s testimony that Meredith’s DNA was on the blade of the knife that had Amanda’s DNA on the handle. They had the forensic evidence they needed to tie her to the murder, they said in off-the-record interviews after the hearing. They believed that if she did not kill her, she knew enough about who did to warrant the conviction. The inconsistencies in Knox’s story were too many. Her lack of corroborated alibi just too much to overlook. How Amanda explained these same things to her parents is a well-kept secret. “She says she wasn’t there,” her father claims. “We just know she wasn’t there.”

Hat Tip

Not quite must see TV

Meacham of Newsweek in Talks for Weekly PBS Show

The Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, is negotiating to add a television job to his schedule. He is in final talks to be the co-host of a new PBS Friday night public affairs series called “Need to Know,” said several executives with knowledge of the production who declined to be named because the contracts had not been signed.

The co-anchor for the program, which begins May 7 at 8:30 p.m., is expected to be Alison Stewart, formerly of NPR’s short-lived “The Bryant Park Project” morning show and, before that, anchor of MSNBC’s “The Most.”

So let me get this straight. When PBS decides they need a new show, they turn to a guy whose magazine is losing readers by the boatload. Then they toss in a co-host who has already failed twice before.

Maybe the guild thought they might need a lifeline. That's the only thing that makes sense.

Politics ain't bean bag

Over at Volokh they decry the the attacks on the DOJ officials who once represented al-Qaeda detainees:

These attacks are not only wrong, but short-sighted as well. Nominees and appointees in Republican adminsitrations are routinely attacked for having represented politically unpopular clients. Suggesting that attorneys who performed pro bono work for detainees necessarily share the political sympathies of their clients is scurrilous — and no more grounded than claims that an attoreny who represented an oil company or accused white-collar criminal approves of his or her client’s conduct. Everyone is entitled to vigorous representation, even those accused of polluting our environment or planning to attack our nation.

A final note: There’s perhaps some irony that Peter Keisler is defending Obama Administration nominees from such attacks, when he himself was subject to scurrilous attacks when he was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. More evidence Keisler is more honorable than those who kept him off the bench.

A commenter, though, makes the critical point and takes the match:

All probably true.

But note that, while maintaining that honor, Peter Keisler is “Mr. Keisler” and not “Judge Keisler.” And the allegedly dishonorable people who kept him that way are running the country.

Same point, but in a different context from R. S. McCain:

The problem with giving the Left a free pass on this kind of stuff is that the Left is so relentless in blaming the the Right for all the world’s evils, both specific and general.

As for me, i'm old enough to remember when Carville and Begala were defending Clinton by smearing Ken Starr as a "lawyer for Big Tobacco".

So that explains why Dylan Ratigan is an obnoxious jerk

“I guess it sucks doing Rachel Maddow’s laundry.”

Wow. How did this guy get on the ticket?

Giannoulias seeks to blunt damage, says family bank likely to fail

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias sought to blunt a potentially damaging political issue today about questions regarding his involvement in his family’s struggling bank, which he said he expects will likely fail in the coming months.

His family pulls $70 million out of the bank in 2007 and 2008. Now it looks like it will fail at great cost to the FDIC. And he thinks Illinois should send him to Washington.


Oh yeah, his family business helped bankroll Tony Rezko and made loans to Michael “Jaws” Giorango,, a bookmaker and pimp.

(HT: Cap'n Ed at Hot Air)

Karl Rove: The not so smart political genius

Rove admits to error on Iraq as Bush strategist

NEW YORK — Republican strategist Karl Rove says in a new memoir that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq badly damaged the Bush administration's credibility and led to dwindling public support for the war.

The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.

Gee, ya' think?

The "Bush lied, people died" meme pollutes the public debate on the Iraq War. Now it finally dawns on Karl Rove that the White House should have pushed back against that libel. Truly Rove is one of the great minds of his generation.



See also:

The Libby case


The Bush governing style

That could be the MSM's epitaph

Apparatchiks who pretend to be revolutionaries — that’s an awful lot of the press these days.

Who is John Galt?

Apparently he was a child-killing psychopath:

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman

By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.

No surprise that libertarianism starts as applied autism and easily slides into something worse.


How can anyone be a Randian after reading Prescott's essay?

Maybe this helps explain it.

Nonetheless, people such as Ayn Rand—and the nerds and geeks who cling to her in the naive belief that her rotten novels will turn them into supermen—could never understand the fact that human beings are social animals.

Prescott blames Nietzsche's influence for Rand's disturbing fondness for sick killers. That is, at best, only a partial explanation. No one who took Nietzsche seriously could create Objectivism:

The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

As is usually the case, Chesterton had the best response to the bad parts of Nietzsche and his dime-store disciples:

Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere-- a very powerful description in a purely literary sense-- of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.