Orrin Hatch

I'm looking forward to the followup article on the Senator's thoughts on whether BYU deserves to go to play for the national championship after Saturday's game.

There's a general ridiculousness with this kind of article. After three weeks of games, there are lots and lots of undefeated teams. Plenty of teams *could* run the table, but not many of them will, and not many will be close.

I was also entertained by the last bit, about a possible matchup of two undefeated teams (BYU-Utah) at the end of the season. That sure would be exciting. But BYU wasn't the only Mountain West team to sink it's national championship chances last week.

Right, Senator?

Citizenship

I find it interesting that Jason Bay, from Canada "becomes" a US citizen the same day that Aroldis Chapman, from Cuba, "defects".

Is Jason Bay sort of defecting too?


Also, reading the article: Aroldis Chapman...Rotterdam...Jose Contreras...yeah yeah...raw prospect...100 mph fastball, wait, hang on, 100 mph fastball? He's been clocked at 102? Seriously? Ok, now I'm paying attention. Yes. Welcome to America, Senor Chapman. Happy to have you here.

Sonia Sotomayor

I'm making a rare reversion back into politics, because the Supreme Court is important.

Obviously, Sonia Sotomayor's ethnicity and her gender are hot topics. The way I see it, there are somewhere around 100 people in this country who are qualified for the Supreme Court at any given time. We may not agree with their decisions, but they have the training, background, and experience to be qualified. (I think that both of W's appointees, Roberts and Alito, fall into the 'qualified' category, although his first choice, Harriet Miers, definitely does not.)

So the President has to choose someone from a pool of people, all of whom have roughly the same set of qualifications. I think that it's worthwhile if the Supreme Court resembles the people of this country, and since Sotomayor comes from the set of people who are eligible due to their experience, she's a good choice.

Sonia Sotomayor is unquestionably qualified. None of the present justices ever worked as a state prosecutor, and only Alito, who worked as a federal prosecutor, has ANY criminal law experience. Hard to believe, but true. NONE of the present justices ever served as a trial judge (Souter did, but he's the one who's retiring). Since the justices regularly have to decide questions that are a trial judge's bread and butter (evidence, procedure, jury instructions, etc.), it would be worthwhile to have someone in the room who's actually had to make those kind of decisions.

So what kind of justice will she be? I don't have any idea. No one does. Souter was supposed to be a pocket conservative, and Scalia was seen as a moderate consensus builder. Who knows how someone will be in ten or twenty years? Not me.

One can demand that the President chooses someone who falls in the 'qualified' group, but outside that, you pretty much just have to hope they rule the way you want when the time comes.

TARP

The benefits and the costs of the TARP is a very complicated topic, with all sorts of nuance.

However, the New York Times linked to presentation that seems to be as helpful as anything else in explaining what it's all about:

The TARP, in Pictures

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Humor Creative Writing tarp

(It's available here.)

Bush

Finally, he's gone. I cannot let him go without commenting.

I wish Bush a long and healthy life. I hope he and members of his administration have the opportunity to witness the complete destruction of their legacy. I hope they spend decades defending the decision to go to war in Iraq, their conduct during Katrina, their monstrous deficit spending, their intransigence on global warming, their embrace of torture, etc. Public opinion has long turned against Bush; I bet most Republicans will follow quickly. This administration's incompetence cost numerous Republicans in Congress their jobs, I expect them to turn on him to survive.


My country is a better place than it was a week ago.


And now back to regularly scheduled blogging....

Couldn't've Said It Better Myself

Election

I can't resist.

There has been a lot of talk about how Obama is energizing young people in this election.

As of today, Obama's Facebook group has 1,154,734 supporters. John McCain's Facebook page has 169,280.

Accountability

The New York Times has an interesting article about Carly Fiorina, who's advising McCain. Her tenure at HP was not much of a success and she was fired.

But she was always good at sales. The article includes a marvelous quote:

“Well, see, the good news about business is, results count. And the results have been very clear. The results have been crystal clear. From the day I was fired, every quarter, even before they had a new C.E.O., has been record after record. That doesn’t happen unless the foundation’s been built.”

Sooooooo, after she was fired, HP's had record results every quarter, and we're to take that as evidence that she is a success? What's Michael Brown doing these days?

Election Day

It's worth pointing out that if our fine state government hadn't moved our presidential primary, then Californians would vote on Obama and Hillary today and would decide the Democratic nominee for president.

Tibet

While San Francisco waffles, kudos to Nancy Pelosi:

If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China's oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world....The situation in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world

Olympics

The Olympic Torch is scheduled to come through San Francisco April 9 on its (schmaltzy marketing-driven) tour of the world before heading to Beijing.

This is all very well and good, except that China is very touchy these days about any protests against its actions in Tibet (i.e. invading a sovereign country, shooting people, etc.). This affects San Francisco because the organizers of the event here are trying to keep even the route of the torch secret to hinder protestors. It sounds like they cannot even stomach the idea that having protestors near the torch--apparantly that might hurt the torch's feelings. They also talk about herding protestors into "free speech zones", which would presumably mean keeping them out elsewhere.

This is horrendous. I was under the impression that our entire country is a free speech zone. It is insulting and absurd to try to limit protestors here, especially people protesting against a foreign government. Eventually, the city will have to back down and the route will become public. I'm sure that when it does, the protestors against China will be out in force, as they should be.

Iraq costs

Aside from the cost in blood, this war is also costing us money. Lots of money. Like, two trillion dollars. With a "t".

Here's a story from 2006 pointing out that the war could cost as much as one trillion dollars. Now it's doubled. More interesting is how the Administration originally estimated the whole thing would cost "just" $50 billion. Oops.

Mitt Romney

So long!

When Romney first started running, I figured he would characterize himself as a relatively nonideological, pro-business, socially moderate former governor who would emphasize his management experience and competence. I figured he would be a pretty strong candidate in the general election if he got the Republican nomination.

At some point he must have decided he had to completely reinvent himself as a Bible-thumping conservative, ignoring all of his accomplishments over the last ten years. Then he kept changing messages until no one knew what he was for.

Except extreme partisanship. I find the following quote, which he made in his concession speech, vile and inexcusable:


If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.


This is outrageous. How would a victory by Clinton or Obama be a surrender to terror?

Good riddance, Romney. Go back to your millions and leave the rest of us alone.

So Long! Farewell!

Sayonara, Rudy Giuliani!

Finally you can go back to being a jerk, further alienating your family, and making scads of money from Hugo Chavez. We'll miss you.

Christopher Hitchens, are you reading this blog?

Mike Huckabee on the confederate flag:

You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do.

Shame, Mike, shame.

Election

2008 is going to be a strange election year. In the last several elections, we've never had as many viable candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards, maybe Richardson; Giuliani, McCain, Romney, maybe Huckabee, surely Ron Paul can't win, can he?). In the recent past, each party has had either one or two strong candidates

2004 (Bush; Kerry, Edwards)
2000 (Bush, McCain; Gore, Bill Bradley--remember him?)
1996 (Clinton; Dole, Pat Buchanan)
1992 (Bush; Clinton, Tsongas; Perot)
etc.

Anyway, the trend has been to compress the schedule of primaries, because with only a couple of strong candidates, everything would get settled after Iowa and New Hampshire. States keep moving their primaries earlier in the year.

This year may be different. If three strong candidates remain after Iowa and New Hampshire, it may well be that they divide the various states on February 5 too, because no one will have momentum. That would be very odd, and it may well be that the later states (Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont on March 4) will cast the deciding votes.

Senator Craig

How long until Senator Craig checks himself into rehab for his secret alcohol problem?

Note that Senator Craig did have an excuse in the police report: 'Craig stated “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine” '


From now on, when I'm travelling, I've resolved to use a narrow stance in all airport bathrooms. No sense in giving mixed messages.

The Havana Devil Rays

I was happy to hear Obama promoting a more open policy to Cuba for a couple of reasons.

First, of course, our embargo is exceedingly stupid. The reasons are obvious and uninteresting.

But second, if we dropped the embargo it could help solve the disasterous Tampa Bay Devil Ray problem. The franchise stinks. The Devil Rays play in a terrible stadium in front of a pathetic fan base. The team never should have existed.

Since the player's union would never let MLB eliminate a franchise, it only makes sense to move them. But where? I say Havana!

Jerry Falwell

Lately I've tried to avoid politics and focus on baseball and similar more intellectual somesuch, but this obituary (?) speaks so eloquently that I can't help myself.

Christopher Hitchens can be, ahem, somewhat over the top as a writer, although sometimes he's right on target.

My favorite quotes:

...media riffraff who allowed Falwell to prove, almost every week, that there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word Reverend.

and the first sentence, which Hitchens surely worked on to make incendiary:

The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled "credulous idiot."