Everyone’s seen the Kerry/Bush flash funny, but my mother hasn’t, and while my response time is not as good as Google I give more personalized search results. So there it is.
Author: Bryant
This is it. 8.5 games behind, 3 games against the division leader over the weekend, and the best chance to climb back into the race in the balance. Fortunately, the pitching matchups are highly favorable.
Schilling should beat Lieber. Arroyo, who is significantly better than his 3-7 would indicate, ought to beat the journeyman Sturtze. Note the insane 55:41 run:earned run ratio that Arroyo labors under. Go, Red Sox defense! Lowe vs. Contreras… well, that’ll be entertaining. I’m predicting an 8-7 game. In the third inning.
Mind you, Derek Lowe has an 87:66 run:earned run ratio. Yeesh. OK, I fired up the spreadsheet; read the extended cut for the bottom 15 R:ER ratios for pitchers who’ve gone over 20 innings. Hint: Red Sox pitchers are well represented, particularly if you filter for larger sample sizes. As much as Lowe was helped by great run production last year, he’s been hurt by lousy defense this year. The real Lowe underneath all the effects of the players around him is still not that good, though.
Anyhow, the point of all this before I got distracted by the lousy Red Sox defense was that I would like to believe that this is the point at which I stop expecting the Sox to do anything this year. That’ll fall by the wayside if they make it to the playoffs, but I’d like to believe it right now. If they don’t sweep the Yankees this weekend — and they need to sweep — then I think they should trade Nomar for prospects; they should sluff Lowe off; and they should think long and hard about Varitek: if they aren’t gonna win this year, and he wants a long-term contract, and they expect Shoppach to be ready the year after next, then they should trade Varitek and rent someone passable for next year to hold down the fort until Shoppach is ready. I wouldn’t feel that way if Varitek was represented by anyone but Scott Boras, but he is and I do.
(Dig those extended sentences? I can reel ‘em off all week.)
This obsession with always contending gets in the way of building a perennial contender; it may at this juncture be necessary to take a step back. There are a huge number of teams who still think they have a chance and there are not a lot of great players on the market. If the Sox’ chances are poor this year, and they are, and if they can improve their chances in future years at the cost of whatever remaining chance they have this year… they should make trades. Screw the fellowship of the miserable.
Not very surprisingly, the Syrian band that freaked out Anne Jacobsen has been identified. Despite this, the usual suspects are still up in arms. From National Review Online:
That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn’t. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did.
But… everything was hunky-dory on board. The band was a band. Saying “but they might have been terrorists” is silly, because they weren’t. You might as well say, with as much justification, “but what if Anne Jacobsen had been a terrorist?” Nothing was stopping her from taking control of the plane either.
My god. Any passenger could potentially be a terrorist! We’ve got to just shut down all commercial travel. It’s the only way to be sure.
The Internet Explorer team has a blog. That’s cool. They also have a wiki. That’s mildly flabbergasting. Looks kind of like it’s working, though.
Glenn Reynolds, July 19th:
MORE: Hugh Hewitt:
Ask yourself what would be going on in Washington, D.C. tonght, and on the network news, within the blogosphere, and in the morning papers, if it had been revealed that Condi Rice was the target of a criminal investigation for removing classified handwritten notes from the government records relating to terrorism.
I think we know. But it’s early yet — this may get more attention from Big Media tomorrow.
CNN, July 20th, front and center story:
Samuel Berger, former President Clinton’s national security adviser, is under federal criminal investigation for allegedly removing classified documents and handwritten notes from a National Archives screening room during preparations for his testimony before the 9/11 commission. Berger acknowledged that he “inadvertently” removed some documents.
New York Times, July 20th:
President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, removed classified security documents from the National Archives while vetting them in preparation for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission and has become the subject of a criminal investigation, his lawyer said Monday night.
Mr. Berger removed at least two versions of a memorandum assessing how the government handled intelligence and security issues before the millennium celebrations in 1999, his lawyer, Lanny A. Breuer, said. He also removed notes he took about classified documents, the lawyer said.
Glenn Reynolds, July 20th:
SISSY WILLIS says that the New York Times is way behind the curve on the Berger story. “In an inversion of Winston Churchill’s famous comparison of the speed of lies vs. truth, the blogosphere had already promulgated and commented upon the information contained in the AP report yesterday afternoon and evening before the Times had had a chance to put its pants on, so to speak.”
Some people are never satisfied.
Also: I think Sandy Berger should resign from Kerry’s campaign right now. I think he’s at the very least an idiot for doing whatever it is he did. How do you “inadvertently” remove classified documents? That’s really sloppy, and one has to suspect dishonesty. This case was leaked now by the Republicans for political reasons, I know, but Berger is still an idiot. In fact, he’s an idiot for remaining involved with the Kerry campaign while this was going on.
And that’s what passes for interesting for me. Five del.icio.us links per box, one box between each pair of entries, most recent links first. All my stuff. I want a slightly lighter grey for the box color, or darker, or something. I’ll fiddle later.
Also later: a big box somewhere containing just the 10 most recent del.icio.us links overall.
I’ve been using del.icio.us for a week and a bit now and it feels like a habit, so I will point out my personal little bookmark clickstream. The cool thing is that I can subscribe to your clickstream and get a friends page that aggregates the bookmarks of the people I find interesting. This works for me.
At some point fairly soon I may hook this up to this weblog in some interesting manner. In the meantime it’s a good way to keep track of evanescent interests. And if you have a del.icio.us account that you don’t mind sharing, share it in comments.
iTunes users may be pleased to discover that much of the 9/11 Commission hearings are available via the iTunes Music Store. This link will do something useful if you use iTunes, and if you don’t, I have no idea what will happen. Something useful, here, is defined as a page which contains the hearings among many other things. I’ve been unable to find a more useful direct link.
I tracked down a copy of the new Sean Stewart novel, Perfect Circle, and it’s good enough to be worth waiting eight years for, let alone the four years it’s been since Galveston. So no complaints here.
A little about the milieu, first. It’s the modern world, akin to Mockingbird, with that touch of elemental unexplained strangeness. Like Mockingbird, it’s set in Texas; like many of Stewart’s novels, it’s about family. In the author’s notes for Mockingbird, he says that “I had in mind something that would ‘fit’ with Resurrection Man, but with the quantities of light and dark reversed; a scary comedy, as it were, rather than a brooding novel with occasional jokes.” I think that Perfect Circle is a better match for those words; it echoes the relationship between death and family described in Resurrection Man through a lens crafted of punk music and Texas.
If I was going to write a cover blurb, on the other hand, I’d say something like “Perfect Circle establishes Sean Stewart as the American Nick Hornby,” which would make all the High Fidelity fans happy until they read any of his books besides Perfect Circle. This is why I’m not in marketing.
And come to think of it, Perfect Circle isn’t a comedy, either. So never mind the whole thing and just read it already. There are not one but two chapters on Salon, so you’ve no excuse not to fall in love.
I just clued into the other thing that bugs me about the Annie Jacobsen story. Michelle Malkin, among others, writes smugly that this event highlights the stupidity of a policy against secondary questioning of more than two Arabs per flight. See also Ann Coulter’s racist whine, which Annie Jacobsen cited in her original article.
But Annie Jacobsen also noted that the 14 Syrians on her flight were… pulled aside and questioned in LA. This was confirmed by government officials. So, ah, doesn’t that kind of undercut the concept that the airlines have a policy against questioning groups of Arabs?
A lot of people aren’t thinking that one through. Or, more to the point, they’re assuming that a policy restricting “secondary questioning” means that airlines can never under any circumstances pull aside more than two Arabs per flight.
It’s also worth noting that the original source for the information about this policy, John Lehman, never said that he knew the policy was in effect. He said he thought it was still in effect; which, of course, was reported without the element of uncertainty inherent in “I think.” Paying attention is hard! And why should Mr. Lehman worry about getting the details right in something so important as the 9/11 hearings, anyhow? They seem like a fine forum to promulgate unverified beliefs about our security.