BTW, the link below came to me in email. I get this sort of thing on a regular basis, more than one might expect for a puny weblog that gets 250 visits on a decent day. I'm more likely to blog about something that comes in a genuinue note from a real reader, as opposed to something like this which I'd call spam if I were feeling cranky, but I'm willing to overlook that if the mood strikes me. Having already blogged about this, I certainly appreciate the tip, regardless of who else may get it.
So out of curiosity, how many tips and links to other blogs do you bloggers out there get on a daily basis? I get between two and five a day, many from the same sources but occasionally new ones. I've apparently been subscribed to a few mailing lists as well. How I feel about all this varies over time, so I'd to know what others think. Thanks!
The progressive group Texans for Public Justice has filed a complaint with Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle over Rep. Tom DeLay's political committee Texans for a Republican Majority (TRM).
TPJ contends that TRM's IRS filings reveal hundreds of thousands of dollars in ostensibly political expenditures that were not reported in the PAC’s disclosure reports filed in Texas. IRS reports also reveal that TRM raised at least $602,000 in corporate contributions. TPJ contends that TRM used these corporate contributions—contrary to Texas law—to pay for some or all of its non-reported political expenditures.
Earle has already announced an investigation into TRM and how it raised and spent its money, so this is some extra fuel for the fire. It still doesn't mean anything until an actual indictment is handed down and/or DeLay gets pressure from fellow Republicans to Do Something about this, but as always, I'll take my good news where I can get it. Stay tuned.
And the winner of the 2003 John McCain Maverick Award, complete with a year's supply of fawning press coverage, is (drum roll, please)...David Dewhurst!
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst may not know everything about the etiquette of having breakfast with the high and the mighty, but he thinks he knows how to count votes in the Texas Senate.Last week, Dewhurst failed to show up for his weekly breakfast meeting with fellow Republicans Gov. Rick Perry, Speaker Tom Craddick and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn.
A spokesman said Dewhurst was busy making phone calls to senators and had sent word that he would be late. But harmless oversight or not, the timing -- from a political standpoint -- could have been better.
A day earlier, Dewhurst's independent streak -- and that of the Senate -- surfaced with the rookie lieutenant governor's attempt to steer the state budgetary process.
With Perry still preaching cut, cut, cut and Craddick bogged down for the second straight week in House debate over proposed civil justice changes, Dewhurst announced that he and most senators, Democrats and Republicans, were ready to dip into nearly $6 billion in nontax revenues to soften looming cuts in state programs and services.
They include tapping into the state's $1 billion savings account, known as the rainy day fund, and using certain accounting changes, which Perry had spoken strongly against only the day before.
Heck, even Molly Ivins has some nice things to say about Dewhurst, a sign that he's either a rising star or about to become forever marginalized by the powers that be.
All snarkiness aside, it is refreshing to see someone in our monolithically Republican state government think outside the box, even a little bit. I don't condone all of the things Dewhurst is trying to do to cover the revenue shortfall, but I give him credit for recognizing that there's precious little fat to be cut, and cutting muscle and bone does more harm than good. If we do make it through this legislative session without turning social services into something that Charles Dickens would recognize, we'll have Dewhurst to thank. It won't get him off the hook for the 79th Lege session in 2005, but it's a start.
Last night I called the mother of one of my players to ask her to attend a Team Mom meeting on Tuesday. We will get our schedule and information about uniforms at that time, so I'll finally be able to plan out my time for the next two months.
After she agreed to attend this meeting, she dropped a little bombshell on me: Apparently, a couple of the other moms had a problem with the way my assistant coach ran the practices on Thursday and Saturday. Hoo boy.
One reason why I've never been interested in pursuing a manager's role at work is because I have no desire to deal with personality conflicts. I don't want to have to sort out who did what to whom, who started it, whose fault it is, who's getting shafted and who's getting away with it, etc etc etc. Some day, I'll have kids of my own, and I'll have to deal with that sort of thing with them. I don't need it from adults.
It turned out not to be so bad. My assistant coach has been very helpful to me, but he's not particularly warm and fuzzy (as one of the moms I spoke to put it). He wanted to work out particular kids at particular positions, based on some covnersations we'd had about where I thought they'd be playing, and wasn't very receptive to questions about it. I mostly listened to the moms and let them vent a little - there are days when having a background in customer service really comes in handy - and assured them that everyone on the team has a contribution to make. Both of them told me they appreciated my taking the time to talk to them, so I hope this incident is behind us.
One thing that came out of my conversation with my assistant coach, whom I spoke to before I called the moms, was how to marry a philosophy of wanting to have fun with the reality that winning is more fun than losing. I'm a relatively mature adult who knows full well that Winning Isn't Everything. On the other hand, as Charlie Brown once said, losing isn't anything. I've played on various beer league softball teams, all of which were mediocre at best, and it's my personal opinion that it's a lot harder to just play for fun if you have no chance to win. There's no joy in getting your butt kicked on a regular basis.
A coach of a team in a competitive league has to put the welfare of the team ahead of the welfare of any individual. In particular, that means only playing your best players. This league insists on having everyone play, and that's a philosophy I support. That doesn't mean that everyone gets to play wherever they want, though. I do think that at this level it's in the best interests of both the team and the individuals to generally play the best players in the infield, since that's where most of the action is. I want to give everyone a chance to succeed, and that means not setting them up to fail.
To be blunt about it, there are a couple of kids who don't catch or throw well enough to warrant regular playing time on a team whose primary mission is to win. Our primary missions are fun and learning, so they'll play as much as everyone else does. Given that I do believe that you cannot completely de-emphasize winning, however, I'll be limiting how often they play in the infield.
(On a side note, as it happens both of the kids whose moms I spoke to would be reasonably successful in the infield. I believe they will be more successful in the outfield, not because they'll be hidden from the action but because I think they can shag fly balls. I told them as much, and I plan on giving a form of that speech to the kids themselves on Tuesday.)
It's a fine balance, and I expect to stumble a few times on the way. I hope the next time I'm confronted by this issue it goes as smoothly as this one seems to have gone.
Just one thing before I call it a night. I see that our very own District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has been arguing the state's case in the sodomy case that's before the Supreme Court. Apparently, he didn't do a very good job:
After watching the arguments, longtime court reporters wrote analyses comparing Rosenthal's performance unfavorably with that of his much more seasoned opponent, Paul Smith.The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse wrote that the argument "proved to be a mismatch of advocates to a degree rarely seen at the court."
Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers listed among low points in Rosenthal's argument his response to a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about whether Texas bars gays from adopting children. (It does not.) "I don't know," Rosenthal replied.
Henderson wrote that Rosenthal's response "underscored how poorly his argument was going," and that the DA "had a difficult time articulating a rationale for the law."
USA Today's Joan Biskupic called the arguments "surprisingly lopsided," noting that Rosenthal "struggled" to defend the law and "had trouble answering questions about what harm the 30-year-old statute seeks to prevent."
Even Justice Antonin Scalia, who along with Chief Justice William Rehnquist made a mighty attempt to bolster Rosenthal's case, squinched up his face at one point and admitted, "I don't understand your argument."
Heh. I don't know if Rosenthal was simply playing to his base, if he was trying to regain some dignity after the Bradford debacle, or if he sincerely believed it was his job to make the public argument. Whatever the case, it's got his stamp on it now.
UPDATE: I'll never catch up on all the reading I missed while on vacation, but thanks to Ginger's comment, I found this post, which in turn points to this post, both of which neatly sum up why the law that DA Rosenthal is trying to bolster has no basis in rationality. Go check them out.
We're back from DC, having had a great time at the wedding and visiting with family and friends. To those who think Houston has wildly variable weather, note this: Yesterday in DC it was sunny and 75 degrees. Today it was snowing. Thankfully, the ground was not cold enough for it to accumulate, and our plane took off without delay.
Back to the usual routine tomorrow.
Just wanted to pop up for a second from my secure undisclosed location to note the following quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski from this interview in In The National Interest:
While at this stage it is too early to make any categorical judgments, it would appear that before too long, it is in the interest of U.S. credibility--especially the Bush Administration's credibility--to demonstrate tangibly that Iraq has--or has had--weapons of mass destruction. (Since Saddam is fighting for his life it would be surprising, and rather strange, if he didn't use the weapons of mass destruction that he is said to have.) Secondly, one would also hope that there will be more evident demonstrations that the Iraqi people are welcoming their "liberation."Both issues, after all, were central to the U.S. case for undertaking what has been undertaken.
You can say that again.
Tiffany and I are travelling to a wedding this weekend. I may or may not have any Net access while we're gone, so if you don't see any updates until Sunday when we return, it doesn't mean I've been carted away by Homeland Security to be asked a few simple questions by Herr Ashcroft. At least, I hope it doesn't mean that. In any event, there may be no updates until Sunday. See you then if not before.
We all know that the motto of this Texas legislative session has been "We're gonna balance this budget without any new taxes if we have to kill everyone to do it". The reality of bringing expenditures for our growing population in line with our shrinking revenues was a 12.5% across-the-board cut, which would have decimated Medicaid, CHIP, various services for the retarded and mentally ill, corrections, you name it.
That reality has started to make some Senators, as well as Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, blanch a bit. They've started looking around for other nontax revenues, such as the Rainy Day fund and parts of the $17.3 billion tobacco lawsuit settlement, to fill the gaps. This development does not please Governor Goodhair:
The governor's comments to newspaper editors and publishers put him at odds with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who recently outlined nontax proposals that, he said, could cover $5 billion to $6 billion of a $9.9 billion revenue shortfall."The Legislature should not try to balance the budget with billions of dollars in budgetary sleights of hand and one-time revenue sources, instead of real spending reductions," Perry told the Texas Daily Newspaper Association.
The governor, Dewhurst and key legislators all have vowed to bridge the budgetary gap without increasing state taxes. But after that point, they have begun to part company.
Dewhurst said he found Perry's comments "confusing," particularly the governor's opposition to using the rainy day fund, a state savings account, to avoid cuts in state programs and services.
[...]
The governor criticized lawmakers who were "looking for a quick fix" to the financial crunch.
"Securitizing tobacco funds, emptying the rainy day fund for ongoing expenses, deferring large payments to the next budget cycle may sound attractive now, but they won't be when the bill comes due later," he said.
He said such steps would increase the likelihood that the next legislative session would have to enact a "major tax hike."
But Perry defended his proposal to divert part of the rainy day fund for economic development purposes. Such initiatives help create jobs and expand the future tax base, he said.
"By keeping our spending disciplined, and by growing our economy, we will build a long-term foundation that will be able to support vital health care and education needs," he said.
Dewhurst said the rainy day fund plus other nontax revenue should be used to help "protect our Foundation School Program, higher education, Medicaid, CHIP (children's health insurance) program, mental health and mental retardation."
"Most of the senators are in favor of seriously considering the totality of this in order to balance our budget and maintain our central services," added Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate.
Perry said children's health insurance and other services could be funded, instead, by cutting state funding for cultural, research, historical and other "special items" from the higher education budget.
Today it appears that Perry may lose this fight:
[More] than the two-thirds majority of senators needed for passage have agreed to tap into nearly $6 billion of nontax revenues, an option Gov. Rick Perry sharply criticized this week.The state is facing a projected $9.9 billion budget shortfall between now and 2005. To balance the budget without raising new revenue would mean cutting services by 12.5 percent, which senators argued is too much.
"It's my belief that in order to pass an appropriations bill that we can get the votes for in the floor of the Senate, we will need to use the nontax revenues that we have been discussing," said Senate Finance Chairman Teel Bivins, R-Amarillo.
"Not everybody agrees with every idea, but I think we have the critical mass to pass the bulk of the nontax revenues," he said.
Perry has essentially been reduced to sputtering over this development, something I'm sure he never expected given the dominance of his party in the state government:
"If you remember the cartoon Popeye, then surely you will understand what I mean when I say using budgetary sleights of hand is something like ol' Wimpy would have done," Perry said. "It's the same as saying, `I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.' "
Perry is referring in part to a suggestion of Dewhurst's to defer some payments to school districts for a month, which carries into the next fiscal year. Oddly enough, I agree with Perry on this point. That is just prestidigitation that covers up but does not solve a big hole in our finances. Not that this is a catastrophe - it's an artifact of being constitutionally bound to make everything balance out by a given calendar date. That bill still needs paying, though, and it's unlikely to be easier in the next go-round.
Still, I think Dewhurst and the Senate have recognized that the drastic cuts that Perry's dictates would force is a bigger negative than groping around for whatever loose change they can find. They still haven't accepted the reality that the state's tax structure is hopelessly broken and needs fixing immediately, but at least they're trying.
Since I bashed Doc Searls for being woefully ignorant about liberal bloggers, it's only fair for me to note that he's now discovered a few, thanks to a tip from Patrick. Happy reading, Doc.
Like many other media outlets, the Houston Chronicle has discovered Salam Pax, the man behind the Where is Raed? weblog. Not unexpectedly, they expressed doubts about his authenticity:
While stories like those by Salam Pax may seem intriguing, Aly Colón, an ethicist for the media think tank Poynter Institute, said the entries should be taken with a dose of skepticism."Blogs are another tool for journalists and the public to get other perspectives from inside Iraq," Colón said. "The danger is taking this, or anything on the Internet really, at face value."
Colón said while the blog may be convincing to some, it could just as easily be a computer prankster in Topeka, Kan.
Salam Pax lists only an e-mail address as a means to contact him. The e-mail address, operated by a British music magazine, responded several times Monday with a message indicating the inbox was full. Efforts Monday to contact Salam Pax or determine his location were unsuccessful.
Look, maybe Salam is real and maybe he is a hoaxster from Topeka. The problem is that this "analysis" gives short shrift to the question. For one thing, Salam's blog has archives that go back to September. If he's having it on with us, he's put an awful lot of time and energy into doing so. That's by no means conclusive evidence of his bona fides, but it's a fact that ought to be taken into consideration.
Second, while you may not be able to get hold of Salam himself, that doesn't mean he's a cipher. Why not treat him like a reclusive author who doesn't give interviews - read his collected works, speak to people who know him, and paint yourself a picture. Maybe there's something in an old post that clearly contradicts what he says about himself. All I've seen so far in the old media accounts of Salam is quotes from his most recent entries, which again gives the impression that he's a newcomer on the scene.
As for his peers, Salam has been a blogworld celebrity for some time now, and a number of bloggers have corresponded with him. Diane E. was an early booster, and she thinks he's real. Other bloggers, especially those on Salam's blogroll, likely have some useful insights. Maybe one of them has an actual email from Salam, whose headers could be checked to see if the originating IP address is in a block that's assigned to Iraq. You never know till you ask.
I understand that this story is seen as "timely", and the steps I've outlined would take more time than a reporter in this position might like to take. But I think we deserve a better examination of the question of Salam's genuineness than the canned opinion of some "media ethicist". Who knows, we might even discover the truth of the matter.
UPDATE: Someone has done some of this detective work, and he thinks Salam is real, too. Thanks to Ikram and Ginger for the tip.
Two sizeable articles in the Chron today about the state of the Enron criminal and forensic accounting investigations. This first one asks the question why the feds have mostly bagged small fry instead of the big fish, Fastow excepted:
There are several reasons top executives like Skilling and Lay may not have been charged, say observers of the case.The most obvious one is that they are not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing and prosecutors have simply not found evidence against them, even though they may still be looking.
Or, it could be prosecutors have enough to make a case but are seeking more evidence for a broad charge against several people and possibly the company itself.
The public likely won't know until charges are filed or the task force disbands.
Hard to argue with that, I guess.
The story mentions this NYT article which had suggested that Kenny Boy has a good "clueless, not criminal" argument against insider trading charges. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be other charges related to fraud or other SEC violations:
Prosecutors have not abandoned looking at Lay, however, and as recently as this month have questioned people about Lay's loans. The government lawyers could also be looking at other fraud-related charges against Lay or Skilling -- relating to anything from presentations to the Enron board to public statements about asset values.Several lawyers involved in the case believe that is what prosecutors are doing but also note that a built-in defense might come if Lay or Skilling had credible legal advice backing up their actions.
The investigation into Enron Broadband Services has been seen as a pathway to charges against Skilling. For months a task force prosecutor has threatened, not cajoled, people involved in Enron Broadband, asking about the reliability of the technology behind the business and how executives, including Skilling, represented the business to investors and analysts.
Meanwhile, bankruptcy examiner Neal Batson has issued a 2100-page report about how Enron kept its books, and there's sure to be some grist for the legal mills in there:
The report, the most in-depth look at Enron's books to date, saves some of the harshest language for how Enron disclosed information in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The report says the company went to great lengths to meet the letter of accounting law while failing to conform to the spirit by providing a complete picture of the company's finances.
Batson has no legal standing beyond the bankruptcy court, but his statement that Enron's filings " ... diverged materially from Enron's actual economic condition and performance," is similar to the phrasing prosecutors would use when filing charges of civil and criminal securities fraud.
The company repeatedly denied its financials were lacking when it came to relevant data. And former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling even argued before Congress last year that the relevant information was all there in the filings. But details from the Batson report, combined with a growing list of details from charges against former executives, challenge those claims.
Batson himself has been somewhat controversial in terms of how much he's billed for his services so far, but if he brings Skilling or Lay into the prosecutors' crosshairs, I'll call it money well spent.
Sean-Paul gets written up in the NYT. Way to go, dude!
This story in the Financial Times asks the question "what are we to do with Saddam if we catch him alive?"
The US government's decision will tell us whether any wisdom has been gleaned from the army's experience more than half a century ago. It has a number of options.First, it could shoot him. This was General George Patton's choice for dealing with captured Nazis: line them up, tell them what they did and pull the trigger. Was there any question of their guilt? One look inside a concentration camp was enough to know. Why dignify such behaviour with trials? The drawback is that this option contradicts the principles of democracy which the Bush administration says its invasion is intended to preserve.
Second, it could try him before an international court. The charges against Mr Hussein would include violations across several borders, which would justify his trial before an international tribunal similar to Nuremberg. Like Nuremberg, however, such a court would be vulnerable to charges of "victor's justice" - guided not by due process but by a desire for revenge.
Nuremberg's detractors were quick to point out that Russia's crimes were as reprehensible as Germany's. How did Stalin's regime qualify to sit on the tribunal and judge Germany? And did transgressions by the British and US, such as the bombing of Dresden, not throw doubt on their ability to judge a defeated enemy fairly? For all they achieved, the Nuremberg trials remain compromised by these questions.
Third, it could turn him over to his own people. This is unlikely. If compromised by Mr Hussein's forces, such a court might vindicate him and find the US guilty of an illegal invasion. At the end of the first world war, the US turned German prisoners over to the German government for trial. A handful were tried, the rest set free. The US would not risk a repeat of that fiasco.
Fourth, it could try him before a military tribunal. This is the most likely scenario. It has precedent. Between November 1945 and August 1948 nearly 2,000 of Hitler's henchmen - administrators of concentration camps where the "final solution" was implemented - were tried by such a tribunal at Dachau, 65 miles south of Nuremberg, in one of the largest yet least known series of war trials in history.
Tribunals, however, face tricky procedural issues: how far down the chain of command would guilt extend? What rights would the accused be granted in preparing their own defence? What charges might be brought, on what kind of evidence? This panoply of legal challenges has plagued such efforts in the past.
In my mind, the best option is probably the much-reviled International Criminal Court. It would provide open proceedings that the world can see - you know, they way things are done in a free society and all that - and the Bush administration's contempt for it would be a strong defense against charges that it's just a puppet of the American government. Naturally, I don't expect this to happen.
Obviously, things will be much easier for Team Bush if Saddam and his inner circle are considerate enough to be casualties of combat. No one will bother noticing a military tribunal for lower-ranking functionaries, at least as long as we don't get too zealous about it. I'll say this: The longer this invasion takes, the less likely Team Bush is to be in any way magnanimous in victory.
HISD spring break is over, so with any luck we should have a full house at tomorrow's practice, which will once again be at the batting cage. T and I are travelling to a wedding this weekend, leaving on Wednesday, so that's the only practice I'll get to attend. I expect my main assistant coach to run a couple while I'm gone. I have no doubt he'll do a fine job of it, though a small part of me worries that the kids will somehow see me as less Coach-like when I return. For now, I'll need him to work a couple of the kids whom I envision pitching but who missed all of last week's practices.
I'm still concerned about the hitting - our coach-pitch and kid-pitch batting practices were not exactly filled with the sound of the crack of the bat (well, with aluminum, I guess it's more the *ping* of the bat). I'm anxious to see how they do against the Jugs machine, which has the virtue of throwing consistent strikes.
As far as I know, the season is supposed to start Real Soon Now, perhaps next weekend. As yet, I have no idea what the schedule is. I've got some travel and other likely conflicts over the next two months, so I'm getting a little antsy about having to make plans without knowing when I'll have a game. Soon, they tell me, soon.
Finally got our catcher's equipment problem solved - the league equipment manager met me after our Saturday practice and handed off two chest protectors and a second pair of shin guards. As it happens, the original pair did seem to fit the two kids we worked out at catcher that day. Both of them have promise behind the plate - they don't fear the ball and they can make the plays, two traits that are very much not to be underrated at this age. I'll work out one or two more kids behind the plate, but those two will see the bulk of the innings there.
This has really been a good experience for me so far. I can't wait for the real games to start.
If you happen to see pictures of Iraqis giving US troops and/or camerapeople the "thumbs up" sign, you should know what that means in this context:
Thumbs up, meaning "everything is great" or "I’m Okay" to the West can be equated to the "middle finger" by Middle Easterners. Of note, hitch-hikers do not "thumb a ride", rather they hold their hand horizontal to the road and wave it up and down as though telling motorists to "reduce speed".
Via the increasingly indispensable Sean-Paul Kelley. Someone get this man a case of Jolt! and a pepperoni-n-anchovy pizza, stat.
The long-awaited book Power Failure, by Enron quasi-whistleblower Sherron Watkins, is due out tomorrow, and it has some juicy stuff in it:
Among the anecdotes:· CEO Jeff Skilling would ponder aloud whether Chairman Ken Lay understood Enron and how it made money. " 'Do you think Ken understands what we do at all?' " he'd ask. " 'Do you think he gets it?' " No one would answer, but everyone would smile encouragingly, so Skilling would answer the question himself. " 'Naaaaah,' he'd say. 'I don't think he gets it.' "
· Despite his ruthless reputation, Skilling was, in some ways, a pushover. Badgered by employees for ever-higher compensation, he would meekly accede and tell them to work out the details with human resources.
"The caterwauling got so intense that Jeff Skilling routinely disappeared the week bonuses were distributed," writes Swartz, who is married to a Houston Chronicle assistant managing editor.
· Sliding toward bankruptcy in October 2001, Enron sought to control the fallout from reports that Fastow had enriched himself through an off-the-books partnership, LJM. Public relations crafted an explanation for LJM, and executives including Lay, Fastow and then-Chief Accounting Officer Rick Causey reviewed it together.
In the document Fastow was cited as the fund's ultimate creator, causing him to explode, "It was Skilling!"
· Seemingly a Master of the Universe dealmaker, Fastow was astonishingly childlike, playing with Slime in his office, driving remote-controlled toy cars up the legs of female employees and throwing tantrums when he didn't get his way. He also showed a lack of spine, routinely failing to make a case for his staffers at bonus time.
· Skilling began "drinking heavily," had difficulty sleeping and came to detest the job after he was named chief executive officer in February 2001 and the stock price began an inexorable decline.
The Chron gave it a pretty good review as well. Personally, I'll probably wait until it's on the Remaindered pile before I plop down any of my spare change on it, but if I do come across a copy I'll let you know.
Like a number of my blogging brethren and sistren, I received the following email from the Heritage Foundation:
Charles,You've been discovered! Tim Rutten's Media column in today's edition of
The Los Angeles Times is the latest example of the traditional media's
newfound appreciation of the growing influence of bloggers on America's
public policy debates.Our job at The Heritage Foundation is to provide useful resources -
objective data and conservative analysis and commentary - to journalists,
analysts and commentators of all stripes. But we aren't quite sure how
to do this with the blogger community.So this email is an invitation for you to participate in an experiment.
For the next month, we will periodically email to you short notices
about significant Heritage studies, publications and events. At the end of
the month, let us know if these notices were helpful. If not, tell us
at any time, and you won't get any more. If you find you only want those
notices regarding specific issue areas - foreign policy, welfare
reform, etc. - we'll limit our future emails to you thusly. If you want to
continue receiving all of the notices, let us know that, too.Regardless of your perspective on the issues of the day, we are
confident you will find Heritage materials useful in your effort to provide
the kind of incisive, immediate and thoughtful commentary and analysis
made possible by blogging.We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Sincerely,
Laura Bodwell Mark Tapscott
Marketing Manager Director, Media Services
The Heritage Foundation The Heritage Foundation
My first reaction to this is to note that this email was sent to my Yahoo address instead of the one listed above. That address can only be found on my old site, which you may have noticed hasn't been updated since July. Anyone can run a 'bot to harvest addresses and send form-letter emails to them (some of us call them "spammers"), but a certain level of cluefulness is required to disguise that fact.
I don't plan on replying to this email, which if I'm reading the text correctly means they assume I've opted in for their press releases. That's fine - I'm actually moderately curious about this, though for the life of me I can't figure out why they just didn't set up their own blog instead. I can just about guarantee it would have gotten a better bang for their buck (and a lot less snarkiness) than scattershooting email to a bunch of people they know nothing about.
I'm willing to attribute Heritage's ineptitude to inexperience, but what in the world is Doc Searls thinking?
Not too coincidentally, Heritage is a conservative think tank. On the whole, conservative thinkers are far more clueful about the Web and its authority structure than their liberal counterparts — as both the Rutten piece (which was almost entirely about warbloggers) and this emailing attest.Liberalism may not be absent from the blogging world, but it's certainly impotent. The only voices on the left with any firepower on Web are Michael Moore and Robert Byrd, and neither one of them blog (though Moore uses the Web quite intentionally, which Byrd does not).
Okay, there's Eric Alterman.
Want to see how little peaceblogging actually counts? Wagging the Tale of War, which I wrote yesterday, got a whopping eight inbound links on Technorati. Total visits for the day were 1908, which is somewhere between half and a third of what I get on the average Wednesday. As a percentage of my Technorati Cosmos (all the inbound links in the last 24 hours or so), my peace post hardly did any better than two other posts — Sixth Column (about blogging itself) and RSS for Webcasts — and lost by one link to Book support.
My point isn't about me. I'm just in a position to witness first-hand the complete absence of a peaceblogging movement. There's no Glenn Reynolds on blogging's left. No Andrew Sullivan or Charles Johnson. Even Brian Linse's Lefty Blogroll is thick with bloggers who not only support the war, but are pro-war in general.
Where to begin? Doc's ignorance about liberal voices on the web is so shocking it almost has to be willful. Have you really never heard of Atrios, Doc, who gets over 21,000 hits per day, who's ranked ahead of everyone but Reynolds, who was cited by Paul Krugman in the New York Times for his blog's role in the recent Trent Lott dustup? Have you never heard of The Daily Kos, which was just cited by Forbes as being the best war blog? Brad DeLong? Tom Tomorrow? Jeralyn Merritt? I could go on listing topnotch widely-read liberal blogs - they're pretty much all on my own blogroll over there - but I'm just gobsmacked that someone who wrote something called The Cluetrain Manifesto was unwilling or unable to find out any of this on his own.
As for your claim that the lefty blog world is "thick" with folks who support this war, all I can say is that if you'd kept scrolling down, you could have clicked on any number of links to bloggers who have loudly condemned the invasion of Iraq. A little bit more of that "research" thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph might have led you to this collaborative effort, which is written and maintained by lefty and libertarian types.
Finally, you're right when you say this "isn't about me". Perhaps one reason why your Wagging the Tale of War post got so few links on Technorati is because the majority of liberal bloggers don't read you. (For all I know, this is true of libertarian bloggers as well. I'm not very familiar with that community, so I'd rather not make any sweeping statements about it.) I can't say I'm surprised by that. Better luck next time.
Brian Linse has been following the federal lawsuit that the NAACP has filed against gun manufacturers, and he's got another update today. The case is especially interesting because of the involvement of Robert Ricker, a former lobbyist for the firearms industry who appears now to be a whistleblower - he's preparing to testify for the NAACP.
Brian's your go-to guy for this case. He has previous entries here and here as well. Go check it out.
I don't often link to specific items on Ted Barlow's blog because I figure anyone who is anyone is already reading him (as well they should be). That said, I commend you to go read this piece on civil discourse. You rock, Ted.
At the end of that same post, Ted links to this Instapundit piece:
In the town of Safwan, Iraqi civilians eagerly greeted the 1st Marine Division.One little boy, who had chocolate melted all over his face after a soldier gave him some treats from his ration kit, kept pointing at the sky, saying “Ameriki, Ameriki.”
This is the "peace" movement's worst nightmare, isn't it?
Ted and Jim Henley have already responded to this, so now I'd like to add my version. It starts out looking like this (via Henley) and like this, from The Agonist:
Tens of thousands of mostly youths protested the U.S.-led war against Iraq in Egypt and the Gaza Strip on March 22. More than 20,000 protesters gathered at Cairo's prestigious al Ahzar University, calling on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to provide military assistance to Iraq -- or else step down. Anti-riot police were deployed to contain the protesters, but there been no reports of clashes so far. In addition, about a thousand lawyers held a sit-in protest at their association headquarters in Cairo to protest the government's position on the war. Lawyers associations in Egypt are often connected with the banned Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood which counts thousands of professional Egyptians among its ranks. In Gaza, a reported 10,000 people -- mostly students from Gaza's Islamic University -- filled the streets, chanting "No blood for oil," "Death to America and Great Britain," and "Where are the Arab countries' armies and leaders?" Agence France-Presse reported.
and culminates, at some undetermined point in the future, looking like this. If you'd paid any attention to the many rational voices that spoke out against this war, Glenn, you might have understood that.
(I'm sure I don't have to say that I fervently hope this particular nightmare remains nothing but a bad dream, but I'm going to say it anyway just so we're all clear on this point.)
UPDATE: Here's another scene from the "peace" movement's nightmares. Is it in your nightmares, too, Glenn? I don't see any mention of it at this time.
Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle is a busy man these days. Not only is he investigating a political committee founded by Tom DeLay, he's now issuing subpoenas to see if a closed-door legislative meeting violated state law.
Two grand jury subpoenas were issued late in the afternoon by state District Judge Mike Lynch at the request of Earle's office, and they were served on the chamber's custodian of records.The move came one day after news of the secret meeting broke on the House floor and scuttled debate of House Bill 4, a sweeping revision of state civil justice laws. Whether the state's open meetings law applied to the meeting is debatable.
After a Feb. 26 meeting of the House Civil Practices Committee, which first considered the legislation, Rep. Joe Nixon, R-Houston, invited members into a private coffee room to discuss the legislation. A quorum of the nine-member committee, of which Nixon is chairman, was in the room as Nixon laid out his plans to merge two bills.
The public had no access to the meeting, and no record was kept, leading Democrats to charge that the meeting violated House rules for openness.
The Austin American-Statesman reported Saturday that Earle's office is trying to decide whether the meeting violated state open meetings law as well. A violation is a misdemeanor punishable by fines of up to $500 and by up to 60 months in jail.
The subpoenas ask for all records, audio and video, of the Feb. 26 committee meeting, as well as all recordings of the House on the day the meeting was revealed.
Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick released a statement on Saturday expressing his commitment to open government and saying that the subpoenaed materials are already part of the public record.
"We are cooperating fully with the district attorney's subpoena -- delivered to the House Custodian of Records at 4:45 p.m. Friday -- and will see that these records are delivered Monday morning," he said in the statement.
The bill in question started out as legislation to deal with rising malpractice insurance rates, but then House Civil Practices Committee Chairman Joe Nixon combines it with another tort-reform measure that had been pushed by business and insurance interests. The newly-reconfigured bill was temporarily delayed by a wide assortment of amendments that were proposed by Democratic lawmakers, all of which were voted down on straight party lines, then it was shelved after a point of order was raised when the secret meeting came to light.
[Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco] based his request that the bill be withdrawn on an affidavit from Rep. Yvonne Davis, a member of the House Civil Practices Committee. Davis said that on Feb. 26 after the committee adjourned, Chairman Joe Nixon said, "Let me talk to the committee just real quickly back in our little coffee room," a reference to a private room behind the committee room. Nixon, R-Houston, can be heard on a recording posted on the House Web site making the request, Davis said.Davis, a Democrat from Dallas, said that seven members of the nine-member committee convened in the back room, and Nixon explained his intent to combine House Bill 3, which concerned medical malpractice lawsuits, with HB 4, which limited other civil lawsuits.
On March 4, the committee voted to approve a substitute for HB 4, which contained the medical malpractice provisions. Gov. Rick Perry had made medical malpractice revisions an emergency issue because of rising insurance premiums that were driving some physicians out of business.
Democrats, who criticized the decision to combine the two bills, filed 300 amendments. The House had considered about 50 amendments, defeating most along party-line votes, when the procedural challenge was raised.
[House Speaker Tom] Craddick at first said that he would let the House decide whether the rules had been violated. But after Democrats objected, he made the ruling himself.
As Clay Robison notes, one reason why Rep. Nixon combined House Bill 3, which addressed the medical malpractice issue, and the far-reaching HB4 is that the medical lobby would then be forced to advocate the whole package. Pretty clever, if underhanded. Apparently, HB3 turned out to be a tougher nut to crack than you would have thought after drawing opposition from a group of Christian conservatives who argued that it would lead to more abortions. Republican Senator Bill Ratliff, chair of the Senate Affairs Committee, has also expressed skepticism.
Despite all that, I expect some form of this bill to go forward. It has too many champions who are too far in debt to its interest groups not to. In the meantime, we'll see if Ronnie Earle can throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who has not been shy about aiming at big targets, is investigating a political committee set up by Tom DeLay.
DeLay, R-Sugar Land, created Texans for a Republican Majority as an offshoot of his Americans for a Republican Majority. The Texas committee was designed to help the GOP win a Texas House majority and put Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, in as speaker.Texans for a Republican Majority raised more than $520,000 -- a third of all its money -- from corporations.
The contributions included $20,000 each from Bacardi U.S.A. and the Philip Morris Cos. and $100,000 from the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, a coalition of nursing home chains based in Boston.
While a political committee can legally raise corporate money to pay for administrative expenses, it would be illegal to use corporate money for political activities.
TRM also coordinated its activities with the Texas Association of Business, which is the target of the grand jury investigation. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle is investigating whether the business group illegally used corporate money to pay for issue ads designed to win 20 House seats for the GOP.
I will, of course, be cheering for DA Earle, but I will not be holding my breath. DeLay's first line of defense will be to scream that the Democrat Earle is on a partisan witch hunt. Earle's unsuccessful prosecution of Kay Bailey Hutchison in 1994 for allegations of misappropriated campaign funds while she was State Treasurer will be his Exhibit A, and it will carry some weight. Earle will point out that he's prosecuted quite a few Democratic politicians in his day, with his biggest scalp being that of former Speaker Gib Lewis. I will expect much sound and fury, with the usual results. But I'll keep an eye on it anyway, just in case.
Bombs may be dropping in Baghdad, but the business of the state must go on. A couple of days ago, a bill was filed in the Texas Lege that would have profound effects on how the state spends money.
House budget leaders have filed a series of bills to make deep budget cut proposals permanent in law -- cuts in such areas as health care for the poor, state employee retirement benefits and death benefits for police officers killed in the line of duty.The legislation has the potential to dramatically shrink state government while putting considerable policy-making power in the hands of 29 budget writers.
[...]
The most sweeping changes would curtail long-standing health and human services to young, old and disabled Texans. These include cutting funding for tuberculosis prevention and control, closing state mental hospitals and schools for the retarded, eliminating Medicaid funding for substance abuse and cutting funding for foster care by up to a quarter.
It's hard to convey just how monumentally stupid such a plan would be. Tuberculosis is a contagious disease that would have the potential to infect many Texans if left unchecked. Closing mental hospitals and schools for the retarded will put a huge burden on affected families. The whole point of a social safety net is to help prevent families burdened by illness or the need to care for someone who needs special help from going under.
Look at your own situation. How would you be affected if you were suddenly given full responsibility for someone who needed round-the-clock care? Could you afford to hire someone? Would you or your spouse have to quit working? Some people can make the adjustment, but everyone needs some amount of help to survive. The state of Texas is considering cutting off much of that help, all because no one in power wants to confront reality. "The people won't let us impose new taxes," they say.
Well, the people may not have gotten that memo. Three letter writers today all stated the need for a state income tax, in conjunction with a reworking of our hopelessly broken overall state tax structure. The people already know that attempting to balance the budget without any tax increases is pure folly. There's less opposition to an income tax than you'd think, and one that was properly designed and sold would probably be less controversial than what's currently being proposed.
But that takes leadership, and that's in typically short supply. Until Governor Perry and his cohorts feel that there's a bigger political price to be paid by their current course of action - and polls aren't showing that right now - we'll continue to get more of the same.
I'm sure it will come as a great comfort to everyone to hear that according to Karl Rove, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with politics.
"It is really the height of cynicism to suggest a president would make the awesome decision to send people in harm's way for politics," Rove said. "He did this because he believes fervently that after 9/11, that the world has changed."
You have to give the man credit. A lesser mortal would have burst into flames immediately upon saying such a thing after having told the RNC last summer that "[we] can go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America", but it's just another day at the office for the Rovemeister.
Although thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in several U.S. cities to protest the war, Rove said he did not see that as any kind of solid opposition to the president. He said polls have shown the American public has consistently favored the ouster of Saddam Hussein as the leader of Iraq, even if they differed on how to do it."In the last few days, the polls have indicated a vast majority of Democrats support the president's actions," Rove said. "This is not an issue about politics. This is an issue of what is best for world peace and the nation's security."
Polls are showing about 75% support for this invasion. That's about the level of support for Gulf War I, though it's interesting to note this particular difference:
Two weeks ago, 54 percent approved of the way Bush was leading the country, according to the New York Times/CBS Poll. Thursday's poll found 67 percent approving of how the president does his job.[...]
In 1991, then-President Bush's job approval rating jumped to 82 percent in the early days of the Persian Gulf War, eventually peaking at 88 percent.
Make of that what you will.
Spring break may decimate our practices, but thankfully war seemed to have no effect. Last night was what should be the last sparsely-attended practice due to family travels. One of the kids who was there had just returned from attending Spring Training in Phoenix. He eagerly recited the games he saw, and mentioned that he'd gotten Benito Santiago's autograph.
We ran through more batting practice, first with me pitching and then with the kids taking turns on the mound. That was really more like pitching practice, since two of the four had a hard time throwing strikes. Several of the kids who I believe will get the bulk of the innings pitched weren't there, so if nothing else I've got a firmer idea of who probably won't round out the staff.
Tiffany was at the practice last night. On the way home, she asked me about one of the kids, whom she thought had an attitude problem. I said no, he's just a hyperactive 10-year-old, who doesn't have the patience to wait his turn and is always letting you know it. I told her I was a lot like that when I was a kid in baseball camp. I knew a lot about baseball, and I knew that I knew a lot about baseball, and I wasn't afraid to let the coaches know it if I thought they weren't measuring up. I'm probably the only kid who ever got tossed out of a game at the Hall of Fame Warrior Baseball Camp for being a pain in the ass. (Note to Mom and Dad: It was Joe Nugent who tossed me. I know you're just shocked to hear that. I thought he was screwing us on ball/strike calls.)
Telling Tiffany that reminded me of a particular incident from baseball camp. One of the guys on my team had hit a home run, and as he was crossing the plate the coach noticed that the catcher had removed his mitt and was rubbing his left hand. It turned out that the bat had hit his glove during the swing. "Aha!" cried the coach. "Catcher's interference! The home run is cancelled and the batter goes back to first base!"
(I should point out here that the coach in question was one of the lowly assistant coaches. Bert, Jack, or Larry would never have gotten this call wrong.)
"That's wrong!" I piped up. I had just come across this particular rule in a Rules Quiz in Baseball Digest magazine. "If the batter reaches base despite the catcher's interference, the play stands." It was to no avail. The coach, who knew that I was a little sharpy, insisted that I was making that rule up and that the only possible outcome to catcher's interference was the batter winding up on first base.
Do I really have to tell you who was right? Here's Rule 6.08 (c):
The batter becomes a runner and is entitled to first base without liability to be put out (provided he advances to and touches first base) when-(c) The catcher or any fielder interferes with him. If a play follows the interference, the manager of the offense may advise the plate umpire that he elects to decline the interference penalty and accept the play. Such election shall be made immediately at the end of the play. However, if the batter reaches first base on a hit, an error, a base on balls, a hit batsman, or otherwise, and all other runners advance at least one base, the play proceeds without reference to the interference. If catcher's interference is called with a play in progress the umpire will allow the play to continue because the manager may elect to take the play.
I may have been obnoxious, but I knew my rules. And I feel reasonably confident about how to handle kids like that. I had some experience with it before, you see.
UPDATE: To belatedly answer Rich's question in the comments, catcher's interference is scored as an error on the catcher.
Sean-Paul has wall-to-wall coverage of the Iraq invasion, with constant updates. I'm getting carpal tunnel just reading it. If you want to stay on top of what's happening, visit The Agonist and keep hitting Refresh.
My wife asked me: "are you going to do this all day?""Yup."
"And tomorrow?"
"Yup."
"You're nuts!"
"Yup."
Yup. Hang in there, Sean-Paul.
Thank $deity for fluffy news stories like this: Joe Millionaire star enjoys his fleeting fame.
Evan Marriott knows his time is running out.In the 15-minutes-of-fame universe, he's at about 14:50.
Which is why the star of the Fox Television hit Joe Millionaire is sitting inside a limo outside a Galleria nightclub, signing hundreds of fliers promoting his appearance at the Miss Hawaiian Tropic Model Search, waiting for hordes of fans to surround the car.
Only they don't.
Evan who?
Joe what?
"I know I probably won't be a major star or anything," Marriott says before entering the Roxy. "I doubt if people will line up at movie theaters or anything to see me, so that's why I'm doing this."
Um, Evan, are you saying that you need a reason to be a judge at a Miss Hawaiian Tropic contest? Because, like, I don't. I mean, I'd need a dispensation from Tiffany and all, but I think the job itself is reason enough. But hey, I was never a reality TV star, so what do I know?
Keep 'em coming, folks. I'm gonna need a lot of distraction over the next few days.
We're going to be hearing the phrase "Support the troops" a lot in the coming weeks, so here's a way that you can actually do something to support them: You can be a foster caregiver for their pets.
[Army Staff Sergeant Dwayne] Armour is stationed at Fort Hood, whose 48,000 soldiers make it the largest army installation in the world. The 265-square-mile base is near Killeen, 180 miles northwest of Houston.Thousands of dogs and cats were killed on American soil during Operation Desert Storm. Soldiers like Armour couldn't find a friend or relative to pet-sit indefinitely, so they abandoned their animals on country roads or dumped them at the pound -- and animals that enter the pound usually don't leave alive.
In 1991, Killeen had a mass slaughter of military pets, says Carmen Wallace, who volunteers at Second Chance, an animal shelter in Killeen.
The Killeen pound "couldn't even hold the pets but a couple of hours," Wallace says. "They were euthanizing them left and right."
To prevent mass mutt murders and keep dogs and cats off casualty lists, Wallace is organizing a foster program. Armour saw it on the news last week; he called and the next day Wallace had several potential foster parents who promise to send him pictures and updates while he's gone.
"Time is getting short. I would never just abandon her," he says. "I was really getting depressed about it. We're getting closer and closer, and I didn't know what I was going to do."
As noted in the article, you can go to NetPets or Hugs for Homeless Animals to offer your assistance. So there you have it.
I've decided not to listen to the radio for the duration of the invasion. I don't think I'll be able to hear a happy-talk DJ offer brainless platitudes or brook-no-dissent "patriotism" without making like Lane Meyer in Better Off Dead and ripping the damn thing out of the dashboard. Actually, I think I'm just going to boycott Clear Channel altogether. It's the least I can do.
(Speaking of Clear Channel and their sponsorship of those faux grassroots pro-war rallies, guess who else they're sponsoring? Thanks to Digby for the catch.)
By the time the combat part of the invasion is over, we'll know once and for all if Saddam has WMDs. If it turns out that he doesn't, or that all of his illegal weapons were destroyed or about to be destroyed by the inspections process, I'm sure we'll be hearing from Bush's amen corner why it was that Saddam didn't need WMDs to be an immediate threat to America's safety.
It's more likely, I think, that he does have some nasty chemical and/or biological weapons and that he will unleash them in the next few days. If so, I wouldn't be so quick to call that the final nail in the UN-weapons-inspections-are-a-joke coffin. After all, it was pretty clear that no matter what was or wasn't found, we were going to invade Iraq and depose Saddam regardless. Given that he had no real incentive to cooperate fully, is it really a surprise that he might have held back an ace in the hole?
I'll echo the recommendations of Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Gene Healy of this Robert Wright piece about the invasion's likely long- and short-term effects. Meanwhile, Seth Michaels puts the likely refugee problem into perspective:
Picture this scenario: a war some decades in the future between the U.S. and Canada. Canada informs us that in three days, Chicago will be no more, so people had best evacuate. How would they all get out? Cars would be clogging the roads, people would leave on foot, panic would set in. Where would these people go? Stay in hotels? Stay with friends? Imagine the impact of three million people, proud owners only the possessions they can carry, suddenly thrust into the suburbs and countryside. What would they eat? Where would they sleep? How many would have no choice but to stay and be killed?Now, consider that Baghdad is bigger than Chicago, and that the area around has less infrastructure - no motels, no ATMs, no supermarkets. This is the humanitarian crisis the U.S. will be faced with - not at some unknown hypothetical future point, but in a matter of ten days or so.
Remember, there's no money officially budgeted for this invasion yet. The administration has only recently even suggested a dollar amount. We're doing this without a real discussion of the costs. Keep that in mind the next time an administration flunky insists that deficits don't really matter.
Argh. I need some distraction. Thank $deity I've got a team practice tonight.
We have crossed the Rubicon. I feel sick to my stomach.
Right now all I want is for the fighting to end as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. After that, I can only hope that we won't come to regret what we've done. May our troops be safely home soon, and may our actions truly benefit the citizens of Iraq.
I'm too upset to say anything else.
It's time for another segment of Is This Headline Real, or Is It From The Onion: Media Banned From Free Speech Event.
CLEVELAND - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia banned broadcast media from an appearance Wednesday where he will receive an award for supporting free speech.The City Club usually tapes speakers for later broadcast on public television, but Scalia insisted on banning television and radio coverage, the club said. Scalia is being given the organization's Citadel of Free Speech Award.
"I might wish it were otherwise, but that was one of the criteria that he had for acceptance," said James Foster, the club's executive director.
[...]
The City Club selected Scalia because he has "consistently, across the board, had opinions or led the charge in support of free speech," Foster said.
Yes, and he sure did demonstrate his famous commitment to free speech by his actions here, didn't he? Perhaps the City Club might reconsider the award.
Scalia made the same demand on John Carroll University, where he spoke Tuesday night. He talked mostly about the constitutional protection of religions, but also said that government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution."The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."
Well, at least he's consistent in his devotion to individual rights.
Thanks to Tom Spencer, who also has an exhaustive review of Gulf War II: Electric Boogaloo among his recent updates, for the link.
Things are a little busy today, so I'm going to point to a couple of posts up on the Political State Report about recent news items. First, the heartwarming news that Rick Perry does not want Texas to become the only state not participating in the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), so abolishing it in the name of budget balancing is not an option. Second, a little time out for some new abortion restrictions and a redundant Defense of Marriage Act.
I saw an amazing movie on Cinemax yesterday, a one-hour documentary called Welcome to North Korea. I'd read a review of it before watching (here's another one that compares this film to the similar documentary Uncle Saddam) so I had some idea of what to expect, but I was still blown away.
The reviews cover the main points of the film - the restrictions on who the filmmakers can speak to, the unending tributes to Beloved Leader Kim Il Sung, who is portrayed as a demigod, like a modern-day Pharaoh, and so on - but seeing the emptiness of Pyongyang is just profoundly creepy. The city is full of sleek modern buildings that apparently suit no purpose, since there's no one there to use them. There are plenty of tour guides but no tourists. The whole place is part Potemkin village, part mass hallucination. It's Disneyland as designed by Sartre.
No commerce of any kind was evident. You do see some people on the streets, though not in the main part of town, and you do see one scene in a subway terminal as people whisk past, but the only people you see that are actively engaged in an occupation are the tour guides, soldiers, a few police officers, and the government flunkies that were assigned to mind the filmmakers. The only schoolchildren you see are busy preparing for the 55th anniversary celebration of the Workers' Party. I kept asking myself "How do they pay for all of them empty buildings, all of the Kim Il Sung statues and monuments, all of the idle support staff for these things?" The film has no answers, but it's easy to speculate, and all of the choices are scary.
We see the demilitarized zone from the Northern perspective. I've been to the DMZ on the South side, and it's very different there. Of course, I was in an area that's been turned into a tourist attraction, but the reality is that there's an awful lot of soldiers on both sides and nothing more than a cease-fire that holds back hostilities. The film shows a wall in the DMZ that was built by South Korea as a deterrent against invasion. Apparently, the existence of this wall is not generally acknowledged on the South side, and it's not readily visible from there.
The war memorials that I saw on the south side of the DMZ were primarily about history, healing, and the desire for reunification. The war memorials depicted in "Welcome to North Korea" were all about the brutality of American soldiers in the Korean War. One display item was a burned-out husk of a fighter plane that had been shot down by "our women", according to the tour guide. A soldier at the museum talked emphatically about how his pregnant grandmother had been beheaded and disemboweled by American troops. How much of these stories is true I couldn't say (in the latter, the storyteller's then-five year old father was the only survivor, which left a lot of room for doubt in my mind), but they were very effective as propaganda.
One other thing that struck me about this movie was that Kim Il Sung was a much bigger figure than Kim Jong Il. There were the statues and monuments and portraits, the huge mausoleum, the constant references to Beloved Leader and his benevolence, the scads of books written about him and by him - Kim Il Sung is everywhere. The propaganda machine has started creating myths about Kim Jong Il, but the Beloved Leader cast a huge shadow over his people, and his son is nowhere close to emerging from it as far as I could tell. What will Kim Jong Il do to make his mark on North Korea? I don't know and I'm not sure I want to find out.
Two thumbs up. If you get the chance, check it out.
Meant to blog this last week, but I was temporarily kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a pod person (I'm sure none of you noticed the difference). Anyway, Tom Tomorrow notes that sixteen Democratic senators voted in favor of the so-called "partial birth abortion" ban:
The vote was 64-33, with 3 abstaining. Which means that it was the 16 Senate Democrats who voted "yes" who put this thing over the top...Thanks, Democrats!
Yes, well, I seem to recall that this ridiculous and dishonest piece of
Oh, that's right: Because we had a Democratic president to veto it every single time.
Thanks, Ralph!
Back here on the domestic front, four Merrill Lynch execs have been charged with civil fraud (which sounds more like an oxymoron than a legal term) in helping that accursed company cook its books.
Charged with civil fraud were Schuyler Tilney, the former head of Merrill's Houston office; Tom Davis, former vice president of private equity and research; Robert Furst, former managing director; and Dan Bayly, chairman of investment banking.All four are alleged to have taken part in a deal involving the sale of three electricity-generating barges anchored off the coast of Nigeria, while only Tilney and Davis are charged in connection with a complex series of commodity sales that were said to be disguised loans to Enron.
By allowing Merrill to take part in the deals, the four men "aided and abetted" Enron's efforts to make false statements that would be used in the sale of securities and in annual and quarterly SEC filings, helped Enron keep false books and records and circumnavigate internal financial controls, according to the complaint.
"We're sending a strong message to investment bankers and other professionals that they will be held responsible and accountable if they engage in aiding and abetting fraud," said Luis R. Mejia, assistant chief litigation counsel with the SEC.
Other banks are also under investigation for transactions they did with Enron, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup.
Looking back at the whole Enron saga and the wreck it's made of people and corporations, I wonder if some day someone will try to put a dollar figure on it all. How much did all of this fraud actually cost all of us, in terms of lost employment, deadweight losses, retirement fund devastation, etc etc etc? I'd love to have a figure I could point to, even if it's just a wild-but-educated guess.
Houston Rockets head coach Rudy Tomjanovich has been diagnosed with superficial bladder cancer, according to the team. The good news is that from reading the story, it sounds eminently treatable and shouldn't even keep him off the Rockets' bench for that long. I'm sure I speak for all of Houston when I say Get well soon, Coach.
There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments to this post about St. Patrick's Day. Reader alkali pointed out this article (warning: page includes music) by historian Richard Jensen, which claims that the legendary "No Irish Need Apply" signs from the 19th century were in fact mostly legends. I tend to agree with Michael, who responded that a lack of such signs does not mean no discrimination. Check it out.
Well, Dubya's about to get his wish. The prospect leaves me depressed, worried, and angry. I do not believe this invasion will make us safer - quite the contrary. I do not believe that Saddam was an imminent, uncontainable threat. I do not believe this course of action is anywhere close to the best utilization of our increasingly scarce resources. I do believe that the damage President Bush has done to world relations will haunt us for years.
A number of antiwar types have said that once invasion is inevitable, those of us who oppose it need to start talking about what comes next. Now that not attacking Iraq is sadly no longer a realistic hope, we need to focus on making sure that the aftermath is properly handled. Truth be told, all I can really think about right now is working to unelect Bush in 2004. I'm having a hard time getting past my emotions on this.
If you haven't already, I'll echo Josh Marshall and recommend that you read these two articles about how Bush failed where Clinton and Bush Sr succeeded in coalition-building, and why the world has reacted the way it has to America's drive for war. In case you're wondering why getting rid of Bush is so high on my mind. Lastly, don't overlook this article, via TAPPED, which looks at the likely numbers needed to keep the peace when the invasion is over.
If you favored this invasion, all I can say is I hope to hell you turn out to be right. I wish I had your faith.
So today is Saint Patrick's Day, a day for the wearin' of the green, when people say things like "Begorrah!" and "Erin go bragh!" (whatever they mean) and the general spirit is that Everyone Is Irish On Saint Patrick's Day. It's a day for green hair, green beer, and green rivers. The luck of the Irish, the Order of Hibernia, corned beef and cabbage, bagpipes and berets...you get the idea.
As someone who actually is part Irish (though far removed from any sense of ethnic identity), I'm always amused by Saint Patrick's Day. It's amazing how a Catholic feast day that celebrates the life of a man whose mission was converting pagans has turned into a secular excuse for partying and commercialism. How did we get here?
Well, I don't know the answer to that question. What I do know is that a hundred years ago, Irish immigrants faced all kinds of discrimination - one reason why there's a stereotyped Irish police officer is because such dangerous jobs were the only ones available to them. To go from that to Everyone Is Irish On Saint Patrick's Day is pretty incredible, I think.
Of course, one of the costs of such societal acceptance is a distancing from the original meaning of the holiday and the culture that spawned it. I'm willing to bet that only the more serious Catholic revelers could explain the significance of the shamrock (its three leaves symbolize the Holy Trinity), for example. As the holiday and its heritage become more mainstream, the details get blurred and eventually caricatured. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing - it's a true sign that a group is no longer considered marginal when a school nickname like The Fighting Irish and its associated icons are considered a source of pride rather than a cause for protest.
I'm not personally convinced that that's all for the good, but I don't see any point in complaining. I am left to wonder, however, if other ethnic-in-origin celebrations will someday be fully coopted by the great melting pot as St. Patrick's Day and Shrove TuesdayMardi Gras have been, and if their respective celebrants will be as happy about it. In other words, if a hundred years' hence we say that Everyone Is Mexican On Cinco de Mayo and Everyone Is Chinese On Chinese New Year, will we consider that a good thing or a bad thing?
Some knuckle-draggers in Kingwood have decided that removing the word "French" from our lexicon doesn't doesn't express their disapproval strongly enough:
Residents of a quiet, quintessentially American subdivision in Kingwood laughed about "freedom" fries and the petition to rename New Orleans' French Quarter.They hardly expected their own neighborhood to be invaded by the anti-France backlash spurred by American and French differences over the threat of war with Iraq.
But when Francoise Thomas took out the garbage Saturday morning, she saw the angry red letters spray-painted on the garage door of her townhouse.
"Scum go back to France," it read.
"I nearly had a heart attack," she said.
Thankfully, the vandal was not representative of the neighborhood:
On Sunday, a neighbor who declined to give his name was repainting the white garage door. Others brought Thomas flowers and chocolates to show their support."It's just the right thing to do," the neighbor said as he dabbed at then-pink marks still showing.
Thomas considers the graffiti a hate crime and is offering a $1,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrator.
Thomas has lived in the United States 23 years and made her career as a real estate agent here. She recently retired and plans to stay in Kingwood."I love France and I love the U.S.," she said in her slight French accent, adding that she has tried to stay out of politics on Iraq.
Neighbors lambasted the vandal and said they fear it was someone they know.
"Who knows she's from France?" asked Sandra Winkler. "Only the people in the neighborhood."
I sure hope that's as ugly as it gets, but I doubt it.
I always knew that Houston had poor air quality. I just never knew that barbecue was a contributing factor:
Analyzing particles in Houston's air, environmental engineer Matt Fraser of Rice University detected fatty acids among the millions of tiny organic particles that float in the city's atmosphere. The acids are released when fat drips onto hot coals and sizzles."It's definitely when you have an open grill. It's any process that generates meat smoke," said Fraser, whose study was recently accepted for publication in the journal Atmospheric Environment. "The compounds are specific to meat."
Come December 2004, fine particles may be subject to increased regulation in Texas if it is found that metropolitan areas such as Houston do not meet federal air quality standards for particulate matter -- what scientists call the mix of particles in the air. The area already exceeds federal guidelines for smog, and has until 2007 to come into compliance.
Research like Fraser's could be used by the state to determine which sources to eventually control.
You can have my grill when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers!
Seriously, I don't expect it to come to that. There are bigger fish to grill, and a crackdown on backyard barbecuing would be even less popular than the ill-fated 55 MPH speed limit. If there's still an issue after the refineries have cleaned up and stricter emissions testing is in place, then we can talk about barbecue pollution.
Having had my fun with New Mexico's recent spate of legislative looniness, I feel compelled to point out this affirmation of civil rights and liberties which has been introduced into their state house. Go read the whole thing and ask yourself if your own state legislature cares about you as much.
Via Atrios.
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The pressure of New Mexico's recent legislative goofiness was too much for our own elected officials to bear. Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson was the first to break when he proposed resolving the border dispute between Texas and New Mexico the old-fashioned way: with a duel. Once more, I quote in full:
SANTA FE - A 144-year-old dispute over a strip of land along the New Mexico-Texas border will be settled with an old-fashioned duel, if the land commissioners of both state's have any say in the matter.Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson issued a challenge Friday to New Mexico Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons. The duel would take place on the New Mexico-Texas border with traditional dueling pistols, Patterson said.
"Since Pat's the only statewide elected Republican in New Mexico, you can trust me - I won't shoot to kill," Patterson said in a humorous written challenge. "I think I'll just wing him."
"Anytime, anywhere," Lyons said as he accepted the challenge. "We'll settle this once and for all 'cause I never miss a shot."
The dispute centers on 603,485 acres in west Texas.
In 1859, a surveyor established the nation's 103rd meridian as the border between Texas and New Mexico. But he then set the actual boundary too far west - 2.29 miles in some places, 3.77 miles in others, according to New Mexico officials.
Today, the Texas towns of Farwell, Texline, Bledsoe and Bronco lie within the strip, along with a lot of empty oil and grazing land.
New Mexico's territorial officials protested the error in a 1910 draft constitution for statehood. Federal officials then redid the survey and ruled that the 1859 version had indeed botched it.
But Texas fought back. In 1911, the feds essentially told New Mexico to give up the land claim or forget about statehood.
In 1912, New Mexico became a state - minus 603,485 acres.
Despite quips from Lyons and Patterson, the land commissioners duel is not likely to involve real bullets, said Kristin Haase, spokeswoman for the Lyons.
"It's a joke...If they do it, I'm sure they will use blanks or take every precaution to ensure the safety of the two land commissioners," Haase said Saturday.
I can't resist the urge to say that if a statewide referendum were to be held on this issue, I'd expect "live ammunition" to win by at least a 2-1 margin in both states. Who cares about land commissioners, anyway? Hell, I can already see the Fox executives scrambling to build a reality show around the concept.
It's also unlikely the duel would legally resolve the issue, she said.The New Mexico Senate approved a measure Monday to instruct the attorney general's office to sue Texas over the land and for compensation for "subsurface mineral rights, oil and gas royalties and income, property taxes and grazing privileges.
The measure has been sent to the House for consideration.
Lyons said Friday the time and exact place for the duel hasn't been determined.
Patterson said it made sense that he and Lyons would settle a dispute with a duel since both, as state senators, authored legislation allowing citizens to lawfully carry concealed handguns.
In the spirit of those concealed-carry laws, I think each dueller should start with his gun in whatever holster he wears under his clothes. Tough luck if it's an ankle holster.
Thanks to the permalinkless Stoutdem for the tip.
Today's Chron has a rather dispiriting piece about support for the death penalty in our great state:
The recent flurry of news about capital punishment has not swayed the opinions of Texans, who remain committed to the death penalty, even if it means executing innocent people in the process.A recent Scripps Howard Texas Poll found 76 percent of Texans said they support the death penalty. Sixty-nine percent of the poll respondents also said they believe the state has executed innocent people.
Before I get into some related topics, I'd first like to point out that the first paragraph above is on logically shaky ground. In the abstract, I support the death penalty, but I want to see it reformed to the point where it's virtually impossible to execute an innocent person. Had they asked me the yes-no questions "Do you support the death penalty?" and "Do you believe innocent people have been executed?", I'd have answered Yes to both. In my personal experience, polls want nice discrete answers to simple questions. An affirmative answer to both of these questions does not necessarily mean that one thinks this is how it needs to be.
That said, I believe the following:
David Atwood of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said he was not surprised by the findings of the recent poll."We've had people say executing an innocent person is the price of doing business," Atwood said.
Which is why I found the following bit to be too precious for words:
The poll results baffled even the most ardent death penalty supporters."That's hard for me to fathom," said Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, a victim's rights organization that supports the death penalty.
Clements questioned whether Texans really believe innocent people have been executed.
"If I believed we executed an innocent inmate, I couldn't support the death penalty. It doesn't make any sense," Clements said.
Dianne Clements and Justice For All are the biggest pimps for the death penalty in the state of Texas. One of their own representatives has shown callous disregard for the possibility of executing innocent people, as seen in this Houston Press piece:
JFA representative Rusty Hubbarth, testifying to Texas legislators last year on a proposal for a moratorium on executions, was asked by one lawmaker, "Rusty, you're not in favor of executing innocent people, are you?""Not this week," Hubbarth joked.
The humor was probably lost on two men in attendance that day. Randall Adams and Kerry Cook had collectively spent more than a decade in prison for crimes they didn't commit -- they'd both come within hours of execution.
So spare me the crocodile tears, Dianne.
The story notes that the poll was taken during February, when news of capital punishment and death row prisoners being cleared of their crimes was in the news. If this story is right in stating that some people truly believe that occasionally executing an innocent person is "the price of doing business", then let's at least make sure we're clear on what the price is, for on top of the travesty of killing an innocent person, there are other costs as well.
As Delma Banks Jr. enjoyed a day he didn't think he would live to see, the family of the teenager he was convicted of killing 23 years ago drove back to Texarkana frustrated by what transpired the night before.[...]
Larry Whitehead, the victim's father, said the court's decision stunned his family.
"It's just devastation," he said. "I guess there aren't any words to explain about the disappointment, the hurt. I don't know. I just don't have words for it. The only thing we can feel is yesterday was no justice for our son."
If one comes to the conclusion that Delma Banks is innocent - and it's easy to arrive at that conclusion - then regardless of whether or not he's eventually freed or fried there are a number of victims besides Richard Wayne Whitehead (the 16-year-old that Banks is convicted of killing) and Banks himself. Whitehead's family has been put through an unnecessarily arduous journey for justice, and depending on the vagaries of the Supreme Court may wind up wondering if the real killer was executed or if the real killer will ever be found now that the wrong man has been set free. They deserve a lot better than that.
There's another group to consider, one that won't be mentioned in the paper unless another person is eventually fingered for the Whitehead murder. If Banks is innocent, then the real killer has potentially been out on the streets victimizing other people, people with no connection to the Banks or Whitehead families. If the police and prosecutors had done their jobs properly, this person would have been in jail, possibly on Death Row, instead of remaining free. How big a boost to "the price of doing business" is this?
Granted, that latter cost is independent of the death penalty itself. If Delma Banks were incorrectly serving 25-to-life instead of awaiting execution, the real killer would still be going unpunished. But the reasons why Banks is where he is are precisely the reasons why the death penalty is so troubling. They have to be addressed, not just to save the life of a Delma Banks but to safeguard his freedom. The fact that society as a whole is better off as well is more than just a happy coincidence.
It's easy to sneer at "criminals' rights" and "legal technicalities" that let bad guys go free while hamstringing the cops and the courts. I have a hard time understanding how anyone can call himself or herself a proponent of "law and order" without being passionate about ensuring that the people we lock up are the ones who really deserve it. The way I see it, being indifferent to actual guilt lets a whole lot more criminals walk free than the Miranda ruling ever did.
Found the following link in the comments to this entry about the closing of San Antonio landmark Little Hipps, from reader Mags. Here's the relevant bit:
Have you missed Little Hipps? You may want to load up for a drive out to Spring Branch and try the new Timbo's at 14370 U.S. 281.The restaurant, owned by Tim and Teresa Lang, features one-pound burgers on the same buns Little Hipps used to use as well as shypoke eggs, chicken-fried chicken sandwiches, a chef's salad and more. There's even a ham and tomato shypoke for those who want a little extra kick.
Why the comparison to Little Hipps? Tim Lang was the manager of the San Antonio landmark for 27 years, and he vows, "This is going to be the fix" some diners have been looking for since Little Hipps closed down last year.
The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Call (830) 885-2325.
I was never really into the Shypokes, but those Little Hipps burgers, only Chris Madrid's are better. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I'm out that way. Wonder if they made off with any of the Hipps decor as well...
The best one-liner I've heard today goes to Joni Electric:
The price of gas in Texas has gone so high that women who want to run
over their husbands have started carpooling.
She'll be here all week, folks. Be sure to tip your waitrons generously.
In addition to being spring break for the local school district, it's also the big week off for UT and Texas A&M;, which means that South Padre Island is overrun with college students.
This island has been hoppin' from the jump. Hip-hop sensation Coolio was spotted at a local club. Actor Luke Perry was rumored to be making appearances here and there. Gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg hosted a live national broadcast of the Girls Gone Wild video series.[...]
The show and video series have been controversial over the past couple of years. Drunken college students have bared all and later sued, claiming the show took advantage of them. Other cities have blamed the broadcast for increased rowdiness, chaos and vandalism.
Thursday's broadcast was a $19.95 pay-per-view event, featuring Snoop Dogg, scantily clad women and wrestling stars.
Producers of the show couldn't be reached for comment, but the show appeared to be successful.
[...]
Amanda Gomez, a 21-year-old student at UT-Pan American, was sporting a teeny tank top, short shorts and a million Mardi Gras beads and was sipping on a bucket-size Long Island ice tea while she talked about her week.
She, her boyfriend and his friend hung out all week.
The highlight?
Gomez's money-making body.
Uh, let's let her explain this one.
"Some guys told me if I took off my top they'd pay me $600," Gomez said. "So, I did and they paid me. I didn't care. I made money."
One of the (sadly) many ways that I know that I am officially Over The Hill is my utter amazement at reading stories like this. I know spring break wasn't like that when I was in college. Actually, and this is even more pathetic, it probably was and I just never knew about it. If you'll pardon me, I'm going to go yell at some kids to get off my lawn, they're making too much noise for me to hear Matlock.
I have somehow made it to #84 in BlogStreet's Top 100 Most Important Blogs, just below Virginia Postrel but ahead of Media News and TAPPED. I've read their FAQ and I'm still not sure how it is that I'm related to some of these other blogs. But what the heck, it's all in good fun. And as a bonus, I get to display this nifty little graphic on my page, at least until they figure out it was all a computer error.
I swear, I won't turn into one of those Hollywood types that won't eat brown M&M;'s or needs his nipples tweaked before a photo shoot. Well, not until I crack the Top 10.
We had three and two kids for the last two practices, today and Thursday. HISD is now on spring break, so some kids are out of town (including two who are off at spring training), and Thursday was a school trip to San Antonio. Tuesday was well attended, though.
With the smaller number of kids, we've mostly done batting practice. I'm finally figuring out the best way to pitch to the kids, just in time to have them pitch to themselves. All three of the guys who were there today took a turn pitching, and all three did all right. Two of them were ones I hadn't really considered as hurlers. I may have more options on the mound than I'd first thought. That's a good thing.
Tuesday we ran through infield and outfield drills. I now know that I can hit fly balls on demand. Major leaguers call it hitting fungoes. Don't ask me where that word came from (you are of course welcome to Google it if you're so inclined). For the most part, the guys who were best at catching fly balls were ones who've done well everywhere I've put them. I'm not sure how I'm going to juggle all of these guys. The league allows free substitution, which will help a little even though it'll make keeping the lineup card chaotic.
We discovered an equipment issue on Tuesday. There's no chest protector, and the shinguards are too big. I've been playing phone tag with the league's equipment guy to get this straightened out. I was supposed to meet him after Thursday's practice but he never caled me back. Annoying.
I also heard through Tiffany that the real field may not be ready in time for the season. Apparently, the city inspector has red-tagged it for improper drainage. Naturally, it's the city Parks Department that's building the damn thing. It would be funny if it weren't so inconvenient. More grist for Kevin's mill.
No practice Tuesday - the field is unavailable for the next two Tuesdays. We're going to go back to the batting cage on the 28th. I'm a little concerned that I haven't seen anyone hit for any power yet. Almost no batted balls have made it to the outfield. Maybe that's an indictment of my pitching, I don't know. Maybe we'll see when the kids pitch to themselves.
The hacker who broke into the University of Texas' computer system and grabbed personal information, including Social Security numbers, on over 50,000 students and faculty, has turned himself in to federal authorities.
Christopher Andrew Phillips, a computer science major, was charged with unlawful access to a protected computer and unlawful use of a means of identification.Phillips told authorities that he wrote and executed a computer program designed to access a university Web site, Texclass, that tracks employees that attend training classes, according to a criminal complaint. By gaining access to Texclass, Phillips was able access a broader range of information, including names and Social Security numbers from a UT database of personal data.
[...]
Phillips told officials he had no intention of using the information to harm anyone, according to the complaint filed by a Secret Service agent who searched Phillips' residences in Houston and Austin.
We'll see about that. He's been released on his own recognizance (i.e., no bail needed) and a grand jury has been convened. Stay tuned.
Several bloggers have heeded my call for more dog pictures. Go check out Speck, Dirac and Markov, and of course the well-initialed CK, who seems to be fond of extreme closeups.
It's actually difficult to get a good picture of Harry sometimes, because when he sees us focus in with a camera, he assumes we're there to pet him. We caught him napping under the Christmas tree several times this year, and just about every time we took aim to take a snapshot, he got up and trotted over cash in on the forthcoming affection. I think Tiffany managed to get one shot, which is probably still on an undeveloped roll somewhere. I'll have to check and see.
And for those of you who for whatever reason would still rather look at cats, Larry has a cat cam update.
Rob Humenik attended a DHA Downtown Forum Lunch recently which featured Mayoral candidate Michael "Boy Wonder" Berry as the speaker. Despite being a card-carrying member of the Heights Area Axis of Left-Leaning Bloggers, Rob came away with the impression that Berry is a credible candidate, which is more than certain other bloggers (that would be me and Kevin) have given him credit for.
I still think that Berry will be buried (sorry) by the Sanchez-supporting conservative establishment, but as always, I'm just a goofball with a domain and an opinion, so I could certainly be wrong. Read Rob's piece and decide for yourself.
Molly Ivins once wrote that when she does radio interviews around the country, the question she always gets asked is "So just what is it about Texas, anyway?". Doesn't matter where she is, doesn't matter what else is going on, they always ask her that. "Mine is not to wonder why," she wrote, "mine is to answer the question 'So just what is it about Texas, anyway?'"
I think it's time we asked that same question about New Mexico. First they try to steal land from Texas, now they want to honor extraterrestrials. Once again, it's so goofy that I'm going to quote it in full:
SANTA FE, New Mexico (Reuters) - E.T.: Phone New Mexico. They may have a little something special for you.A New Mexico legislator proposed on Monday having the state honour all extraterrestrial beings with a special day that will "celebrate and honour all past, present and future extraterrestrial visitors" to New Mexico, the measure reads.
Rep. Dan Foley, a Republican from Roswell, the spot where some say aliens crash-landed more than 50 years ago, said he introduced the legislation to "enhance relationships among all the citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown."
Extraterrestrial Culture Day would be held the second Thursday of February and would honour space travellers from other worlds and even give a nod to creatures made famous in movies, such as E.T. in Steven Spielberg's 1982 blockbuster film.
In July of each year, thousands of earthly visitors descend on Roswell, the self-appointed alien capital of the world, where many UFO buffs believe an alien craft crash-landed in 1947, based on claims that alien bodies were discovered there.
The town's population of 45,000 doubles and even triples during the week long festival that includes speakers on extraterrestrial life, UFOs and other anomalies such as crop circles.
Foley feels the same excitement -- and economic benefit-- can be spread to the rest of the state by adding a state-sanctioned day of alien celebration.
"If we can capitalise on something that did or did not happen in 1947 then it can help the entire state," Foley said.
I just can't argue with that last sentiment, can you?
I should note that over here in Texas, we know the proper way to deal with marauding aliens from outer space. Klaatu barada nikto, indeed.
Says here I'm an interesting newcomer, which is rather amusing as I've been doing this blog thing since last January 1. But hey, it beats being an annoying newcomer. Don't know how long I'll be visible on this link, so check it out now while you still can.
UPDATE: Gone already. Damn, that was fleeting.
Well, well, well. A New Mexico state legislator is introducing a bill that would force that state's Attorney General to sue the state of Texas for some 600,000 acres of border land that were incorrectly given to the Lone Star State. This is so goofy I'm going to reproduce it in full:
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) -- A land dispute between Texas and New Mexico may be headed for a showdown.New Mexico's state Senate unanimously approved a bill Monday ordering the state's attorney general to sue Texas over a strip of oil-rich land along the state line.
Democratic Sen. Shannon Robinson sponsored the legislation that seeks the return of 603,485 acres he says were wrongly placed in Texas because of a mistake by a surveyor in 1859.
The error, Robinson said, caused the Texas-New Mexico state line to be several miles too far west. The Texas towns of Farwell, Bledsoe, Bronco and Texline are within the strip of disputed land.
"There is no doubt that the people's lives in that strip would be vastly improved because they no longer would be Texans," Robinson explained during Senate debate.
"I can see a great uplifting of their personal self worth," he said.
Despite the Texas bashing, Robinson assured his colleagues that he was serious in wanting a lawsuit filed against Texas. However, he acknowledged he sponsored the measure partly to carry on the quixotic fight of a friend, the late Sen. John Morrow, who died last year.
The bill instructs the attorney general to sue Texas for return of the disputed land and seek compensation for "subsurface mineral rights, oil and gas royalties and income, property taxes and grazing privileges that New Mexico has not realized due to the boundary error."
The measure goes to the House for consideration.
New Mexico's territorial officials first protested the placement of the state line in a 1910 draft constitution for statehood. Federal officials agreed the 1859 survey had indeed botched it.
But Texas fought back. In 1911, the federal government essentially told New Mexico to give up the land claim or forget about statehood. In 1912, New Mexico became a state - minus 603,485 acres.
I feel a song coming on, don't you?
Diane Zamora, the former Navy cadet now serving life for her role in the murder of Adrienne Jones, has petitioned Bexar County for a marriage license. Her potential groom is not her fellow killer David Graham but a soon-to-be-released inmate named Steven Mora. She's never met Mora, of course, but the only real obstacle is the county clerk and an unusual double-proxy ceremony:
The couple's request for a double-proxy wedding is a new one, even for prison officials.Larry Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the TDJC, could not remember a double-proxy wedding but said, "We have proxy marriages all the time."
Pickax murderer Karla Faye Tucker, a resident of Texas' death row from 1984 to 1998, married Dallas-based prison ministry worker Dana Brown by proxy in 1995. In 1998, she became the first woman executed in Texas since 1863.
Two ceremonies are conducted when proxy marriages take place, Fitzgerald said: A civil ceremony in the free world with a proxy standing in for the inmate, and another ceremony conducted in prison by the prison chaplain, with a proxy standing in for the free spouse.
To conduct a double-proxy wedding, four stand-ins and three ceremonies would probably have to take place, Fitzgerald said: A free-world ceremony with two proxies, and two prison ceremonies with one proxy each.
Attorney General Greg Abbott gave an opinion allowing all this to go forward, but it's still up to the county clerk.
As she isn't eligible for parole until 2036, it's hard to imagine this actually lasting. But stranger things have happened, I guess.
As expected, the feds arrested two Enron Broadband Services executives and charged them with a variety of fraud-related offenses for their role in the whole EBS/Blockbuster/movies-on-demand fiasco. As is so often the case with these Enron arrests, there's a nugget of comedy gold buried in there:
Kevin Howard, former chief financial officer of Enron Broadband Services, and Michael Krautz, former EBS senior accounting director, were charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and making false statements to FBI agents.[...]
Howard and Krautz turned themselves in to the FBI Wednesday morning and appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Marcia Crone. Each was released on $500,000 bond, secured by Krautz's 401(k) account and Howard's stock holdings.
Clearly, neither of them was sufficiently invested in Enron stocks if their portfolios are capable of covering these bonds.
As Skimble notes, these guys are just small fry. Is this another example of prosecutorial bootstrapping?
Asked why some midlevel employees are being charged but no top executives, Enron Task Force leader Leslie Caldwell said she would not comment on specific targets of the investigation."We are looking at everything," Caldwell said, "We are looking at everyone."
I parse that answer as "No, dammit, this is the best we can do", but you're welcome to disagree with me.
I play a regular game of bridge on Wednesdays using the online game OKBridge. We have a regular group that gets together, but we don't always have a full foursome. When that happens, we play with whatever random person or persons that come by.
Last night I partnered with such a person. When I checked his profile, I discovered that he was living in Iceland. Cool!
Iceland, by the way, is one of the world's hotbeds of bridge. In 1991, when a team from Iceland won the Bermuda Bowl, it was front page national news over there. It's also the site of a prestigious and high-end annual tournament that always gets good reviews from its participants.
As it happened, my Icelandic partner and I did pretty well. I'll be happy to play with him again if he ever drops by our table.
Delma Banks, scheduled to be the 300th Texan to die by lethal injection, was given a last minute reprieve by the US Supreme Court.
The court was acting on appeals by lawyers who raised questions about the legitimacy of his conviction.As Banks prepared Tuesday to be moved from death row in Livingston to Huntsville, where he was scheduled to be executed, his attorneys complained that the Texas criminal justice system never considered the merits of his final appeals.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said the defense waited too long to introduce evidence that two key prosecution witnesses lied at trial. Also, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a lengthy petition for clemency Monday without reading it because it had been filed after its deadline.
"I think this case goes to show, unfortunately, in Texas, substance and merit and concern about due process and possible innocence don't hold any water compared with technical procedures and rules," said Miriam Gohara, an attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
When I read about cases like this, I come to understand how liberal war hawks have been feeling lately. I want to support capital punishment, but not in the way we've been doing it. We care more about the process than the results, more about closure than justice, more about efficiency than innocence.
Every time a case like Delma Banks or Leonard Rojas hits the papers, the state always natters about deadlines and how the system just can't work if we're never allowed to close a case. There's an easy answer to that, and that's to remove the artificial need for deadlines that executions require. What's more important: getting it right or getting it over with? I know what my answer is.
Cragg Hines lays out the case for Banks' innocence pretty clearly - allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, coerced witnesses, withheld evidence, incompetent representation, racial bias in jury selection - pretty much all of the bullet points you'd expect from an anti-death penalty speech. Does the fact that Banks' lawyers filed his paperwork with the state Board of Parole and Pardons 15 days before he was supposed to die instead of the mandated 21 make all of that moot?
I cannot abide the death penalty as it is administered. If we can't fix the system, we need to throw it out. There's just no excuse.
UPDATE: Jeralyn has anti-death penalty editorials from the four major papers in the state, including the usually reliably conservative Dallas Morning News.
Wow.
SALT LAKE CITY -- Elizabeth Smart, the 15-year-old girl who vanished from her bedroom nine months ago, was found alive today, riding in the car of a drifter who had once done work at the family's home, police said."Miracles do exist," said the girl's uncle, Tom Smart.
The girl was wearing a wig when police in suburban Sandy pulled over the drifter, a man known as Emmanuel, authorities said. She was taken to the Salt Lake City police department, where her father was with her.
That's truly amazing. I sincerely hope she'll be all right. My best wishes to her and her family.
Stephen Hawking is in town to give a lecture tonight. He's spending some time at Texas A&M; thanks to some grant money. I hope someone has informed him that driving his wheelchair over the grass outside the Memorial Student Center is strictly verboten. The Aggies do take their traditions seriously.
What's the deal with bloggers and cats? Kevin, Digby, Gianna, Ginger, Larry (what happened to the cat cam, Larry?), Meryl...the list goes on and on.
What the blog world needs is more dogs. Right, Harry?
Harry says he'll get back to me after he finishes his nap.
I managed to miss an anniversary last week. Fortunately, it's not one that involves Tiffany. On March 6, I marked 25 years of playing the saxophone.
When I transferred from Sacred Heart Elementary School to William Morris Intermediate School in March of 1978, one of the options that became available to me was to learn a musical instrument - Morris had an excellent band program. I decided that this appealed to me, so the next step was to pick an instrument. My first instinct was the trumpet, but I was scheduled to get some orthodontics in the near future, so we thought that a woodwind would be more suitable. You really don't want to be pressing a metal object to your lips on a regular basis when you have a mouth full of braces. Turned out that the orthodontic work I got was a removable retainer, and I didn't get it until high school, but the specter of braceface had already wielded its influence.
And 25 years later, I'm still tooting. I've played the alto, tenor, and baritone saxes at one point or another, though the sax I own is the alto my folks gave me in 1980 as a graduation present. I've been fortunate to be able to keep playing in bands, especially after leaving school, because I'm basically a Sunday hacker who does it for fun and doesn't like practicing too much. Oh, I take performing seriously, but if I couldn't play in a group like the Rice MOB I probably wouldn't play any more. I don't get the same joy from playing solo, and I don't have the time, patience, or talent to turn myself into a featured performer.
So I'm happy with how things turned out and I'm happy that I'm still able to play after all these years. And of course, I can't leave this subject without noting that I've been playing the sax for longer than Mike Tremoulet has been alive.
McDonald's will be offering high speed wireless Internet access with the purchase of a combo meal at select restaurants starting today.
That's pretty cool, though I can't say it's something I'd ever take advantage of. Personally, I go to lunch to escape technology and responsibility for an hour or so. What I want is a nice, quiet table where I can spread out my quaint, low-tech newspaper and read the funnies. I don't want interaction, I want peace. I suspect this is a holdover from my years doing tech support. I got into the habit of going to lunch by myself because I spent all day talking to people, and what I needed more than anything was an hour away to maintain sanity.
(Besides, if I really can't live without my email for the brief time I'm away from my desk, I have my Blackberry.)
Prosecutors are preparing to file charges against a number of Enron Broadband Services (EBS) executives for various shady deals involving movies-on-demand over the Internet. It's the usual gaggle of booking vast future projected earnings as current income, accounting skulduggery, and insider trading that has characterized Enron since it all fell apart in 2001. The story doesn't name any execs, just notes that it's mostly obscure fish this time around despite Jeff Skilling's relentless pimping of EBS.
One person who comes off well in the story is from Arthur Andersen, of all places:
The [Blockbuster] transaction was also a source of concern for Arthur Andersen accountants, according to testimony from the Andersen obstruction of justice trial last year. Andersen partner Carl Bass, a member of an internal review team demoted for disagreeing with Enron on interpretation of accounting rules, testified that he discouraged Enron's attempt to sell its share of the Blockbuster deal to CIBC because it was not "a real business with cash flows."When Enron canceled the Blockbuster deal in March 2001, Bass wrote in an e-mail to a colleague that "one would think ... that there should be a loss reported."
Quite the contrary, the company reported a further $58 million in revenue by marking-to-market the transaction, even though there are no indications the business ever found any other partners to continue the service.
Typical. EBS was last in the news a few months ago when they pleaded guilty to tax evasion. As Binkley noted, their warehouse on Shepherd (not far from where I live) was stacked full of hardware but was claimed to be empty. It can be so hard to tell the difference sometimes, can't it? I blame poor lighting.
Not that it would have done much here, but the Lege is debating a bill that would give the Attorney General more power to crack down on certain types of business fraud, mostly involving people who manage state funds and who have conflicts of interest. But hey, every little bit helps.
Unbelievable. The man responsbile for writing the long-discredited book The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin, gave an intelligence briefing to the Pentagon and has reportedly given others to the Mossad. This article suggests that the officials didn't know what a loon he is and were just polite, but Drosnin has written a letter to the editor claiming that they did in fact take his advice.
Drosnin's book claimed that there are a bunch of "hidden messages", of the form "Kennedy Dallas" and "Clinton President", that can be found in the Hebrew Bible, and that this is proof of the existence of God. He claimed that similar messages were not there to be found in the King James Version or in other works of literature.
It didn't take long for his outlandish claims to be thoroughly and spectacularly debunked. The whole story is here in these two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine, plus Brendan McKay's work finding similar "messages" in Moby Dick.
Frankly, I'd have thought that this would have been more than enough to send him scurrying back into obscurity, but apparently people like Drosnin have no shame and no capacity to learn. The next time you hear the name Michael Drosnin, just laugh. He deserves no better.
Links to original NYT article and Drosnin's letter via Atrios.
'Peace On Earth' Shirt Sparks Arrest
Authors Arrested in Protest at White House
These stories are fairly old news by now, of course, but I got to thinking about them yesterday and they reminded me of an old joke, one that I heard twenty-odd years ago. It was a favorite of Ronald Reagan's, and it went like this:
An American and a Soviet were arguing about whose country was better. "Our country is better because we have freedeom of speech," said the American. "Why, I can stand in front of the White House with a sign that says 'Down With Reagan!' and no one will arrest me."
"That's nothing," said the Soviet. "I can stand in front of the Kremlin with a sign that says 'Down With Reagan!' and no one will arrest me, either."
Those were the days, eh?
One-term City Council member Michael "Boy Wonder" Berry has officially announced his candidacy for Mayor in 2003, joining Bill White as an announced candidate.
Standing in a southwest Houston neighborhood that has had problems with city street and storm sewer construction, Berry promised to set higher standards for city workers."If you think we need to put a workhorse in the mayor's office -- and not a show horse -- I am your candidate," Berry said.
Berry, 32, would become Houston's youngest mayor since Oscar Holcombe, who was 10 months younger when he took office in 1921 than Berry will be when the next mayoral term begins.
Berry, who has declined to accept his $44,200 annual city salary as a council member, has said he also would decline the mayor's $165,800 annual salary.
"Some may think we are starting this race as an underdog, but the truth is, I wouldn't have it any other way," Berry said. "Today, the vast majority of Houstonians out there are paying higher taxes and getting less for it. I don't mind being an underdog because Houston taxpayers are underdogs, too."
Whatever. I will say this, Berry does seem to know where his political bread is buttered and who his real opponent is in the pre-runoff stage of this election:
Several in the racially mixed crowd of roughly 100 were Republican Party officials who said they now support Berry after backing Sanchez two years ago.Among them were State Republican Executive Committee member Amy Jones, Harris County GOP Senate District 11 Chairwoman Sheryl Berg, Senate District 13 Chairman James Earl White and local precinct chairmen Bill Borden and Jim McGrath.
McGrath, a Houston consultant who was a speech writer for former President Bush, said a growing number of Republicans are disappointed that Sanchez has aligned himself with some campaign workers and supporters who helped Brown beat Sanchez in a 2001 mayoral runoff.
Houston's elections are officially nonpartisan, though they increasingly have split along party lines.
"I think a lot of Republicans supported Orlando Sanchez in 2001 because he wasn't Lee Brown," McGrath said. "Now, here comes Michael Berry, who is a Republican we think can do the job."
Until demonstrated otherwise, a vote for Michael Berry is a vote taken from Orlando Sanchez. That may or may not damage Sanchez's odds of getting into the runoff, but it can't help him. So I'll say it again: Spoil away, Boy Wonder!
Soon after Berry's announcement, New Black Panther Party spokesman Quanell X issued a statement saying the candidate was not welcome to campaign in the black community.Last year, about 40 protesters demonstrated at Berry's home because of his vote against a City Council resolution supporting a study of slavery reparations. It failed on an 8-7 vote.
Berry alluded to those protests during his announcement speech when he said, "Picketers in my front yard, hecklers at my speeches and professional character assassins will not intimidate me."
Berry has said he expects to preserve a coalition of blacks and conservative whites that helped him win his at-large council seat.
Quanell X said Berry's campaign can anticipate protests.
Well, that at least has entertainment potential. Not as much as Marc Katz's candidacy in Austin, perhaps, but potential nonetheless.
If you just can't get enough of all of this mayoral campaigning, I suggest you visit the candidates' web sites for a bigger dose. Here's Michael Berry's site and here's Bill White's. Orlando Sanchez's site is being renovated from his last run, and Sylvester Turner doesn't have one (yet). (Note to Sylvester Turner: What are you waiting for? Get a domain name now, lest the fate of David Dewhurst befall you. Someone already owns sylvesterturner.com and I don't think it's you.)
The City of Houston is proposing new rules to its contracting ordinance that will forbid any business from doing business with the city if they or one of their owners owe more than $100 in city taxes.
After months of fine tuning -- such as defining ownership and determining what debts will be included -- City Council's Regulatory Affairs Committee approved the changes Monday and referred them to the full council."This has been a long time coming," said Councilman Mark Ellis, the committee chair who spearheaded the proposed changes. "We limited it to ad valorem taxes, so we could get our arms around it. We might look at other areas where businesses and individuals are indebted to the city."
Since October, Ellis has delayed contracts of businesses that owe the city money. Several delinquents have been shamed into paying.
Under the proposals, each contractor wanting to do city business must sign an affidavit listing anyone who owns 5 percent or more of their company. Nonprofit companies will be required to list officers.
The controller's office will pass that information to the city's delinquent tax collection firm -- Linebarger Goggan Blair and Sampson -- to determine whether companies or individuals owe property taxes. Any owing at least $100 may not do business with the city.
This is great news, but I have to ask: What took them so long? Heck, why wasn't this the case under Mayor Lanier, or Mayor Whitmire, or Mayor Hofheinz, or...you get the point.
Never mind. Let's focus on the positive, which may get even more so if the Texas Lege cooperates:
The ordinance does not apply to competitive bids -- about 70 percent of the city's contracts -- which by state law require the city to do business with the "lowest responsible bidder."That would change if a bill by Sen. Jon Lindsay, R-Houston, amends the state law, allowing the city's ordinance to apply to all contracts.
Damn straight, and about time. Kudos all around.
Finally, we've had a string of sunny and warm days around here. I suppose if my birthday weren't in February, I'd hate the damn month as much as everyone else does. And I don't even live in a cold climate.
Practice last Saturday was a bit limited, with only seven kids showing up as four others had conflicts. HISD's spring break is next week, so attendance will continue to be spotty. On the plus side, two of my kids are travelling to spring training with their dads, so at least they'll get some baseball by osmosis. Lucky stiffs.
(I hear from my dad that my cousin Joe will be attending the Seattle Mariners' spring training camp as a guest of Terry Pollreisz, hitting coach for the San Antonio Missions and former head coach at the University of Portland. Hey, Dad, tell Joe to bring a diary.)
We ran through some infield drills first. I was reasonably happy with how they handled grounders, though throwing to first still needs work. I think I've identified a potential third baseman and shortstop, which is good. I'll have to see some of the guys who weren't there to know for sure.
After shagging grounders, I put everyone at a position and threw batting practice. While my infield-drill grounder-hitting has improved since the first practice, my batting-practice-pitching still needs work. When I pitch from the league mound, my pitches are coming in too high for the kids. I finally figured out to start from behind the mound and throw a bit harder, much like the pitching machine we used at the batting cage. Eventually, I'd like to have some of the kids throw a little batting practice, but not yet.
Today the guy who recruited me to coach sent out email to all league coaches reminding us that we need to have a corporate sponsor lined up for our team by Friday. After I stopped hyperventilating, I sent him a note saying "uh, I must have missed that part when you talked me into this". Thankfully, there are some unaligned sponsors in the queue, so one of them will be assigned to us. Whew!
Next practice is tomorrow. We should have good weather again. I love springtime.
Jumping Jehosaphat, it's an epidemic!
A man was in good condition at Memorial Hermann Hospital on Sunday evening after Webster police said his estranged wife struck him with her car.Clifton Leroy Dickerson, 29, was with a female friend about 2:30 a.m. when his wife pulled in front of them in the parking lot of their apartment in the 800 block of West NASA Road One, police said.
An argument erupted when Dickerson walked over and struck up a conversation with his wife, Miacona Charles Dickerson, 29. Police said she then pulled out a knife and slashed him on his lower arm.
When Dickerson tried to run away, his wife ran him down with her car, police said. He was seriously injured and taken to Memorial Hermann. Miacona Dickerson was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and bond has been set at $50,000, police said. She remains at large.
A Liberty County woman, Renee Fowler-Reents, 46, was charged with misdemeanor family-violence assault after authorities said she ran her husband down Feb. 23 outside a Hardin convenience store. That incident occurred about 10 days after a Harris County jury found Friendswood dentist Clara Harris guilty of murder for fatally running over her husband on July 24.
I'm speechless. Thankfully, Larry's on the case.
Which lily-livered America-hating limpwrist said the following?
Wars are easy to get into, but very difficult to get out of. They can sap the moral and spiritual fiber of a nation, squander lives and resources, deplete scarce funds, cause undue hardship on all involved, destroy families, and engender hopelessness.I have questioned both the motives for military action at this time, and the ever-changing, illogical justifications presented to us in what has to be one of the greatest media propaganda blitzes ever force-fed a populace. Any time ground troops are deployed, serious questions must be asked and real answers demanded. The jingoistic rhetoric we are receiving does not constitute legitimate answers.
The consequences of our planned attack on Iraq (and also probably Iran, given the size of our forces and their location in proximity to Iran), should cause us all to pause. The Pentagon has announced that we will hit Baghdad with a force almost equal to the bombing of Hiroshima. Obviously many thousands of civilians will perish, with untold thousands maimed. And for what? To liberate them? To bring them freedom? Or democracy? Or is it to really secure the world’s second largest oil reserve and establish a base from which to subjugate other Middle Eastern nations? Is it also the plan for Israel to use the cover of war to forcibly relocate the Palestinian population (as has been publicly stated by some members of Israel’s current government)?
How on earth have we arrived at this crucial juncture in our country’s history? How has a war on terrorism been converted into an attack on Iraq? What threat does Iraq pose to us? We must lay the blame squarely on our congress, who according to our Constitution, only has the power to declare war. For congress to cede it’s war-making power to the executive branch is unconstitutional on the very face of it and effectively destroys our three branches of government. Circumventing our Constitution is very bad, and the undeclared wars, which have resulted in our recent history, have had disastrous results. Undeclared wars have no declared objectives, and therefore can widen at will, and our foray into the Middle East will likely set in motion a long-term wave of retaliation. Indeed, I believe that the administration would like to entice Iraq into firing the first blow so some justification could be paraded at the United Nations. If the United States government can adopt this unreal doctrine of preemptive attack on any nation, anywhere, at any time, so can other nations! This is how world wars begin. If the President goes into Iraq alone without a UN resolution, he will be in violation of the war powers given him last October by congress which was contingent on UN approval. A constitutional crisis will occur.
That would be Jack Walters, the now-former chairman of the Boone County (MO) GOP, who wrote these words in his resignation letter. Go read the whole thing and ask yourself where you've heard some of these questions before.
Via the Political State Report.
I don't think I've ever heard of a university president resign over an athletic controversy (though $deity knows a whole bunch of them, including every one that's hired Jim Harrick since he was fired at UCLA, ought to), but it just happened at St. Bonaventure's. Basically, St. Bonny's took on an ineligible transfer student, then was forced to forfeit six league wins once the league found out about it. University President Robert Wickenheiser personally approved the transfer, and now he's paying the price. Good on the Bonnies for standing on principles.
Unfortunately, there's still the matter of how their season ended. Once the players heard about what happened, they decided to forfeit their last two games, a decision that among other things wrought havoc with seedings in the Atlantic 10 conference tournament. Their coach, Jan van Breda Kolff, did not require them to play.
"I said we have to play but they said they need to hear it from the administration as to why this was happening," van Breda Kolff said. "It was spring break and we (the staff) were making phone calls trying to get a hold of people to tell them what the situation was. Everyone said, 'Well, you could have picked up five guys from intramurals,' but there was no one on campus. It was spring break."[...]
Van Breda Kolff was guarded in what he would say but gave a little insight into what occurred last Monday night on campus. He said he told the team on Feb. 26 that Jamil Terrell wouldn't play against George Washington because the school and the NCAA were investigating his eligibility. He said the team then learned of the sanctions four or five days later from a school spokesperson.
The players apparently wanted to hear that they were out of the A-10 tournament from the school hierarchy -- not just van Breda Kolff and a spokesperson. He said that other people on campus told the players that the coaches knew about the sanctions well beforehand but didn't tell them.
"But that wasn't the case, we had no knowledge," van Breda Kolff said. "The players felt betrayed. It was very awkward."
I can understand the players' feelings, but I think they were wrong. Their actions affected a lot of people outside of St. Bonaventure's, people who had nothing to do with Robert Wickenheiser and the university's failure to communicate with them. They should have found a less disruptive way to express their displeasure, like maybe wearing a patch with Jamil Terrell's number on it or some such. Based on how St. Bonny's handled President Wickenheiser's behavior, I think the players would have gotten a satisactory outcome without causing so much trouble for everyone else.
UPDATE: Steve Smith agrees with me. St. Bonny's is hoping the Atlantic 10 won't drop them from the league.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Multiple offender Jim Harrick was suspended by Georgia for his role in their current academic scandal and expects to be fired again. The Bulldogs will sit out the postseason.
Houston isn't the only major city in Texas that will feature a wide-open mayor's race this year. So will Austin, where incumbent Gus Garcia is not running. Here in Houston, the most offbeat candidate we'll have is Boy Wonder, which is to say that this race will be deadly dull. Noisy, perhaps, but dull as dishwater.
Austin, thankfully, has a real live character in the race, restauranteur Marc Katz of Katz's Deli fame. He's already stirring things up with a federal lawsuit that challenges Austin's $100 campaign contribution limit, despite the fact that he'll be mostly self-financing his candidacy. Will Wynn (which, as noted, is an awesome name for a politician) is the favorite, but who knows what a guy like Marc Katz and his unbeatable name recognition can do?
Here are some photos from the Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston that was recently attacked by a protester who smashed a van into the clinic's front door. You can see from the first couple of pictures how fortified the entrance is. From the pictures labelled "Frank Bird Van from outside" and "Frank Bird Van in door from outside", you can see the private driveway that he had to enter before crashing the van. The sidewalk in front of the door is inside clinic property. Patients get dropped off there, where protesters cannot confront them. The last photo, "Door after van removed", shows the space between the front door and the street. The gentleman in the gray suit on the right is Peter Durkin, the executive director of the clinic.
Thanks to Pete for forwarding the link.
Kevin had noted that all of the poetry of Emily Dickinson can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas". I started to write a reply to that, listing a few examples of other such phenomena, but never quite finished it. Which is just as well, because anything I could have said would have paled dreadfully in comparison to this post at Electrolite and all of the associated comments. I sincerely hope my head will stop spinning sometime before I go to bed tonight.
Michael "Boy Wonder" Berry is set to become the second official candidate in this year's Mayoral race, and today's Chron has a profile of him. I've called Berry's candidacy a joke, and while I stand by that assessment and his odds of making a runoff, it has occurred to me that I ought to consider rooting for him. After all, any support for Berry is likely to come out of Orlando Sanchez's vote column. It's not out of the question that he could cost Sanchez a shot at the runoff, giving us a Turner/White showdown in December. I can certainly think of worse things than that.
Be that as it may, I do have to wonder why he thinks running for Mayor after one mostly ineffective term as Council member is a good idea. Why not serve the three terms (since hardly any incumbent draws opposition due to the term limits law, reelection would be essentially assured) and then take a shot at something higher? I have to think that if he does get trounced, he'll be finished. Yes, plenty of politicians have bounced back from defeats. It's just that they almost always made a serious impression in their initial losses. I just don't think he will.
But hey, it's a long way off and I could be wrong. He's got the Blakemores on board as consultants, and their track record is not one to sneeze at. Spoil away, Boy Wonder!
UPDATE: Berry makes it official.
Tiffany and I just got back from a trip to Austin where we attended a birthday party for my buddy Matt. The theme of the party was Roll Your Own Sushi. No, really - Matt bought all the ingredients at an Asian grocery store, and the guests (after suitable instruction from Matt, who has done this sort of thing before including when he and I roomed together) made their own sushi rolls. A good time, and much good food, was had by all.
That was Saturday night. This morning Tiffany and I along with Matt and his girlfriend Brandy met fellow bloggers Andrew Northrup and Claudia Navarro, whose surname I hope I'm spelling correctly, for brunch at the East Side Cafe. They're as charming in person as they are on their blogs, and I'm glad we had the chance to meet up.
Back here on this page, I've given in to the inevitable and decided that much like the federal budget deficit, my blogroll will continue to expand for the foreseeable future. Two new links in particular that I'd like to call your attention to: One is The Raitt Stuff, by my old college buddy David Raitt, which I expect will be about politics, Formula One racing, and his dogs (Dirac and Markov, from whence his blog URL comes). David recently noticed a bit of myth making in Time magazine. The other is Nail-Tinted Glasses, by my bridge buddy Danil. It's a techie blog rather than a political one, sure to be of interest to your programmer types.
We're midway through the annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and this year we have some fans who've come a long, long way to take part in the festivities:
The laugh lines around Sue-Ellen Mays' eyes deepened as she smiled and ran down a list of what's near and dear to rural Australians."Families, horses, country music and rodeos," said the rancher from New South Wales, Australia. "And the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo has it all."
Which is why Mays and seven members of her family scrimped and saved for a year -- during the worst drought to hit the Land Down Under in more than a century -- to attend the rodeo at Reliant Stadium.
They also wanted to see George Strait perform live.
When Mays and her sister, Jennifer Tuttle, learned that their favorite country music legend was opening RodeoHouston, they had to make the 31-hour, roughly 9,000-mile trip to the Bayou City.
"They have a budgie (parakeet) that says 'Hello, George Strait' and 'George, George, Texas,' " said Tuttle, 45.
Now that's devotion. Sounds like they're having themselves a heck of a good time, and they'll even get to see a bit more of the Lone Star State before they head back home.
The families will return home March 21 after traveling around Texas to visit some horse ranches. They probably will stop at some local ice cream parlors, too."I would come to America just for the ice cream," Mays said, smiling.
The families explained that while Australia has ice cream, it doesn't have anything as good as Blue Bell.
Funny you should mention Blue Bell. The bidness section of today's Chron happens to have this nice tribute to Lyle Metzdorf, the man who did all of Blue Bell's advertising for over 30 years before dying last year in a fire on his boat. Check it out.
An abortion protester drove his van into the front entrance of the main Planned Parenthood clinic near downtown Houston yesterday, causing some damage but thankfully no injuries.
Frank Lafayette Bird Jr., 61, of the 2300 block of Callie Street, was arrested at the scene.Bird, a well-known Houston abortion protester who served a one-year federal prison term for attacking a doctor outside another Houston clinic in December 1994, told a deputy constable the crash was done deliberately to "stop the killing."
No one was injured when Bird's van, bearing the name "Watkins," plowed through the clinic's glass doors about 10 minutes after 9 a.m.
Bastard.
There is one irony to this and other recent events involving clinics and protesters, which was mentioned in this earlier version of the story but not today's:
[Peter Durkin, the president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas] and others at the clinic expressed hope that the Friday attack was not the beginning of another violent siege in the wake of a Feb. 26 ruling that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used to punish or curtail protesters.Although the ruling applies to all forms of protest, the case stemmed from a dispute between the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and the National Organization for Women, along with abortion clinics in Milwaukee and Wilmington, Del., and has been hailed by Operation Rescue as a vindication of aggressive anti-abortion protest.
In the wake of the ruling, abortion rights groups promised to look at other laws, notably the recently passed USA Patriot Act, to see if anti-terrorism statutes can be used to curtail aggressive protesting.
Using the execrable Patriot Act against these people would be about the only good use I could think of for it. Take that, John Ashcroft.
Link to earlier story via Devra.
Former Attorney General Dan Morales surrendered himself to federal authorities on Friday after being indicted for multiple counts of fraud in the 1998 tobacco lawsuit settlement, and he had some harsh words to say about it.
"Every single allegation of wrongdoing included in this indictment is false," Morales said.[...]
"When I decided to take on what I think many would recognize as one of the most powerful, one of the wealthiest and one of the most politically potent industries in our country, I recognized that it would not be an easy fight," Morales said.
"More importantly, I recognized that there probably would be a price that I would have to pay politically and personally and otherwise."
Morales called the U.S. Justice Department's investigation of him a "stacked deck." He said he never had an opportunity to present his side of the story.
Formal arraignment is March 18, so the trial itself is likely months away, maybe more depending on pretrial motions and whatnot. Should be interesting, that's for sure. In the meantime, there are a couple of bits at the end of this story that are worth pondering:
Morales, a Democrat, did not seek re-election in 1998, the year the lawsuit was settled.Almost as soon as the settlement was announced, then-Gov. George W. Bush announced his opposition to $2.3 billion in fees the tobacco industry was going to have to pay to the major trial lawyer firms representing the state.
Bush called the fees excessive. Later arbitration raised the fees to $3.3 billion.
Bush political adviser Karl Rove also had been a consultant to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company shortly before the tobacco fee fight began.
That year, Bush talked Republican John Cornyn into running for attorney general. Cornyn made the attorney fees a major issue in his winning campaign.
Almost as soon as he took office, Cornyn announced an investigation of the attorney fees and Morales' side legal deal with Murr. Cornyn's investigation formed the basis for the FBI investigation of Morales and Murr.
Part of the argument over the fees had to do with who would pay them. In the end, the litigators chose the arbitration panel's $3.3 billion award, to be paid by the tobacco companies over many years. Here's an excerpt from the Chronicle story of December 12, 1998, when the panel made its ruling:
The lawyers said the three national arbitrators, who included Texas Tech Law School Dean Frank Newton, set a base fee of 10 percent of the state's $17.3 billion settlement. Then the panel increased that by a so-called "difficulty" factor to take into account Texas' "contributions as pioneers in tobacco litigation and the tremendous results we obtained."That put the award at about 19 percent of the Texas settlement. A contingency agreement the five lawyers signed with Morales when the anti-tobacco suit was filed guaranteed them only 15 percent of whatever damages the state won or negotiated.
Cigarette companies will limit their payments to lawyers representing Texas and other states involved in anti-tobacco litigation to $500 million a year. Since most states have reached settlements with the industry, it will be an undetermined number of years before the lawyers are paid in full.
The tobacco company Brown & Williamson said the awards are obscene and shouldn't be viewed as a precedent for awards to the rest of the states.
If five lawyers alone were to share the $3 .3 billion award, it would compute to about $120,000 to $150,000 an hour, based on full-time work during the nearly two years that elapsed between the time the anti-tobacco suit was filed and the settlement was announced in January.
But as many as 120 lawyers may share in the award, including other members of the five firms, a spokesman for the lawyers said. Part of the award - an amount not disclosed - will go to Ron Motley, an anti-tobacco specialist from South Carolina who participated in the Texas case.
Civil justice reform groups immediately fired broadsides at the award.
John Butler, chairman of Texans for Reasonable Legal Fees, a Houston-based group, said the size of the award "shocks common sense."
Jon Opelt, executive director of Houston Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, said the fees were "horrific and wholly unjustified."
Arbitrators also set fees for attorneys in Mississippi and Florida, the only two states to settle anti-tobacco suits before Texas. The private lawyers in Florida, which settled with cigarette makers for $13.2 billion, were awarded $3 .4 billion, or a 26 percent contingency fee. Lawyers in Mississippi, which settled for $4.1 billion, got $1.4 billion or 34 percent.
The contingency percentages for the lawyers in those two states were higher than those for the Texas team because of a greater "difficulty" factor.
Brown & Williamson was not pleased. "When we reached a settlement with each of these three states, we agreed to pay 'reasonable compensation' to the lawyers representing the states. The award of $8.1 billion defies anyone's definition of 'reasonable,' " the company said.
So to review, Bush and Cornyn criticized the attorneys' fees from the beginning, then a federal arbitration panel gave them a higher award. Tort reform groups criticized the fees. Tort reform is, of course, one of Bush's major policy initiatives. Tobacco companies criticized the fees. Karl Rove once worked as a consultant for RJ Reynolds. Oh, and the US attorney who brought the indictments was a Bush appointee. Such a tangled web.
None of that may have any bearing on the actual charges, which have to do with money Dan Morales himself handled and money that was awarded to his friend Mark Murr. The tobacco settlement kerfuffle is really nothing more than background in this case. But given the background, one can at least see where Morales is coming from when he claims the charges are politically motivated. He'll have to do better to convince a jury, but he's at least got a place to start.
With a big assist from Michael Croft, we installed a wireless router today. Now both machines can connect to the Net. Shweet!
Of course, the process wasn't without a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth. The original PC is a 200 MHz Compaq Presario that Tiffany bought in 1997. We finally bought a nice new Dell recently, and it's been sitting upstairs and unconnected until today. Since the cable modem comes in on the ground floor, into the room where the old PC is, the original idea was to connect the old PC to the wireless router via the Ethernet card that came with the cable modem. The upstairs PC would get a wireless adapter installed to talk to the router.
The problem was that the Ethernet card had never actually worked in the old computer. The tech who installed the cable modem could never get Windows 95 to recognize the device. I wound up upgrading the machine to Win98 so I could connect the cable modem to the USB port. But hey, we still had the Ethernet card, so we figured we'd give it a shot.
Bad move. Win98 eventually recognized the device, but we could never get the drivers to bind to it. After several futile hours, we gave up, took a break for dinner (which Tiffany made as thanks for the help), bought a USB adapter, and voila! There was much rejoicing.
Next on our list is to install the print server software that came with the router so we can print to the nice HP LaserJet from the upstairs machine. Life is beautiful all the time.
A little more than two weeks after the Houston Press gave an overview on fat times in the local political consulting market, the Chron follows suit with a Who's Who of the men and women behind the candidates. This sort of thing is usually on the dry side, but they did their best to bring us some Drama and Conflict:
At times, they work for candidates and issues who are in sync with their own political leanings.Often, however, it's just a job -- though one that can affect which candidates get into office, and provide hints about how they'll behave if they get there.
You're saying that money trumps ideology? Whoo, let me catch my breath here.
Anyway, this story is a bit more fleshed out than the earlier Press piece, so if you're into that sort of thing you should check it out.
So the other day I was channel surfing, and an ad played for Time Warner's high-speed Roadrunner cable modem service. The ad showed a bride who was crying her eyes out because the DJ had just called and said he couldn't make it to the reception, so there would be no music at her wedding. No problem! her dashing groom says. Let's fire up the web browser download what we want! We'll burn it to CD and have all the music we need!
Isn't Time Warner a part of the RIAA? Weren't they plaintiffs in a lawsuit over illegal music downloading? Is it just me, or are they sending out some mixed signals here? I'm just asking.
First Michael Morales, brother of former Attorney General Dan Morales, pleads guilty to a charge of attempting to extort money from the Tony Sanchez gubernatorial campaign. Now Dan Morales is in his own legal trouble, as a federal grand jury has indicted him for fraud involving the $17.3 billion tobacco lawsuit settlement from 1998.
Morales was charged with 12 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy, filing a false tax return and making a false statement on a loan application. The charges carry maximum penalties totaling 83 years in prison and $3.6 million in fines, if he is convicted.Houston lawyer Marc Murr was charged with mail fraud and conspiracy and faces up to 10 years in prison and $500,000 in fines if found guilty.
The charges stem from Morales' unsuccessful attempt to obtain as much as $520 million in legal fees for Murr in the tobacco case, litigation in which other lawyers said Murr did little, if any, work.
There'd been controversy over the legal fees that were awarded after the tobacco case was settled, but it always had the smell of politics to me. Morales better hope he can make the argument that that's still the case here, because these chargees are not only serious, they're also just plain tawdry. If he is guilty, he really ought to be ashamed of himself.
Whatever happens from here on out, I think we can all agree that it's just as well Dan Morales was not the Democratic candidate for Governor last year. I'm pretty sure he won't be good buddies with Rick Perry for much longer, too.
The University of Texas' computer system was hacked two weeks ago, with the thief or thieves making off with the names and Social Security numbers of 59,000 current and former students.
"We flat out messed up on this one," [university president for information technology Dan] Updegrove said. "Shame on us for leaving the door open, and shame on them for exploiting it. Our Number 1 goal is to get those data back before they get misused."
Dude, that data's been scattered to the four winds. Catching the thieves is no assurance that you've put it back into a box. Assume it's now part of the public domain and do what you can to mitigate.
The incident comes at a time of growing concern about identity theft on college campuses. Many universities, including UT, use Social Security numbers as student identifiers, and the numbers are therefore found in many records.
We used a different number as our student ID for my first two years at Trinity, then they switched to using SSNs. It wasn't such a big deal in the 80s. I sure hope they're up to date on their database security now. There's now a bill in the House that would require state colleges to phase out the use of SSNs as identifiers, but private schools would not be affected by it.
Now that UT has fessed up to this debacle, there's fear that the publicity will encourage more hackers to strike. Maybe, but surely any rational thief must know that UT's security will be at a pinnacle right now. Better to wait until they've moved on to the next crisis.
Authorities said there was no evidence that the stolen information had been used to set up false identities or bogus financial accounts. The data can be used to build a profile to open credit card accounts and get access to money and documents in other ways, say security experts.The U.S. Secret Service said victims should wait before canceling credit cards or closing bank accounts. Instead, they should contact the nation's three major credit bureaus to see if their personal information was used recently for unauthorized transactions, the agency said.
When such personal information is used fraudulently, victims should notify police and their banks and creditors, the Texas Department of Public Safety said.
If you're a UT alum or faculty member, you can find out more about who was affected here.
I suppose I should be grateful that articles like this even get written. I mean, San Antonio is a military town in the heart of Bush country, so when one of their writers goes off on a screed about how incredibly pro-war the media is, it stands out.
And writer Rod Davis does an excellent job for the most part of making the salient points: the media has consistently described war as inevitable (and in some cases has been outright cheerleading for an invasion), dissenters have been painted as ignorant at best and dangerous kooks at worst, and the utter inability and/or unwillingness of the media to find out and report facts that aren't fed to them by the government.
It's ironic, therefore, that he himself commits the same sin of ignorance that he justly accuses the rest of the media of committing:
Where, then, are the boot camps for covering the voices of dissent? Where are the newsroom reporters assigned the antiwar, not the military beat? Where is the consistent Page-One treatment and discussion of the not just the growth of the antiwar movement — which is in the millions and includes people of all class levels, races and creeds — but the detailed rationale behind it?Where are the interviews with Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and other strong critiques of the national security state, and not just the nominal "now is not the time" homilies from the likes of former offiicials such as Madeleine Albright, Gen. Schwarztkopf, or President Clinton?
For all his accuracy in identifying the sins of his media siblings, Davis can't name any dissenters other than Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, two people who speak from one fairly narrow perspective. This in itself is a great disservice to the antiwar movement because there's so much more to it than just a couple of oldtime lefties and the not-terribly-popular views they represent.
And that's the point, isn't it? The voices against the war and Team Bush's imperialism are many and varied. The libertarian Cato Institute (here and here, for example). Justin Raimondo. Liberal mainstreamers like Joe Conanson and Molly Ivins. Conservative mainstreamers like James Pinkerton. Conservative outliers like Lew Rockwell and Pat Buchanan. Pope John Paul II and many, many, many mainstream Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders and congregations. And even a bunch of ordinary folks.
In a way, the fact that Rod Davis didn't take the time to do a quick Google search before he wrote his otherwise worthy rant illustrates his point even better than he could. It's still a shame that he fell down so close to the finish line like he did.
Link to Rod Davis' article via Cursor.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn says that revenue projections are worse than she originally thought.
With layoffs of state employees and potential cuts in services to thousands of Texans already looming, Strayhorn announced that collections of state sales taxes -- state government's primary revenue source -- continued a steady decline in February.Collections for the month were down 4.7 percent, or $59.4 million, compared to February 2002, she reported. Year-to-date totals since the Sept. 1 start of fiscal year 2003 were down by 2.5 percent, or $184.3 million.
"I believe we may have a historic unfortunate first in Texas. If collections don't improve quickly we are going to have losses in sales tax revenues for two consecutive years for the first time in our state's history," Strayhorn said.
The comptroller said that 2002 was only the second year in Texas history that the state experienced a reduction in sales tax revenue. The first was 1983.
Remember, Strayhorn insisted for months that state revenue would grow enough to result in a budget shortfall of only $5.1 billion, then after the election she changed her tune and admitted that the deficit would really be $9.9 billion. Now we see that revenues are actually shrinking and have been shrinking for over a year. At what point will the powers that be admit that maybe we can't fix things by only considering spending?
Strayhorn, who has made some cost-savings recommendations to the Legislature, has opposed higher taxes and continued with that message on Wednesday."Like countless hard-working Texas families, we may be forced to tighten our belts another notch," she said.
Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt said the governor's office was informed of Strayhorn's announcement. But she said she didn't know if the comptroller was going to lower her revenue projections, which determine how big a budget lawmakers can write without increasing taxes.
"The governor still believes in tough economic times it is not the time to raise the cost of government," Walt said.
She said the comptroller's warning reinforces even more the need to "get spending under control."
Apparently, the answer is "never". If you'll pardon me for a moment, I'm going to go find a wall to bang my head on.
"There are three things the average man thinks he can do better than anyone else: Build a fire, run a hotel, and manage a baseball team." -- Rocky Bridges, quoted in Why Time Begins on Opening Day
Thomas Boswell once wrote that there are four kinds of baseball managers: Little Napoleons, Tall Tacticians, Peerless Leaders, and Uncle Robbies. Each was named for its prototype: John McGraw, Connie Mack, Frank Chance, and Wilbert Robinson, and through the years they have persisted in the major leagues. Modern examples of the breeds are Larry Bowa, Tony LaRussa, Joe Torre, and Don Zimmer, respectively.
I was pondering what mold I fit as I drove home today, but I think Boswell's spectrum is a bit lacking for Little League coaches. I see myself as more of a teacher than tactician, and I think with 9 and 10 year olds, the best goal to set is one of improvement rather than winning. Obviously, one hopes accomplishing the former will lead to the latter, but even if it doesn't there's still plenty of success to be had.
So far, our practices have been based on the drills that I did for many summers as a kid, when I attended the Hall of Fame Warrior Baseball Camp for four weeks each year. It was a day-only camp, from Monday through Friday. We'd emphasize a different aspect of the game each day, then play a game in the morning, break for lunch and a World Series or All-Star Game highlight film, then play another game in the afternoon. As a baseball-obsessed kid, I'm hard pressed to think of anything better than that.
(One side effect of attending this camp every year was a great familiarity with certain highlight films. I can still recite bits of Curt Gowdy's or Joe Garagiola's narration from some of the films, such as this bit about Tony Perez from the 1975 World Series - "The Series hasn't been much fun for Perez so far; he's fifteen-for-oh. But with one swing of the bat, it's GOODBYE slump, GOODBYE baseball, and GOODBYE Red Sox lead." For some odd reason, this ability always impressed my fellow campers much more than it ever did the ladies. But I digress.)
The camp was run by three men: Bert Levinson (a middle school principal and classic Little Napoleon), Larry Anderson (definitely an Uncle Robbie), and Jack Tracy, a Peerless Leader whose claim to fame was being on the spring training roster of the 1969 Mets. He never made it to The Show, but in his honor we always cheered for the Mets when they showed the '69 World Series film.
It has not escaped my notice that the lessons these guys taught me over and over again in the 1970s influence everything I've done with the team so far and likely everything I will do in the coming weeks. I can't think of a better tribute to give to a teacher, and I hope that when the season is over a little bit of them has been passed on to my kids.
To answer the question I posed in the title, I can see aspects of all four archetypes in me. What comes through depends on the day, my mood, and how the kids are behaving. I suspect I'll be somewhere between a Peerless Leader and an Uncle Robbie for the most part. One of my assistant coaches is more the Tall Tactician type, with a smidgeon of Little Napoleon thrown in - he's definitely going to be the enforcer of discipline. I suppose this collection of personalities could be confusing to the kids, but so far at least they seem to be paying attention to me.
Next practice is Saturday. I sure hope it dries out a bit before then.
Here's an extended commercial for using Mozilla, both as a blogging tool and as your everyday web browser. I use Mozilla at home and generally love it, mostly for the ability to kill unwanted popup windows. There are some links that I refuse to follow when I'm at work using IE because of the barrage of popups that come with them. Frankly, if this were the only advantage to using Mozilla, I'd consider it enough.
Mozilla's tabs are another feature that I love and use heavily. A big win for me with tabs was after I'd imported all of my old Blogspot archives into my new site and had to edit them to add categories and fix backlinks. In the Movable Type window to edit entries, you can't conveniently save changes and then get back to the original window. With Mozilla, I'd choose the Open In New Tab option when clicking on an entry to edit. I'd make my changes, hit Save, and close the tab when done, thus leaving me in the original Edit Entries window, which is where I wanted to be. Similarly, when I come across a link that I might want to blog about later, I just open it in a new tab and it's there for me later without cluttering up my Windows taskbar.
I have two complaints about Mozilla, neither of which is that bothersome. One is that the Movable Type buttons to generate bold/italic/underline/hyperlink tags don't show up for me. I never use those buttons anyway, so this is no loss for me but it might be for you. My other complaint is that on the rare occasion when I have to use ctrl-alt-del to kill a Mozilla session, it kills all of the sessions I have open (I still open multiple Mozilla windows, despite using tabs).
Like I said, neither objection comes close to negating the joys of no popups. I haven't tried to block ad images yet, but that's just laziness on my part. The author describes a bunch of other whizzy features that will surely excite some of you. Check it out, and download Mozilla today.
Thanks to Larry for the link.
As long as we're thinking outside the box today, I'll point you to Centerpoint's take on how to bloodlessly resolve the Iraq situation. Interesting reading. And I plan to hold Ted to his promise of future analysis.
On a different note, Centerpoint also has a way to reduce the budget deficit. That would all be funnier if it weren't for the fact that the duct tape industry is already a corporate sponsor of President Bush.
Eric McErlain points me to this piece by Eugene Volokh about how to reform college athletics. It's a pretty radical idea, suggesting that for most college athletes, the education they're there to get is in athletics, so why not acknowledge that and act accordingly?
Why should we be demanding that athletes who are getting an education in athletics pass muster under academic standards, or for that matter engage in academics at all?Say that tomorrow the system of legal education magically changed, so that the overwhelming majority of top law schools -- the feeder institutions for law firms -- required all their students to do well in athletics: run a mile in no less than 8 minutes, bench-press at least X pounds, and so on. We'd think that, first, this system isn't very rational, because it disqualifies some people who'd be fine lawyers, and imposes serious burdens and distractions on others; and, second, it's unfair to the law students -- if you have a first-class legal mind, but fifth-class athletic skills, why should you have to do what you can't do well, and what you don't like trying to do well?
The same, I think, applies to college athletics (with some distinctions that I'll mention shortly). College athletics is an educational program -- it teaches athletes to be better athletes. An athletic department at, say, the University of Oklahoma (I'm picking a school arbitrarily here) probably provides a very good education in some athletic subjects. But what if some potential students in that school are (1) dumb as posts, or are (2) not at all interested in academics? Why should they be effectively denied an opportunity to study the subject of their choice (football) at this school because they're not good at other subjects (math, English, etc.), any more than a law student should be denied an opportunity to study the subject of his choice (law) because he's not good at other subjects (football)?
The solution, then, is simple: Each university may have a School of Athletics that can select students based solely on athletic skills, and may demand only (or overwhelmingly) athletic studies and achievement from them, just as a conservatory may select students based solely on musical skills, and may demand only (or overwhelmingly) musical studies and achievement from them. (I imagine that many conservatories also have serious academic components, but we wouldn't think there's anything outrageous if they let in brilliant musicians with lousy SATs and high school grades, or even if they decided that there'd be no academic criteria for continuing one's musical education, no matter how awful one is at other subjects.)
The comparison to a conservatory is an interesting one. One of the arguments that has been used in favor of Division I athletics at Rice University is the presence of the Shepherd School of Music. Opponents of athletics complain that most athletes don't meet Rice's stringent entry requirements, and with a small enrollment that means they're taking slots that should have gone to someone who does meet those requirements. Supporters point out that the same thing can be said for music students - they have a different standard for admission that's not as high as the one regular students face. If you see athletes as being in a similar class as the music students, then this sort of anti-athletics argument is diminished.
I find Volokh's logic to be pretty compelling, and I only have one fairly minor objection. Regarding his suggestion about letting athletes get their academic or vocational education elsewhere, I think that might turn out to be an unexpected cost for some schools. After all, the marginal cost to UCLA of letting a few football players sit in on one their own classes is pretty minimal, but if they have to pay tuition for those same athletes to attend a vocational school, that's real money out the door for them. For schools that are in budgetary distress, that could be a killer.
(On the other hand, schools already invest a lot of money in tutors and other supplemental help for their scholarship athletes to ensure that they stay academically eligible. The theoretical cost of sending a few players to the local ITT Tech is likely to be more than offset by the real savings of slashing some or all of these support programs. Someone will have to run numbers on this.)
There are other details to consider, such as continuing to enforce "scholarship" limits so we don't return to the bad old days of large schools hoarding talent, but nothing that I can think of that can't be made to work within this framework. Of course, Volokh's suggestion will be taken up for consideration shortly after Jerry Falwell moves to Vermont and marries George Will, but that shouldn't stop us from talking about it.
We managed to have a fairly short practice tonight in spite of the wet field. My goal for the evening was to give everyone a turn on the pitcher's mound to see what they all had. League rules mandate how much each kid can pitch, so teams need a minimum of four hurlers. Ideally, I'd like to have more - after all, as Jack reminds me, you can never have too much pitching.
After working everyone through a couple of turns on the mound, there's two kids who I'm sure will be pitching, and another four or five who will have a shot at it. (There were at least two others who weren't there tonight as well.) I'm going to continue giving everyone some time on the mound if possible, because it's a pretty good way to see who has good throwing mechanics and who needs work. I'm hoping that by forcing some of them to think about what they're doing and to do it in a specific way, I'll help them improve how they throw in all contexts.
I do have to be a little more careful about how I approach the issue of who will and will not actually pitch during a game. After one of the kids who I know will pitch did his second workout, I said out loud that he would be on the staff. Tiffany mentioned to me afterwards that some of the parents on the sidelines got a bit worked up by that. I don't think everyone else realized how many kids would wind up on the mound, and a couple of the kids took my words to mean that they had been ruled out. I did talk about the need for numbers, though, so I don't think this will bite me. When I send out my next email, I'll reinforce that.
Next practice will be Saturday. I'm hoping the weather will finally cooperate so we can do some more infield/outfield drills and give everyone some time at bat as well.
It's interesting to see this article about bills in the Texas Senate to replace the current system of electing statewide judges with appointments and retention elections.
Currently, all Texas judges are elected. Even if appointed by the governor to fill a vacancy, a judge eventually must run in an election to keep the post.Under Senate Bill 794, the governor's nominations would go to the Texas Senate for approval or rejection.
After an initial term an appointed judge would face a "retention election," in which voters could opt to keep the judge or toss him or her out of office based on performance. There would be no candidate running against the judge in that election.
"The most formidable opponent can be yourself," said Rep. Elizabeth Jones, R-San Antonio, who is sponsoring House Bill 1511 in the Texas House.
I support this effort, though I'd like to see more than one retention election per judge. There's an awful lot of money that goes into our judicial elections, and money from special interest groups have had a big effect on judicial races. You can never remove the influence of money on judicial selections, but I do think this plan would at least dilute it somewhat.
You may wonder why, in a state that has an all-Republican government, I wouldn't be more wary about letting the Governor pick judges for the Senate to approve. Well, I figure we've already elected Sharon Keller, so how much worse could this system be?
Despite the bipartisan support that this bill has, I give it at best a 50-50 chance of passing since both state political parties oppose it, presumably because this would decrease their own influence. But I'll allow myself to be pleasantly surprised.
The judge who gave a directed verdict of "not guilty" to Chief C.O. "BAMF" Bradford in his perjury trial has now expunged the arrest from his permanent record.
State District Judge Brian Rains, the judge who called off the chief's trial on Jan. 23, granted Bradford's request to have his record expunged, which means that chief can legally deny the matter except when testifying in a court. In that case, he would be obligated only to say that the case had been expunged.
Emphasis mine. Boy howdy, wouldn't that be the king of all ironies?
Now if only we could expunge everyone else's arrest record in this incident that easily...
One of the companies that we support is transitioning its IT functions to an outsourcing firm. Included in their total package is support for an old, cranky, inscrutable, and ridiculously expensive fax server package. No one in their right minds uses this thing, so the new guys have contacted us to get whatever information we have on it as part of their due diligence, since they have zero experience in supporting it. As a result, I have spent the better part of my day today copying CDs and printed documentation to mail to them.
[voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android]
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they've got me making copies. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't.
[/voice]
Hmm. Maybe there's a little of Rob Schneider's Office Guy in there, too. That's a scary thought.
Ah, well. It'll be worth it when we can finally and forever stop supporting this godforsaken fax software. If the HS&E; people will let me get away with it, I want to ritually burn all of the manuals in the parking lot once I've officially turned everything over. Ah, the sweet smell of closure.
NZ Bear has updated his Blogging Ecosystem, and now it looks a lot more representative. Now Atrios and TAPPED are in the Top 10, with Josh Marshall, Calpundit, MaxSpeak, and Daily Kos in the Top 15. I qualify as a Flappy Bird at #117. You can still go and add your blog if you haven't yet.
Kudos to Bear for bringing this back. Let's hope he can keep running regular updates. This is more useful for primary-political blogs than Technorati or Myelin are.
Like Max, I noticed that NZ Bear's latest version of the Blogging Ecosystem is, um, a tad bit lacking. NZ says the following in Max's comments:
Sorry you aren't on the list, but by all means, go ahead and add yourself (there's a link on the right sidebar). And as to why you aren't on there, here's a quote from my announcement post:"As an homage to the original Ecosystem, I took the list of weblogs from Instapundit and VodkaPundit's blogrolls --- which was how the original was created. This time around I also added in Bill Quick's list, as he's got a darned comprehensive one himself. This naturally gives the TTLB Ecosystem a very political-blog slant in general, and warblogger slant in particular. Depending on how popular the new version becomes, we may see it branch out into the wider Blogosphere, or perhaps it will remain focused on the political zone. Either is fine by me..."
Fair enough. I've added my weblog to the Ecosystem, and you should add yours, too. Let's make this more than just the Warbloggers' Greatest Hits. I'll check back in a few days and see what it looks like when NZB updates his list.
Via Christine Quinones, I learn of the sad news that folk singer Tom Glazer died last week at the age of 88. Who was Tom Glazer, you ask? Why, the writer of one of the best songs ever, On Top of Spaghetti, that's who. Sing it now with me:
On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.It rolled off the table,
And on to the floor,
And then my poor meatball,
Rolled out of the door.It rolled in the garden,
And under a bush,
And then my poor meatball,
Was nothing but mush.The mush was as tasty
As tasty could be,
And then the next summer,
It grew into a tree.The tree was all covered,
All covered with moss,
And on it grew meatballs,
And tomato sauce.So if you eat spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
Hold on to your meatball,
Whenever you sneeze.
sniff...brings a tear to my eyes, it does.
Tom Glazer occasionally speculated about meeting St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and being asked what he accomplished in music. Mr. Glazer mumbles that he wrote "On Top of Spaghetti.""Sorry, buster, you can't enter," the imagined St. Peter replies.
I'm sorry, but any version of Heaven that I can imagine has plenty of room for people like him. Rest in peace, Tom Glazer.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have named San Antonio as America's Fattest City:
In 2001, the most recent year for which national data on obesity are available, 31.1 percent of adults in San Antonio were considered obese -- the highest rate in the nation. Gary, Ind., had the second-highest obesity rate -- 28.8 percent.San Antonio's ranking comes as the numbers of Americans who are overweight and obese are hitting all-time highs. In 2001, 21 percent of U.S. adults were obese and 37.2 percent were overweight, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[...]
In addition to having the highest rate of obesity, San Antonio also had a high rate of people who are overweight -- 65 percent of the city's adults were considered overweight in 2001, second only to Charleston, W.Va., where 67.8 percent of adults were overweight, according to the new numbers.
This of course is in direct contradiction to the conclusions of the noted research journal Men's Fitness, which ranked Houston as the fattest. Let's do hope this little disagreement doesn't degenerate into name calling or hair pulling.
It would have been nice if I could have found the CDC's full list of cities from this study, which is apparently on their web site, but I couldn't. Here's what they do have on obesity and overweight - maybe it's just buried in there and I don't have enough search fu to find it.
February was a slower month than the previous two, but it still wound up as my fourth-best ever, with slightly over 5500 visits.
February 8 marked one year since I installed a hit counter. I recorded about 54,000 visits in that year, and will pass 60,000 sometime in the second week of March.
Top referrers and search terms are under the More link for those who may be interested.
Aggregators, collections, indices, etc
======================================
612: http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/
579: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator
146: http://www.technorati.com/
137: http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/
117: http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/
84: http://www.weblogs.com/
Weblog referrers
================
360: TAPPED
298: Calpundit
244: Daily Kos
217: Atrios
173: Amish Tech Support
100: The Sideshow
89: Ted Barlow
80: Coffee Corner
75: Tom Spencer
69: Owen Curreges
60: MyDD
58: Karin Kross
53: Matthew Yglesias
51: Electrolite
48: Garden Spot
45: Publius
Top search terms
================
#reqs: search term
-----: -----------
150: alex michel
89: ron kirk
87: madelyne toogood
83: prime number algorithm
78: women of enron
64: dr marnie rose
62: jennifer levin
56: marnie rose
50: mastercard moments
36: alex michel amanda
35: pro war cartoons
31: mamie peanut johnson
31: pro war
29: wicked weasel
28: frodo bush
26: women of enron photos
25: talk like a pirate day
21: off the kuff
19: liebeck v mcdonald's
17: girls with glasses
Last night we had a few friends over for a chocolate and wine tasing party. It went very well and a good time was had by all. We had been invited to a chocolate-tasting party at someone else's house some months ago, and this little soiree was the result of Tiffany deciding that she really liked the idea and wanted to do one herself. Among other things, this allowed her to try out some chocolate recipes, which you can see here. The editorial comments in the recipes are mine - these things happen when you ask me to transcribe.
The list of Texas political bloggers continues to grow, as some new (to me) folks have announced themselves in the comments to that post and as I come across them from other sources. Just today, I found StoutDem via the Talking Dog. The TD has been meticulously giving capsule summaries and dog-breed designations to each blogger on his enormous blogroll (I'm a boxer, in case you're curious), a project which has been useful and illuminating. Go check it out when you get a moment.
Now that's just sweet: College hoops coaches across the country wore bow ties yesterday to honor the man who's coached more games than anyone else:
Jim Phelan remembers the last time Mount St. Mary's went looking for a new basketball coach. That was back in 1954.Phelan was 25 and working as an assistant coach at La Salle University. His boss offered to recommend him for the job.
He told Phelan: "You'll love it. You'll win a lot of games, you'll stay forever, and no one will ever hear of you."
Forty-nine years later, everyone's hearing of Jim Phelan.
The bow tie-wearing Phelan will coach his final game at The Mount on Saturday.
Coaches across the country will wear bow ties on the court Saturday to honor the man who's coached more college basketball games than anyone else in the history of the sport.
Coaches at Texas, Cincinnati, South Florida, Saint Joseph's, Rider, San Diego, Tennessee, Rice, Oklahoma and Kansas already have committed to wearing bow ties for their Saturday games.
Phelan's career record going into his last game was 829-524. Not too shabby.
It took an op-ed piece written by a couple of defense attorneys, but Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has finally commented on the perjury trial of Chief C.O. "BAMF" Bradford with a letter to the editor in today's Chron. I'm including it in full below to More link for my own ease of retrieval later. I have no desire to rebut any point the DA makes, but I will say this: It sure took him long enough to say something about this case, and it's more than a bit craven in my book to do so in a way that doesn't allow any questions to be asked of him. Maybe if he'd spoken to reporters around the time of the case (I recall the news stories saying he was "unavailable" when the verdict came in), he wouldn't have smartass defense attorneys taking such potshots at him in print in the first place.
On the Monday Outlook page ("What Bradford, ham sandwich have in common"), Troy J. Wilson and John C. Brittain suggest that my office prosecuted Houston Police Chief Clarence Bradford in bad faith. While I welcome constructive criticism and debate regarding the decisions that I make, it is unfortunate for the readers of the Chronicle that these two experienced lawyers apparently overlooked some issues of law and fact before submitting their article for publication.
For example, understanding the law of perjury is fundamental to understanding the decision to present this case to a grand jury. In their article, however, Wilson and Brittain chose to ignore the Texas Penal Code's definition of perjury and quoted from a legal dictionary. While I might use a dictionary to ensure that the word is spelled right, I certainly would not use it to explain the unique parameters of Texas law.
They also cite the comments of one of Bradford's lawyers as "well-established law." Fortunately for us, the laws of this state are not written by criminal defense attorneys. Unlike Wilson and Brittain, I'll continue to rely upon the statutes drafted by the Legislature, and the interpretations of those statutes by our appellate jurists.
The worst aspect of their argument is their implication that my office manipulated a grand jury into indicting Bradford without adequate evidence. They repeat the canard that it is "well known in legal circles that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."
This aspersion, often repeated by criminal defense attorneys to deflect blame from their clients, is false and insulting to the grand jurors who serve this county with little pay and much personal sacrifice. These true public servants work very hard to satisfy the requirements of the Texas Constitution that, unless an indictment is waived by the defendant, all felony accusations must be presented to grand juries before the state can proceed with a prosecution.
Grand jurors do not determine the guilt or innocence of the accused but whether there is probable cause for an indictment in any particular case. Most cases presented by prosecutors are "true billed," but that shows that the system works: Police don't arrest people on mere suspicion, and prosecutors screening the reports of those arrests do not accept charges that want for evidence.
Whoever said that my office could get a grand jury to indict without evidence has never been a grand juror or known one. Don't just take it from me: Talk to the judges who empanel grand juries. They will tell you that those folks who serve this community are fair-minded, independent people who are as much a cross section of society as petit jurors.
I acknowledge that Bradford has had a distinguished career, but popularity and station in life are not listed anywhere as reasons to except persons from being held accountable for their actions. The grand jury heard from all of the witnesses with relevant information. The chief and his legal counsel were provided the opportunity to have other witnesses testify. Once all of the information was before them, the grand jury independently returned an indictment.
Once the indictment was returned, the people had the right to learn the facts giving rise to the charge. Trials do that. Trials require admissible evidence in public courtrooms rather than spin in the media.
It may not be widely known, but Chief Bradford is a lawyer. I know that he knows that the misrepresentations made by the [opinion essay's] authors are not the law and that criticism of the grand jury system is unfounded. But it is like my father used to say, "No matter what the issue, you are always going to find people on your side that you wish were not."
Charles A. "Chuck" Rosenthal,
Harris County district attorney
If you're looking for evidence that the national Democrats are done playing along with the President, look no further than this pictoral guide to promises President Bush has made and the subsequent actions he took. It's pretty compelling stuff.
Thanks to Les Dabney for sending this to me.
I've got a post giving an overview of the likely candidates in this year's Mayoral election over at the Political State Report. I'd love to get any feedback you may have on this in the comments.