I still get the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to my door, meaning that when summer arrives and Chron sports columnist Bruce Jenkins turns his attention to baseball, I find myself mourning the loss of FireJoeMorgan.com all over again.
First, a few nice words about Jenkins. He writes decently about the NBA, very well about tennis, passably about soccer and magnificently about the Mavericks surf contest. That’s quite a bit of subject matter. And considering that the Chron already has John Shea and Henry Schulman covering MLB in the Sporting Green, there’s absolutely no reason Jenkins should ever be called upon to write a single word about a sport he deeply misunderstands.
Jenkins was regularly pilloried by the FJM boys for a few typical Morganesque qualities — he hates baseball statistics that are more useful than batting average, lamely mocking anybody who seeks a better understanding of the game through more rigorous statistical analysis as a basement-dwelling nerd, and he generally just writes stupid stuff all the time.
Case in point, in today’s 3-Dot Lounge column, following a dumb appraisal of Stephen Strasburg’s arm injury (‘Limiting young pitchers’ workloads turns them into pussies because Tom Seaver!’) he writes this:
Now that the Phillies have added Roy Oswalt and fabulous outfield prospect Domonic Brown, they could win the NL East in a runaway — and the Giants need that to happen. You don’t want Philadelphia anywhere near the wild-card race.
I don’t want to go overboard and say that this is the most idiotic thing anybody has ever said about anything ever, but it is. The 59-45 Giants, with a .567 winning percentage as of today, lead the Phillies (56-47, .544) by 2 1/2 games in the wild-card race. Currently sitting above the Phils in the NL East standings is Atlanta (59-43, .578).
So Jenkins is basically saying that it would be GOOD for the Giants if a team they currently lead in the race to the playoffs started winning a lot more games, thus relegating another team that actually has a better record than the Giants from division leadership to the wild-card chase, which would of course decrease the Giants’ chances of making the playoffs.
Seriously, I see no other way to interpret what Jenkins has written here. He offers no explanation for how his preferred scenario for the rest of the season would actually help the Giants other than to simply state ‘the Giants need that to happen’.
Can’t link to the Jenkins column because it’s ‘exclusive to the print edition’ — but if anybody can tell me what the hell he’s getting at here, I’ll be as appreciative as Rich Lowry getting a free replacement graphic for the shitty mess of pixelated blah currently illustrating The Corner.
NOTE: The Phillies do face the Braves six more times this year, so while he doesn’t say it, maybe Jenkins is thinking the improved Phils will beat up on Atlanta in those games, thus helping San Francisco. But the Giants also have to play this new juggernaut Phillies team for a three-game set down the stretch as well, so even crediting Jenkins for this logic seems questionable (and I would bet a jillion dollars he never even considered the remaining schedule before blurting out the above brain fart).
UPDATE: It occurs to me that Bruce Jenkins is very likely to write about baseball again, so it would be helpful to explain to him why he is so stupid. I’ll try to put it as simply as possible:
Baseball is a sport in which two ‘teams’ try to score ‘runs’ at the expense of the other over the course of a ‘game’, at the end of which the team with the greater amount of runs is declared the ‘winner’.
Major League Baseball, the highest level at which this sport is played, pits 30 such teams against each other over a ‘season’, with each team playing 162 total games against some portion of the other 29 teams in MLB. This is called the ‘regular season’ because it is followed by an extra season — called ‘the playoffs’ — in which only the eight teams who had the most wins in the regular season are allowed to play. The winner of the playoffs is crowned the winner of that particular season of baseball, which is why everybody hates the Yankees.
Now each individual team can only control the outcome of the games in which they actually play — and even then, there is a lot of luck involved. Thus a team like the Giants can work positively towards defeating a team like the Phillies in a regular season game, thus improving the Giants’ chances of getting to play in the extra season and decreasing the Phillies’ chances of same — but only when the Giants are actually playing the Phillies. When the Phillies are playing, say the Braves, the Giants can only hope for a particular outcome of that game, but cannot do anything to effect it.
And it is not stupid for the Giants to hope for certain outcomes for games involving the Phillies, Braves, etc. even though they can only directly control a handful of them. In fact, it would be logical for the Giants to hope that they, the Giants, win all of their games while the other 29 teams* win half of theirs and lose the other half. This would be the optimal result for the Giants because it offers the maximum assurance that they will make it to the playoffs, which is their overarching goal in any given baseball season.
We can see how hoping for certain results that you cannot control for can be a smart thing to do, with the following example:
1. I value my life and want to continue living it.
2. A giant asteroid crashing into the Earth would almost certainly kill me, everybody I know and the vast majority of all human beings.
3. Humanity would not currently be able to do much of anything about
it if a giant asteroid happened to crash into the Earth.
4. Therefore, I hope a giant asteroid DOES NOT crash into the Earth.
5. Therefore, I am a smart person, because I smartly hope for outcomes that will positively reinforce the first premise listed here, my desire to continue living my life.
6. Conversely, I would be a dumb person if I were to hope for outcomes that threatened my life, given my assertion that I want to keep living it.
Similarly, it would be very, very dumb for the Giants to actively want one of the teams that they are competing with for one of the very few spots in the playoffs to actually become better and win more games. Because that would decrease the Giants’ chances of making the playoffs. Which is the whole fucking point of baseball, you dumbass.
Please make a note of it.
*I can say this because of inter-league play, though obviously the Giants will be more concerned about the performance of their National League competition than the teams in the American League.
July 31, 2010 05:44 PM
We're approaching the dog days of summer in the northern hemisphere, and tech news shows no signs of cooling down.
Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are "fair use": Every three years, the Library of Congress approves a handful of exemptions to the DMCA, allowing consumers to break or bypass DRM in particular instances. On the list this time: jailbreaking an iPhone, ripping clips from a DVD, and investigating SecuROM on computer games.
Overkill as art: Ars reviews the Cyborg R.A.T. 7: It's not easy to justify a $100 price tag for a gaming mouse, but the R.A.T. 7 is adjustable in both size and shape, features multiple levels of DPI control, and offers more options than anything else on the market.
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July 31, 2010 05:00 PM
DOWNLOADS: (107) PLAYS: (875) As Karoli and I already posted, Rep. Anthony Weiner ripped into the Republicans for blocking the 9-11 Responders Bill. What neither of us had earlier was Rep. Peter King's hackery on the House floor that set him off. Since Countdown covered it, I thought I'd share it here. TPM also caught their exchange on Fox News the day after the dust up on the House floor where Anthony Weiner ripped into Pete King again. Peter King And Anthony Weiner Shout Their Way Through A Fox News Interview (VIDEO): Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) went on an apoplectic rant on the House floor last night, and apparently he hasn't cooled off much since then. Earlier this morning, Weiner and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) shouted and finger-pointed their way through a Fox News interview over a bill that would provide health care to rescue workers effected by the dust from the World Trade Center, which failed in the House last night. King accused the Democrats of orchestrating a "cruel hoax" with the bill, while Weiner called it "outrageous" that Republicans would vote against it. Weiner was furious last night that most of the "cowardly" Republicans voted against the bill and then blamed it on "procedure." Exclaimed Weiner: "You vote yes if you believe yes! You vote in favor of something if you believe it's the right thing! If you believe it's the wrong thing, you vote no!" On America's Newsroom today, King, who is the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, said that "the bottom line is the Democrats control the House, and they pulled a procedural gimmick starting ten days ago, and they lost the nerve to bring it to the floor on a real vote." He also called the whole situation a "cruel hoax," and accused the Democrats of "moral cowardice." "They control the House," said King. "They could have passed this." Weiner shot back: "You know for all the whining about the process, we had an up-or-down vote. Do you know what percentage of Republicans voted for it? Seven percent." Only twelve Republicans voted in favor of the bill. "Your rant last night about the process and how bad the process was gave cover for your colleagues," said Weiner adding, "Twelve Peter? That's all you could muster?"
July 31, 2010 05:00 PM
The details are out for the DefCon 18 badges. The new design has a lot of goodies packed into it, most notably a 128×32 LCD display. You can’t see it in the image above because it’s on the other side of the badge; the ribbon cable passes through a slit in the substrate to reach the connector on the back. The board has a mini-USB connector and is meant to get even the unseasoned novice up and running with some firmware tweaks. The Freescale processor (which is the same chip as last year’s badge) is running a bootloader that can be accessed and flashed using a terminal program. Yeah… impressive.
But it doesn’t stop with the component selection or firmware mastery, these badges are beautiful too. What you see above is the prototype, but the 7780 badges produced come in seven different flavors (as usual), laser etched on a PCB that uses Aluminum as the substrate. Line up all the badges side-to-side and you get a graphic art storyboard. [Joe] outdid himself this year, and he’s been nice enough to share the development details (PDF) which we spent way too much time drooling over.
[Thanks Kim]
July 31, 2010 04:04 PM
We knew Glenn Beck was going to deny any culpability for his role in inciting a right-wing nutcase named Byron Williams, who got into a shootout with Oakland police officers last week when they pulled him over en route to his planned attack on the San Francisco offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU. After all, Beck always cries, like his conservative cohorts, that eeeeevil libruls are just trying to "silence" him whenever he incites acts of violence. Personal responsibility? That's for liberals and black people, we guess. But his denial yesterday on his Fox News show went beyond mere cries of "bloody shirt!" -- though it contained that, too. What he attempted to do was claim some kind of equivalence and another Oakland incident involving shots fired at the police -- even though the claim is just nakedly false: The next thing is, they're painting people into terrorists -- painting people into dangers. Um, you know, we had a sniper in, um, Oakland, California, trying to kill police. At the same time we have another guy who appears to be against the Tides Foundation, uh, and he goes down and he's going to try to kill people at the Tides Foundation. I'm tied to the Tides Foundation in this story because, quote, how scary is this? We have searched all the television records and Glenn Beck is the only host that spoke about the Tides Foundation in the past year. That's terrifying. But I'm tied to that. But nobody's even talking about the sniper from the left trying to shoot the police officer. So where do you stand on violence? Let's parse this carefully, because it's important to understand just how deep Beck's mendacity is here. First, let's be clear that no one is "painting" Glenn Beck as a terrorist -- and there should be no question, frankly, that Byron Williams fully intended to be a terrorist. More significant, though, is the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that the sniper case in Oakland involved any political motive at all. As you can see from the Oakland Tribune report, this appeared to be largely a case of someone who was angered by a police drug bust, or simply hated cops. That stands in direct contrast to the Williams case, which was unmistakably motivated by political hatred. We know that particularly because of the information from Williams' mother about his motives: She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment and about "what's happening to our country." Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said. ... She said she then checked the locked safe where she kept her guns, all legally purchased and owned, and found that they were also missing. Janice Williams said she kept the guns because "eventually, I think we're going to be caught up in a revolution." But she said she had told her son many times that "he didn't have to be on the front lines." And how did Byron Williams come to choose the Tides Foundation as a target? What television show did he watch that made him think the Tides Foundation was an evil entity worthy of being shot up and terrorized. Well, as Beck openly admits -- and as Media Matters explains in detail -- there was only one show that did so -- Glenn Beck's. Moreover, Beck is being disingenuous in the extreme to describe his role in this as merely "talking about" the Tides Foundation -- he viciously (and groundlessly) demonized them as an organization intended to "destroy capitalism", a "Trojan horse" engaged in "indoctrinating children" and "warping your children's brains" with the idea that "capitalism is evil", the "nastiest of the nasty," a bunch of "far left radicals" who are "infiltrating" and "failing capitalism" so they can "destroy it." These are all utterly false and base smears, of course. But if you were a violent and gullible right-winger prone to anger, you probably would be inspired by this kin
July 31, 2010 04:00 PM
From a Quick Hit early this week by counterspin:
(CO-Sen) How Bennet got rich and teachers lost their pension fund (counterspin)
From Cherry Creek News:
A young Bud Fox leaves Washington for Colorado, lands a job with Gordon Gekko, tycoon and corporate raider. Only in this case, young Bud is future United States Senator Michael Bennet, and Gekko, billionaire Phil Anschutz.
The job leaves Bennet wealthy, and allows him to take a giant pay cut and work for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, then the Denver Public Schools. It gives him financial experience, which in turn leads to a complicated interest rate swap that may leave Denver taxpayers in a billion dollar hole, as the fund for Denver teachers' retirement looks in need of an AIG-style bailout.
Ironically, the details of the source of Bennet's wealth are revealed largely in a lawsuit by Louisiana teachers, whose investment in theater chain Regal Cinemas went south after Bennet and Anshutz gained control of the company through the purchase of debt, forced other debtors and shareholder into taking losses, then sped off with $1.4 billion in cash, while jobs were lost...
Unelected Freshman Senator Michael Bennet was the 8th highest recipient of Wall Street cash in the current election cycle. ?As Denver School Superintendent, he entered into a swap deal that provided $3 million in fees to JP Morgan and is now $78 million underwater, forcing teacher layoffs. ?
In Congress, Bennet voted against mortgage cramdown, which would have provided bankruptcy protection and relief for homeowners. ?He also opposed a 15% cap on credit card interest rates. To cement his pro-Wall Street stance, the appointed politician stood against breaking up the banks. ?In a Roll Call article yesterday, he was described as having been born 'with a silver spoon in his mouth'.
An appointed senator who never ran for office before, but instead rose the ranks of corporate raidership under a notoriously anti-union mentor. It makes perfect sense... for a Republican!
The appointment of Bennet was just one of a flurry of such moves by which the Democratic Party moved sharply to the right after the 2008 elections--a move with absolutely no credible foundations.
Today, Bennet's appointment stands out as part of a multi-front assault on public teachers and public education, which is about as inimical to traditonal Democratic Party values as it's possible to be.
Things happened so rapidly after the 2008 election that most folks simply had no idea what to make of it--much less how to react.
That is no longer the case. The battle lines now are clear.
July 31, 2010 04:00 PM
This week the ACLU released a disturbing report documenting the permanent enshrinement of the Bush/Cheney definition of the Unitary Executive by the Obama administration. With the tacit acceptance of the Democratic Congress, the balance of power continues to shift heavily to the executive branch. While distressing, the report is unsurprising as it became clear in the first few weeks of the new administration that Obama’s campaign rhetoric of rolling back the Bush/Cheney power grab was just that – empty campaign rhetoric.
The ACLU report “Establishing a New Normal” is summarized here, and the full report linked here [PDF]. The report assesses the record of the first 18 months of the Obama administration across several civil rights categories and is well worth the read.
Excerpted here – a few ACLU report highlights lowlights:
TRANSPARENCY
“…the administration has fought to keep secret hundreds of records relating to the Bush administration’s rendition, detention, and interrogation policies. To take just a few of many possible examples, it has fought to keep secret a directive in which President Bush authorized the CIA to establish secret prisons overseas; the Combatant Status Review Transcripts in which former CIA prisoners describe the abuse they suffered in the CIA’s secret prisons… the administration has also fought to withhold information about prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Obama administration has released less information about prisoners held at Bagram Air Base than the Bush administration released about prisoners held at Guantánamo.”
TORTURE AND ACCOUNTABILITY
“The truth is that the Obama administration has gradually become an obstacle to accountability for torture. It is not simply that, as discussed above, the administration has fought to keep secret some of the documents that would allow the public to better understand how the torture program was conceived, developed, and implemented. It has also sought to extinguish lawsuits brought by torture survivors—denying them recognition as victims, compensation for their injuries, and even the opportunity to present their cases.”
DETENTION
“Of far greater significance than the administration’s failure to meet its own one-year deadline is its embrace of the theory underlying the Guantánamo detention regime: that the Executive Branch can detain militarily—without charge or trial—terrorism suspects captured far from a conventional battlefield… we fear that if a precedent is established that terrorism suspects can be held without trial within the United States, this administration and future administrations will be tempted to bypass routinely the constitutional restraints of the criminal justice system in favor of indefinite military detention. This is a danger that far exceeds the disappointment of seeing the Guantánamo prison stay open past the one-year deadline. To be sure, Guantánamo should be closed, but not at the cost of enshrining the principle of indefinite detention in a global war without end.”
TARGETED KILLING
“President Obama has authorized a program that contemplates the killing of suspected terrorists—including U.S. citizens —located far away from zones of actual armed conflict. If accurately described, this program violates international law and, at least insofar as it affects U.S. citizens, it is also unconstitutional… the government has failed to prove the lawfulness of imprisoning individual Guantánamo detainees in some three quarters of the cases cases that have been reviewed by the federal courts thus far, even though the government had years to gather and analyze evidence for those cases and had itself determined that those prisoners were detainable. This experience should lead the administration—and all Americans—to reject out of hand a program that would invest the CIA or the U.S. military with the unchecked authority to impose an extrajudicial death sentence on U.S. citizens and others found far from any actual battlefield.”
MILITARY COMMISSIONS
“The administration’s embrace of military commission trials at Guantánamo, albeit with procedural improvements, has been a major disappointment. Instead of calling a permanent halt to the failed effort to create an entirely new court system for Guantánamo detainees, President Obama encouraged an effort to redraft the legislation creating the commissions and signed that bill into law… the existence of a second-class system of justice with a poor track record and no international legitimacy undermines the entire enterprise of prosecuting terrorism suspects. So long as the federal government can choose between two systems of justice, one of which (the federal criminal courts) is fair and legitimate, while the other (the military commissions) tips the scales in favor of the prosecution, both systems will be tainted…”
SPEECH AND SURVEILLANCE
“…over the last eighteen months, President Obama’s administration has defended the FISA Amendments Act in the same way that the last administration did so: by insisting that the statute is effectively immune from judicial review. Individuals can challenge the statute’s statute’s constitutionality, the administration has proposed, only if they can prove that their own communications were monitored under the statute; since the administration refuses to disclose whose communications have been monitored, the statute cannot be challenged at all. In some ways, the administration’s defense of the statute is as troubling as the statute itself. The Obama administration has been reluctant to yield any of the expansive surveillance powers claimed by the last administration. It has pushed for the reauthorization of some of the Patriot Act’s most problematic surveillance provisions.”
WATCH LISTS
“…rather than reform the watch lists the Obama administration has expanded their use and resisted the introduction of minimal due process safeguards to prevent abuse and protect civil liberties. The Obama administration has added thousands of names to the No Fly List, sweeping up many innocent individuals. As a result, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents have been stranded abroad, unable to return to the United States. Others are unable to visit family on the opposite end of the country or abroad. Individuals on the list are not told why they are on the list and thus have no meaningful opportunity to object or to rebut the government’s allegations. The result is an unconstitutional scheme under which an individual’s right to travel and, in some cases, a citizen’s ability to return to the United States, is under the complete control of entirely unaccountable bureaucrats relying on secret evidence and using secret standards.”
CONCLUSION
“…if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.”
It is easy to point to the hypocrisy of liberals and Democrats who railed with righteous indignation about the Bush/Cheney expansion of executive power, only to be complicit in the continuing erosion of our liberty now. Their deafening silence, kid-glove criticism, and/or rationalizations of the Obama administration’s continued expansion of executive power and consequent institutionalization of the Bush/Cheney Unitary Executive speaks volumes about their prioritizing partisanship over principles.
To be sure – there are principled voices on the left who have consistently and clearly pointed to this administration failure – notably Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher among others:
These voices are too few. The first two years of the Obama administration represent a badly squandered opportunity to undo the damage done by the previous administration.
Worse than the routine partisan hypocrisy by administration apologists, is the complete abrogation of constitutional checks, balances, and executive oversight responsibilities by our Senators and Representatives in Congress.
Fro example, what happened to the soaring rhetoric of Senator Patrick Leahy – who campaigned passionately and relentlessly for the restoration of constitutional Habeas Corpus protections in 2006?
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: “It grieves me to think that three decades in this body that I stand here in the Senate, knowing that we’re thinking of doing this. It is so wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The Supreme Court said, ‘You abused your power.’ He said, ‘Ha, we’ll fix that. We have a rubber stamp, a rubber stamp, Congress, that will just set that aside and give us power that nobody, no king or anybody else set foot in this land, ever thought of having.” – Senator Patrick Leahy
In 2007 I again supported the Leahy follow-on effort to restore Habeas Corpus:
If you click on the petition linked in this quote you’ll note the referenced campaign on the Leahy website no longer exits, replaced with a milquetoast request to send a letter to your senator requesting support. I guess it is just not as high a priority for Leahy if a Democrat has “power that nobody, no king or anybody else set foot in this land, ever thought of having.” I expect Democrats will not be as sanguine about the expanded and institutionalized power of the Obama Unitary Executive when and if a Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin steps behind the wheel of this supercharged presidential machine.
The ACLU report focuses on civil liberties, but the accelerating accretion of executive power over our economic liberties has been equally egregious. I won’t belabor the point in this post, but will simply point out the obvious. Regardless of what one thinks of the merits or politics of the legislation, it is beyond argument that Obamacare and Financial Regulation as passed, dramatically increase the power held by the executive branch. With these laws, Congress granted vast power to faceless bureaucrats in the executive branch with unfettered latitude to set industrial policy, create and enforce broad new regulations over the healthcare and financial industries.
Even beyond these laws, even when operating without a firm legal foundation, this administration has repeatedly demonstrated an eager willingness to push the the boundaries of presidential power.
You’d think, even allowing for partisanship, there would be enough institutional loyalty among our legislators to try to maintain some semblance of balance between the supposedly co-equal legislative and executive branches of government. It is simply not happening. In times of Single Party Rule (as we’ve had for eight of the last ten years) it is Party Über Alles, and the constitutional checks and balances envisioned by the founders between the executive and legislative branch just fade away. This was true with Republicans in 2000-2006, and it is true with Democrats now.
At the rate that the Senate and House have ceded power to the executive branch over the last decade, combined with the lap dog deference most legislators offer to an executive of the same party, the legislature might as well vote itself out of existence. Perhaps they could be functionally replaced by a Legolist e-mail listserv.
The only remaining restraint on executive power today is the judiciary. This is why I have supported and will continue to support Obama nominations to the Supreme Court. My fervent hope is that the new justices will help form a SCOTUS majority that will pull hard on the reigns of the executive branch, declare many of the Bush/Obama administration actions (civil and economic) unconstitutional, and restore some semblance of the rule of law.
Regardless of what you may think of the political leanings of ACLU, they are fighting the good fight for our constitutional protections in the courts and they are doing it regardless of the party in power. They deserve our support. Beyond the courts, the only other way to restrain the extraordinary economic overreach and fiscal irresponsibility of this executive branch is to vote Republican in 2010 and divide this government. Congress only seems to remember their executive oversight responsibilities when the president is not of the same party as the majority in Congress.
Cross posted from “Divided We Stand United We Fall“
July 31, 2010 03:30 PM
