Something To Cheer About

The economy sucks, it looks like even if the Democrats win the White House things won't get much better, and there's a whole lotta stupid on display in the Veep debate, but at least there's something to cheer about today.

The Philadelphia Phillies may advance beyond the first round of the Major League playoffs this year.

For those not up on the history of this franchise, it's historically been one of the sorriest in baseball. Over the last thirty years or so they've enjoyed some success, but prior to the 1970s the Phils sucked as badly as any team in baseball. Their famous 1964 collapse is a baseball metaphor for implosion at the end of a season. In the book Baseball's Dynasties, Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein rated the fifty worst teams of all time over one, two, three, and four-year periods. The Phillies score prominently in all those lists. Without question, few teams have played more bad ball than they.

So it's always something of a special moment when the Phils are in the postseason. According to this writeup at the official site, the last time they won a post-season series was in 1993. Today they went up 2 - 0 in the National League Division series (NLDS) against the Milwaukee Brewers. They did it partly on the strength of Brett Myers' pitching, which was a disappointment early in the year. Myers also turned in a solid at bat to keep a rally going:

Myers fell in an 0-2 hole in the count, only to take a slider for a ball, and foul a pitch off. He took another slider low to even the count at 2-2 before fouling off another Sabathia offering. Another ball low set the count full and Myers walked on the next pitch.

The nine-pitch at-bat was the apparent turning point, as Sabathia loaded the bases by walking Jimmy Rollins. Victorino batted next and drilled a high breaking ball into the left field stands to give the Phillies a 5-1 lead.

Phillies slam Sabathia, take 2-0 lead in NLDS

Pitchers hit in the National Leagues, but no one expects them to hit well. This would have been a good at bat from just about any position player.

Saturday, former Mariner Jamie Moyer, who has the most wins on the Phillies' staff this season, will get the ball. It might be over by this time Saturday night. And if it is, at least there will be one thing to smile about this fall.

UPDATE (Oct. 5): Saturday's game didn't go according to plan. Moyer made bad pitches early and fell behind 2 - 0. Then he got no run support - the Phillies went one for twelve with runners in scoring position in a 4 - 1 loss.

UPDATE (Oct. 5): It took a game longer than necessary, but the Phils won the NLDS today on the strength of left fielder Pat Burrell's three-run homer.

It's Banned Books Week

September 27 through October 4 is banned books week. Here's a short list of the books most requested to be banned last year, according to the American Library Association:

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell


2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier


3. Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes


4. The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman


5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker


7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle


8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou


9. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris


10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

That's quite a list of books, including some classics. Why anyone with a functioning mind would want to ban these books is beyond me. Thankfully, I've never heard of such a person. Generally, the books in that list have been opposed by one narrow-minded religious group or another. While I don't think anyone should have this power, this is the last group of people I'd want banning books.

So, if you can, read a banned book this week. For instance, there's this heartwarming tale of a dog and his human friends. As the ALA points out, there are other ways you can help. Not the least of them is to report attempts to ban books.

When it's OK to ban books, any book can be banned. The marketplace of ideas is where the worth of books should be determined, not in the minds of people who fear ideas that differ from their own.

(h/t NP at The Coffee Stained Writer, from whom I borrowed several links.)

Another Elitist Cruise Begins

NP, who blogs at The Coffee-Stained Writer, is hosting this month's cruise of the Carnival of Elitist Bastards. Once again, Yours Truly was impressed into service on the promenade deck and the dining hall of the "300,000-ton cruise ship" for several days of discussion in the Caribbean.

If that is to be my lot, so be it. You might as well come along.

Washington Voter Registration Easier Until Oct. 4

If you're a recent resident of the state of Washington, there's a deadline coming if you want to vote this fall. Over at Evergreen Politics, Lynn Allen writes:

Oct. 4th. That's the deadline for doing it the easy way - either online or by mail. Getting as many people as possible out to vote is critical in this election. The easy way is online - and works both for new registrations and change of address.

If you miss that deadline and still want to vote, you can still register in person at your county elections department for another 15 days, Oct. 19th, in this case. More information on rules and regs here.

It's important and, despite the time and effort, it's personally rewarding. I was out talking with undecided voters in Puyallup yesterday and it feels like a win each time an unregistered voter takes a registration form, better yet when you help them fill it out and take it to the mail for them.

Last Call for Voter Registration

[links from original]

I have nothing to do with this. I'm just passing the message along. For those of you who don't live in our state, the League of Women Voters has a state by state rundown of who can register to vote and how. Check it out if you're not registered. Voting is one of the few ways you can change your community or your country to be the way you want it to be. Don't give up that right.

Congratulations, Ichiro

Image credit: McClatchy, reduced by Cujo359

There haven't been very many bright spots in the Seattle Mariners' season this year. One of the few occurred yesterday:

KANSAS CITY. Mo. — Ichiro's 200th hit this season came in fitting fashion Wednesday night at Kauffman Stadium. He beat out a ground ball to Royals shortstop Mike Aviles in the top of the eighth inning.

Ichiro makes 200th hit in 5-2 loss to Royals

What's so special about this? It's because it's the eighth time in a row that he's accomplished this feat. It's the first time this has happened in what is usually thought of as the modern baseball era:

[Seattle manager Jim Riggelman said:] "When you are talking about Ichiro you are talking about one of the greatest players in the game. To get 200 hits eight years in a row is unheard of."

Indeed. Eight straight seasons with 200 hits tied a major-league record with Wee Willie Keeler, who did it from 1894 to 1901.

Ichiro makes 200th hit in 5-2 loss to Royals

The game has changed considerably since Keeler played. The equipment is much better, as are the fielders and pitchers. Getting 200 hits a season is more of an accomplishment now than it was back then, in many ways.

Fittingly, this occurred during another losing effort for the Mariners. If they play really well the rest of the way, the Mariners might eke out sixty wins this season.

Congratulations, Ichiro. Hopefully, your next 200 hit season will get you into the World Series.

Of Foxes And Hen Houses

Image credit: Composite image by Cujo359 (see NOTE)


You'd think from things John McCain has said recently that he's now ready to take the economy seriously:

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a longtime critic of excessive government intervention, vowed on Sept. 16 to "put an end…to running Wall Street like a casino." At an Orlando rally Sept. 16, McCain called for a high-level commission to investigate the securities industry, and for ending "multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs that have broken the public trust."

Wall Street Crashes the 2008 Election

Is anyone taking this seriously? I sure hope not. It's McCain's sort of laissez faire philosophy that got us into this mess. In an interview with Keith Olbermann Monday, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman remarked on the likelihood of McCain being the economy's savior:

OLBERMANN: The senator and the Republican campaign obviously selling themselves throughout the campaign as a break from the Bush administration on the subject of the economy and this sub-subject gigantic, disastrous black holes opening up in the middle of the economy. Is McCain actually a difference from Bush?

KRUGMAN: No, if he had said, at any point, look, you know, we need some regulation, we need some policing, if there was—I‘ve actually been trying to see if I can come up with anyone sort of on the Republican side who has said anything, who said anything about the housing bubble, who warned about subprime. You know, I can‘t see it. The fact of the matter is he‘s—and you know, what he says is, well, we‘re going to clean up Washington, and then I‘ll clean the markets. I don‘t understand.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Monday, September 15

Of course, the people Krugman refers to include John McCain. In short, not bloody likely. Here's what Phil Gramm, McCain's principle advisor on economic matters, did as a Senator:

In June 2000, Senator Gramm co-sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a measure aimed at deregulating certain kinds of futures trading, but not energy futures. That bill never made it to the floor, and thus quietly died. Six months later, on December 15, Gramm curiously turned up as co-sponsor of a bill with the same name, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which did deregulate energy futures and which, without undergoing the usual committee hearings and preliminary votes, was immediately attached as a rider to an 11,000-page appropriations bill. It passed and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton six days later. Few lawmakers had likely perused the rider carefully, if they even knew it was there. And at any rate, Enron had given to the campaigns of over 200 legislators.

Phil Gramm’s Enron Favor

In short, he helped set up the conditions that Enron could exploit to screw both its customers and its stockholders.

Gramm set up many of the financial conditions we're facing now:

Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.

Foreclosure Phil

Needless to say, there's much more:

The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil.

“A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed,” the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. “But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.”

Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there.

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

McCain guru linked to subprime crisis

But wait, it gets even better:

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.

McCain guru linked to subprime crisis

Not only did Gramm screw consumers and the economy, he even managed to fuck up the company he worked for. What's more, he was paid handsomely to do so. While he wasn't a CEO, Gramm is just the sort of person McCain was railing about in the lead quote of this article.

The Politico article I just quoted, which was written in March, is well worth a read if you want to know everything a voter ought to know about Phil Gramm. It's a sobering read. This is the guy McCain trusts to run the economy. Paul Krugman put it best, in a quote that's been widely cited around the Net:

KRUGMAN: Yes. I mean, if you‘re going to ask who is responsible for the, you know, which people in official capacity would bear the most responsibility for getting us into this mess it would be, number one, Alan Greenspan, and then, number two, Phil Gramm. He‘s at the core of this. I mean, it‘s—and by the way, whatever they may say officially, everybody knows that if McCain becomes president, Phil Gramm is, the odds [are] in favor (ph) for him to be the treasury secretary.

OLBERMANN: What would that do to the American economy, do you think?

KRUGMAN: Oh, boy. Well, you know, under current management, Hank Paulson, I have some sympathy for, the (INAUDIBLE) works for the czar, he can only do so much given the guy he works for. But boy, Phil Gramm, you know, Ben Bernanke, I think Hank Paulson understand that we could manage to have another Great Depression if we work at it hard enough. I think Phil Gramm might be just the guy to do it.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Monday, September 15

Barack Obama summed up his differences with McCain on the economy thus:

"This March, in the wake of the Bear Stearns bailout, I called for a new, 21st century regulatory framework to restore accountability, transparency, and trust in our financial markets. Just a few weeks earlier, Senator McCain made it clear where he stands: 'I'm always for less regulation,' he said, and referred to himself as 'fundamentally a deregulator.' This is what happens when you confuse the free market with a free license to let special interests take whatever they can get, however they can get it."

Obama Seizes Opportunity, Hammers McCain On Economy

We've been letting the foxes guard the hen houses for the last decade, and what we have to show for it is generally lousy growth followed by a financial system that seems to be on the verge of collapse. We've tried that strategy before, and each time it ended up either the same, or worse.

On this issue, Obama is clearly headed in the right direction, and McCain just as clearly can't be trusted to do anything but more of the same.

NOTE: The image on the left is an official image of the McCain for President campaign. The image on the right is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, a photo of a Depression era migrant worker and her children. It is one of the more iconic images of that era.

Afterword: It doesn't fit in with the narrative above, so I offer this last quote from the Wikipedia as further example of the Republicans' inability to understand how to manage an economy:

Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948, detailed what he believed caused the Depression in his memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951)[21]:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.] Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.

Wikipedia entry: The Great Depression

The tax changes brought about by the Bush Administration, coupled with the sort of "tort reform" Republicans have been pushing lately, rampant deregulation, and general lack of interest in helping out the working stiffs of this country are creating this same structural problem. McCain and Gramm gave these changes their full-throated support.

People are having to choose between the basics, like food or medicine, food or heat, or housing or health care for their children. People who can't afford to buy things aren't going to drive the economy out of a recession. The Republicans, with the help of far too many Democrats, have set up these conditions.

They've had their fun. It's time for adults to be in charge again.

UPDATE: Over at his blog, Bustednuckles had this to say about the financial meltdown we're watching:

That is what is what has been bothering me, with 24 hour a day coverage of this carnage, Billions and Billions of dollars in damages and the legal and economic Tow trucks hauling off the burnt out carcasses of Financial business left and right, The New York Times, WAPO, the LA Times, pick a news source, I have yet to see anyone point a finger at ANYONE as to just who is responsible for this disaster.

Oh, there is the vague reference to this or that but I don't see any names.
I call Bullshit!

I want names.

I Am Not Going To Ask Politely

You can start with the two I mentioned, Bustednuckles.

Ninja Cat

Freezing when they're being observed is an instinct most large mammals, including human beings, seem to have. That doesn't mean it can't be a funny instinct, as this YouTube demonstrates.

Thanks to Adobe's non-support of Linux, Flashmedia sound doesn't work on my computer. For this video, it didn't have to.

Firefox Takes The Lead At SnS

Image credit: Screenshot of Sitemeter page by Cujo359


The viewers of this site are, almost by definition, an example of a small, self-selecting population. Even so, I thought this chart was interesting. It shows that the Firefox web browser, along with its Netscape and Mozilla (now Seamonkey) brethren, account for 50 percent of the traffic here. Microsoft's Internet Explorer makes up about 44 percent of the views, with the rest being mostly Apple's Safari.

Two years ago, I think those numbers would have been very different. Back then, IE was accounting for something like two-thirds of page views.

I've been encouraging people to use Firefox for some time. It's available for Windows, for the Mac, as well as for POSIX systems. It's more secure, and it blocks most of the annoying popups that make browsing with IE hell. While it's not what I'd call a lightweight application, it is way ahead of IE. Its extensions, which are mostly contributed by users, make it much more customizable and useful.

Best of all, it's free.

While it's probably not much of an improvement for Safari users, I'd recommend that anyone who is using Internet Explorer give Firefox a try. If you do, I'd recommend that you also load these two extensions:

• NoScript - an extension that blocks Javascript unless you specifically allow it. It also has sophisticated checks for cross-site script attacks.


• AdBlock - an extension that blocks most ads and other spam that appear just about everywhere these days.

I never surf the Internet without these two extensions. There are other extensions, of course, like Google Toolbar and the various search tools, that add functionality or make it easier to get where you want to be.

If you're an IE user, I suspect you'll wonder how you ever got along without Firefox.

A Bad Morning

[Satellite image of Hurricane Ike at 1 PM CDT today Image credit: The Weather Underground]

Eastern Texas had a really bad morning today. Bloomberg elaborates:

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Hurricane Ike plowed into Texas early today, driving the Gulf of Mexico's waters into Galveston Island, blowing out office-building windows and cutting power to at least 4.5 million people in the Houston area.

The storm flooded roads, shut oil refineries and prompted panicked calls from residents who didn't join the 1 million- strong exodus from its path. Winds blew pine trees sideways in Houston, the nation's fourth-biggest city, where electrical transformers sparked and residents waited out the hurricane in their homes last night under a citywide curfew.

Hurricane Ike Batters Texas, 4.5 Million Lose Power

That link is from the original article, by the way. Bloomberg seems to get the Internet more than the other wire services, and quite a few online newspapers.

In Killeen, Texs, which is a hundred miles or so inland, the Killeen Daily Herald has submitted no storm-related stories since early this morning. It's a small paper, though. The link they point to for the Killeen preparedness agency redirects to a non-existent domain. So much for preparedness.

The Austin Statesman, meanwhile, which is about 50 miles south of Killeen, is up and running, it appears. They filed this a little while ago:

Chris Lippincott of TxDOT said crews from as far away as the Panhandle are heading to the Houston area and Southeast Texas to begin debris removal and to make decisions about opening bridges and roads.

“We’re just now getting out and about,” Lippincott said about 10 a.m.

UPDATE: The agency later stressed that flash flooding is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in Texas.

“Many roadways in the affected areas are still not safe for travel due to flooding, power outages and debris,” TxDOT said. “Travel in the area affected by Hurricane Ike is strongly discouraged.

TxDOT, Texas National Guard gear for recovery actions

If you live in that part of Texas and you don't need to go anywhere today, it looks like staying at home would be a good idea.

Galveston may have been the worst hit. According to Bloomberg and the Austin Statesman, many people there did not evacuate:

About 40 percent of Galveston's 57,400 people decided to stay and ride out the storm, Steve LeBlanc, the city manager, said in a televised press conference yesterday.

Hurricane Ike Batters Texas, 4.5 Million Lose Power

Thankfully, the storm surge was lower than expected.

I wish Texas well, and hope that everyone's OK down there.

The Price Of Freedom, Revisited

Image credit: Laredo Firefighters


I've hit on this theme before, but Dana Hunter wrote a good essay yesterday from the perspective of someone who hasn't always been interested in politics:

I get you. I used to be you. I called myself an Independent, but I really belonged to the Apathy Party. I didn't follow politics because it just seemed to be a big fucking charade. Both parties disgusted me. The political infighting seemed like much ado about nothing. I didn't give a rat's ass about which ass got planted in the Oval Office chair because they all struck me as grandiose assclowns who placed party before country. And who was I to change that? One little peon who couldn't bother to be politically informed enough to make a serious choice for President.
...
But I am going to tell you something you won't want to hear: you're being played for a fool.

You're sitting there bitching and moaning about the state of your bank account, and the fact that you hate the war in Iraq, can't afford health care, your wallet sobs every time it's hauled to the gas station, and your mortgage is murdering you. And yet, you're not doing a damned thing about it, because you believe that nothing you do politically is going to make an iota of difference. Neither party has the answer to your woes. They're all lying crooks. Your vote won't do a fucking thing to get you out of the mess you're in.

An Open Letter to Politically Disinterested Americans

OK, I've never been one of you. I've always been interested in politics. I've always realized that I have an effect on the world and my own government, even if it's only a small one that takes far too long to assert itself. But this is my country as much as it is theirs. I honestly believe that their job is to run this country for us, not for themselves. Why? Because I've seen it work that way.

In my lifetime, I've seen black Americans go from being second-class citizens who weren't allowed to use the same facilities white people did, to being equals. I saw in an unnecessary war ended when the government would have let it go on for years rather than admit it was a mistake.

Neither thing happened merely because the government wanted it to. They both happened because this country's citizens demanded change. They did it on the streets, they did it on the job, and they did it in the voting booth. Even when the politicians didn't seem to listen, they heard us.

The only vote that doesn't count is the one you don't cast. I get so tired of people lamenting how politicians are all the same, which inevitably means that they are all corrupt and uninterested in their country.

The great thing about telling yourself that is that it relieves you of all responsibility to do any of the research and thinking required to find the politicians who will vote in your best interests. And that's just what the corrupt ones want! If that's all you expect, you'll never demand better. They want you to have low expectations, so they have nothing more to live up to.

As Dana put it, you're being played for a fool.

There is real power in numbers. The few of us who seem to care about the future of our country aren't enough. The corrupt and indolent in our governments can safely ignore us, as long as you continue to ignore them. That's the secret. Like I said before, it takes work. It takes learning things, and it takes making your voices heard.

That's what that vote is for. There are all sorts of ways to find out what your legislators and executives have been up to on the issues you care about. There are special interest groups that rate politicians on particular issues. There are blogs and publications that cover those things, too. This blog, and many, many others, are here to try to make sense of issues, and explain what's going on in a way that you can check for yourself. Find the ones that are interested in what affects you, and keep checking them.

If you don't like what is going on in your country, you have some power to change it. If you continue to do nothing, don't complain to me. I've already said I'm not interested in your complaints, and I meant it.