What is your opinion of the electoral college?
To what extent does the fact that Al Gore won the 2000 popular vote affect your opinion of the outcome of the 2000 election?
More than one post at FiveThirtyEight.com indirectly suggests the possibility that John McCain might win the 2008 popular vote but lose the election.
Does that change your opinion any?
(Cards on the table: I'm outspokenly in favor of the electoral college, i.e. in favor of keeping the system we have now. This is true regardless of whose ox is gored. If McCain won the popular vote but lost the election, I think a lot of "Gore won the popular vote" people would be suspiciously silent. Their counter-argument would be, "well, we settled this in 2000," to which the counter-counter-argument would be "we settled this in 1787.")
The SEC foolishly banned short sales AND Cuban's getting crackpot e-mails after one of his players was caught on a YouTube video disparaging the Star Spangled Banner?
With 11 days to go, these players have gotten me 300 or more points in the Kimera Bartee Open this year (league where the object is to have players who play badly):
Carlos Gómez 954
Michael Bourn 856
José Castillo 768
Tony Peña Jr. 660
Bobby Crosby 584
Kurt Suzuki 524
Brad Wilkerson 442
Chase Headley 412
Akinori Iwamura 334
Asdrubal Cabrera 330
Brian Schneider 306
IP
Kyle Kendrick 125.00 940
Brian Bannister 92.67 751
Luis Mendoza 38.00 635
Brian Burres 46.33 456
Greg Reynolds 34.33 384
Kevin Correia 54.33 352
Jason Jennings 22.33 336
Scott Feldman 41.00 331
(Then again, what isn't a disaster-prone area? If it isn't hurricanes it's earthquakes, blizzards, Mississippi River flooding... but the point still holds.)
If you don't want your championship chances dented by a questionably neutral site for your rescheduled games, why not be a bit more proactive and work out a deal with a friendly city closer to home?
For example, no baseball could have taken place in Houston yesterday; but there's no obvious reason why Arlington (the Texas Rangers' home park) couldn't have hosted a game, with the Rangers at Oakland this past weekend. I assume the main reason it didn't work out was that the event staff there couldn't muster a workforce on such short notice (and/or that the evacuation and disaster relief had a ripple effect just that far in-land). But if the Astros and Rangers had made some contingency deal, who knows?
Side note to a spoiled athlete or two: Your own fans got washed out; many of them lost their homes. OMFG, you have to play "83 road games" instead of 81? - the tragedy doesn't quite compare.