By what criteria have the 2008 MLB playoff teams been ranked in the lists below (and what would the relevant raw numbers be)? [This becomes easier still when you look at the subtle differences between the lists.]
1. Rays
2. Brewers
3. Dodgers
4. Phillies
5. Cubs
6t. Angels
6t. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1. Rays
2. Cubs
3. Brewers
4. Dodgers
5. Phillies
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1t. Brewers
1t. Rays
3. Cubs
4. Phillies
5. Dodgers
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
WTF?
Who decided it was a good idea to make an entire movie about people saying inappropriate (or gratuitously hurtful, or both) things to family members and operating at the emotional level of toddlers?
Was I supposed to notice character development somewhere in the snide comments and accusatory remarks? Was I supposed to identify with even one of the characters?
I had this on as background music, and then for some reason I actually looked at the video.
While we're here, I should watch/listen to this once a year. It's a nice tribute; it holds up well and isn't not over-the-top.
Many of you saw it live; I didn't because the holders of the remote control opted for a special presentation of Fear Factor. (How were we to know the quality of what we'd miss?)
How can any educated person not think of Dred Scott and Plessy as Supreme Court decisions with which one disagrees? (I suppose it's possible that one doesn't think of them since neither has any precedent value now; and I suppose it's possible that one would implicitly think of only 20th century and beyond.)
Kelo is an obvious 21st century choice, plus I imagine most people disagree with either Bowers v. Hardwick or Lawrence v. Texas.
But... tell me how this is wrong:
A hedge-fund reader emails: "Reid, Schumer, and Pelosi are widely assumed to be stoking a financial Reichstag fire that would be a win-win for the permanent government. Conventional wisdom holds that economic chaos benefits the "out" presidential party, of course. Destruction of private wealth increases dependency on the central government. And a humbled private sector makes spinning the regulatory ratchet that much easier. Cynical, shameless, and in plain sight."
--Instapundit
A bunch of politicians want to implement a draconian/idiotic bailout -- that incidentally helps them quite a bit both in affixing blame to the other party AND in giving them a breathtaking amount of power come January 2009. Ostensibly they're "fixing" the economy, but nearly everything they say [by inciting panic*] or do [by intertwining Uncle Sam with the market] should identifiably have the opposite effect.
*- Charles Schumer only killed one bank. Did Harry Reid decide he had to up the ante and kill off an entire industry?
Look, I know full well that the dominant memes are that Republicans Are Evil, and in particular that it was somehow the GOP that caused people to sign up for mortgages that, if they had one lick of sense, they'd realize they couldn't afford unless the housing market kept going up forever.
But for all the economic wrongs the GOP supposedly committed over these past few years, none of them involved spending my money against my will, and certainly none of them rose to the level of wishcasting economic ruin for political gain.
(This still doesn't mean that an out-of-nowhere $700B taxpayer outlay with no oversight is anywhere near the right solution, but at least the problem is easier to understand.)
The State of California asks the Treasury Dept. for a loan, because the amount of credit they need just isn't available on the open market.
As mentioned in the parenthetical above, I'm still deeply skeptical that the best (or even most direct) solution to a liquidity crunch is for taxpayers to put up some arbitrary chosen value on hard-to-value assets.
I think even under normal circumstances I would have noticed the similarity between this story and this story.
Meanwhile, you all know we named our cat after this guy, right?
This probably wouldn't look as good as it could have with any real effort, but anyway, Radley Balko has pointed out that every David Brooks column can be summarized by the sentence "What we need in this situation is authority."
Never mind. The point is to compare this to this.
Raiders owner Al Davis just did to Lane Kiffin pretty much the same thing he did to Mike Shanahan, only with a lot less money at stake and (as far as I remember) without the gratuitously nasty press conference.
This in a nutshell is why no matter how bad the Raiders get, and no matter how many of their fans deserve better, the franchise itself richly deserves a million times worse, until the day Mr. Davis departs this mortal coil.
This* is also why I shouldn't mind so much (nor be so surprised) that Shanahan can at times be a ripe bastard. He came from the NFL equivalent of a broken home.
*- well, that and the back-to-back Super Bowl wins at the end of Elway's career
Ah, Fred Basset, your September 30 strip is so funny to British people (and those of us who happen to know a specific piece of jargon from the crime debate over there). Maybe not so much on our side of the pond.
A partial list of bail-out opponents:
Rush Limbaugh
Dennis Kucinich
Jeff Flake
International A.N.S.W.E.R.
Richard Mason (who was even more eloquent on Facebook than on Blogspot; he was vocal about this back when I just assumed it was bad-but-unstoppable)
A partial list of bail-out supporters:
George W. Bush
Warren Buffett (incidentally, DO NOT EVER TRUST THIS MAN except on his stock tips: every other time he opens his mouth it's ultimately to boost the values of his holdings, or worse yet to torpedo the value of things he wants to buy at distressed rate - that Warren Buffett is evil is one of the most under-reported stories in American finance)
Nancy Pelosi
Barney Frank
Megan McArdle
and David Brooks (as noted here). at least Megan knows what she's talking about - if you were still undecided then knowing where Brooks stands should help you rapidly choose the opposite position
Two political dynamics that I find similar:
1. September-October 2008: Congress needs to pass a bailout
2. Most of this decade: various European voters need to approve this EU treaty
Two long-term socioeconomic trends that also have instructive similarities:
1. About a generation ago it was decided that everyone should get a college education, and that government loans/grants would help foot the bill. Can you guess what effect both the increased demand and the subsidy had on tuition rates? Harvard's mammoth endowment rests (to a surprising extent) on the backs of taxpayers.
2. Somewhere around that time it was decided that everyone should own a home, and that government...
...anyway, one obvious difference between these two is that when a student loan borrower defaults, you can't repossess his education. The other is that the "tuition bubble" has yet to burst.
A social ritual that "everyone should go to college" or "everyone should own a home" has obvious effects on demand; that's fine, that's what markets are about. But when government subsidy gets involved, the unintended consequences spiral. Many people bought more home than they could afford, when a smaller house would have been much more prudent and still a comfortable living. I wonder how many of the people who go to small, uber-expensive (but not Ivy-caliber) liberal arts schools have really made the best decision.
Two factoids, of which the scarier sounding one is by far the less useful:
1. Worst one-day drop (by raw number) in stock market history.
2. 17th-worst percentage drop in stock market history.
Two factoids that are even less scary than the previous two:
1. +254 so far today
2. We're still in five digits, and have been since 2004
(No sign of labor yet. Due date was yesterday. I continue to work.)
The attempt at a bank bailout, of course. (Megan McArdle expects doom. I fervently hope she's wrong, though of course so does she. The difference is that I honestly believe she's wrong.) And the first McCain-Obama debate.
My parents watched the end of this game and together we saw parts of the fourth quarter of this game.
Despite living in the East Bay and having family in Chicago, I felt no allegiance towards either home team.
In theory my rooting interest was sealed by growing up with the John Elway era Broncos (a favorite of Tulsa's NBC affiliate - there's no way I could have become a Dallas Cowboy fan), though these days it's hard to feel that strongly about a team that manages to win under such sketchy circumstances.
If anything I feel affinity for the Pennsylvania teams despite having no ties to that state at all. My cat's namesake is a Steeler now (and Dwight sent us a Terrible Towel) and my fantasy teams of the past 3-4 years have been unusually likely to get Stillers/Iggles. (No Roethlisberger for me this year but I have McNabb, Parker, and Westbrook on different teams.)
I wonder which will come first between the kid's birth and the 2008 AL Central being decided. This game is still not under way as I type.
"[T]he fact that someone of Biden's experience and intellect can make as many gaffes as he has since joining the ticket shows how treacherous the presidential trail is."
--Kristen Powers (NY Post columnist), quoted by Mickey Kaus
Now if you'll excuse me, time to re-watch the SNL skit making fun of the Palin-Couric interview.
(And your money [since most of you are taxpayers from the U.S.], and your family, friends, neighbors...)
Bailout bill goes down (again), but yet another vote planned? Good luck...
