ABHORRENT
- The Paranoid Style in American Politics
- Booby Hatch
- I don’t think you can see this as “I don’t think you can see this as anything but a positive step”
- “I deeply appreciate that.”
- De Palma was right (both times)
WRONG
- Yglesias has not a stupid, but an incomplete takedown. Douthat:
big government and big business are increasingly on one team, and the champions of free markets and limited government are on the other.
That’s glibertarianism at its most pure: the biggest “champion of free markets and limited government” is … “big business.” Yes, they’re also about buying influence through lobbying and bribing congresscritters, and about establishing and maintaining pork and monopoly protection, but those are framed in their worldview as “free markets” (freedom to bribe congresscritters, freedom to exercise their corporates-as-persons rights) and “limited government” (government has a role in doling out cash to corporations-as-persons, but not a role in telling the C’s-as-P’s what to do with it or taking any of it back in taxation or regulation, nor in doling out cash to persons-as-persons (unless those P’s-as-P’s are wealthy enough that they are or might as well be C’s-as-P’s). And when the fuck has Douthat or any of his ilk actually attacked “big business”?
- Anyone want a high-OBP switch-hitting OF?
- Anyone want to sell high on Rajai and replace him with Not-Not-Corey?
- Cameron links to a decent, albeit unresolved Crasnick article on assessing defense. Here’s what I want to know: why, given that everyone concedes D stats are subject to huge, probably relatively random Y-Y swings, aren’t they more commonly presented as, say, 3y rolling averages?
Lincecum wins! (Yeah, suck it, mikeA.) Interesting: Schulman voted for Carpenter.
What happened to your sincere indifference?
I’m a Lincecum fanboi. Overrides my indifference engine.
Besides, it screws the Giants, or so says Ratto.
My face has turned red with
indifferenceJuggalo warpaint.Will mikeA’s posse be upset by this?
I think “balloon release” goes in the Clown Euphemism Directory.
I watched that segment with the sound off. It looked embarrassing for every single person involved.
Speaking of balloons, I haven’t been much of a fan of DougJ, but this, from the title on down, is pretty great.
*vice* president.
Why does everybody forget that she wasn’t at the top of the ticket?
close to becoming vice president=close to becoming president.
No one forgets that — everyone remembers that McCain is old, feeble/fragile, and in poor health.
weak
I’ve had him in my dead pool for 3 years running
1. Congratulations on your newborn.
2. What is your argument here?
Is it
a) vice presidents are not close to becoming president
b) it is okay to have a vice president who is not qualified to be president
c) Palin is qualified to be president
d) all of the above
e) none of the above (please explain)
95% a, 5% b
So you’d have no objection to my plan to get either Oprah or Jon Bon Jovi on the ticket in ’12?
No Oprah, but I’m ok with Bon Jovi.
I still think JBJ should have run for NJ gov the year that Corzine won.
this table suggests about a 14% chance of death for the first term. Maybe he’s more likely to live given the best medical care, but there is also incapacitation without death. 14% chance is pretty high, I’d say. I don’t think anyone has a 14% chance of becoming president right now.
Oh, wow. I think I’m going to have to write a screenplay/short story/airport novel about a “President Schiavo” scenario.
That is, if Chris Buckley doesn’t get there first.
Although, probably most of the people who die could be identified as “about to die” which McCain was not, so maybe it’s lower. But whatever it is, I’d definitely say it’s “close.”
Fixed.
Apparently we’re in the midst of a helium crisis going by the final comment in that article. Looking around, I notice that our helium comes from Amarillo, Texas. Interesting and terrifying. The use of helium for comedic effect dates to the bronze age.
Huh.
Tee-3He-3He
Should we trust the projections of any scientist named Swindle?
I don’t think we need to worry about the next Top Chef coming from MCC.
Not especially sad to see Eli go. The ReuBenedict, of course, will put him in the KOTD HoF. Tough challenge last night, but Beardyweirdy made the right decision: to execute the best food possible with the allotted resources. Everyone else got too caught up in the parameters of the challenge (i.e., fancy-pants garde manger and technqiue at the expense of taste).
Jen went back to seafood and won the quick-fire, and got a nice “welcome back” from Padma. Too bad she didn’t cut the salmon evenly. I almost thought MV might go, but in truth the best four over the course of the season are left.
The influence of Top Chef is clear:
Beardyweirdy sed that he owed a debt of gratitude to Thomas Keller for his book “The French Laundry” that he could never repay. Gushing like that on national television I’m sure doesn’t hurt. I don’t need to look at Amazon’s numbers to know that book has about a million percent spike today.
That’s a lot of thanks you’ve given to Mr. Keller, bw. Hold the phone.
Last night proved (I think) that lV is REALLY an evil prick while his older brother may be mb’s last week’s result of overbearing parenthood and a BF Skinner “cookin’ closet.”
Yep. That challenge played right into the strengths of the Volt Bros., but Kevin again showed the wisdom of putting flavor/execution first, and presentation/rules second. Hard to give the victory to anyone except the guy who cooked his protein correctly. But it was amusing when he essentially told the judges that by playing it safe he was really taking a big risk. A better justification would have been essentially what he had said on camera earlier: we was staying true to his style, which involves complexity of flavors, not complexity of presentation. I thought Little Volt might go home. The gf suggested that in a perfect world, Kevin would get the challenge victory (and the $) but Big Volt would get to compete in the fussy frenchy food fest.
Hard to argue with the final four. I liked Eli, but he and Mike I. were both just a bit below the standards of these four, and he knew it. You could argue that Jennifer is in that second tier too (and barring an upset she’ll be the next to go), but at least with the quickfire she seemed to be returning to form. I imagine that getting the doneness and textures of the various seafoods in her dish right would not be easy.
TWSS
I think your gf’s right! Let bw have the money and the glory and let lV compete in the frufru cooking challenge.
That said, I now want a copy of the dvd they were watching with the frufru cooking challenge…
Yes, and what’s more, Kevin devoting the whole next year of his post-Top Chef life to prepping for the Bocuse d’Or is probably not best for either him or his food.
W2: Yes, W3: No
W2. I’ve never been a fan, but if the price was right, I’d be all for it. I doubt that the price will be right (Cashman’s pretty sharp … they wouldn’t be looking to move him unless they figured they could get good value in return).
W3. It only works under (a) my burn-it-to-the-ground scenario, and (b) if Rajai actually is overvalued by other GMs. Along those lines, I forgot to call this out from the Crasnick article:
Anyone else think that other GM is Beane?
Referring to Rajai, or Sweeney?
I wondered that myself — depends when the quote was allegedly uttered, just how conspiratorially good a pal Z. is with Beane, etc.
Re W2: Agreed about the price issue. And I like him much better at 1B than in the OF.
In the abstract, yes. In context, no — Barton needs one last shot to prove himself (either for retention or for trade value), we have multiple 1B types coming up, and we don’t have a real LF.
Time for some nothing-else-to-do-on-a-Thursday sleuthing…
Assuming the mystery GM is only talking about 09 stats, we can start by looking at the 09 CF leaders in fielding runs above replacement (again, assuming that by “the metrics”, the GM is primarily talking about UZR). Only three guys are what I’d categorize as “off-the-charts”:
Franklin Gutierrez 29.1
Nyjer Morgan 27.8
Ryan Sweeney 24.0
Whereas five guys (Rajai Davis, BJ Upton, Mike Cameron, Colby Rasmus, Michael Bourn) put up pretty good FRAR numbers from 11.4 to 8.6, but not mindblowing like the 3 above.
We can immediately cross off Gutierrez since, well, he plays for Zduriencik. Sweeney and Davis seem like obvious picks but personally, I don’t find myself believing that Beane is the type of GM who would intentionally denigrate one of his players to another GM (trade value purposes, etc). Mike Cameron is one of those guys who impresses everyone metrically and observationally so I don’t think it’s him. Michael Bourn? Psh, it’d be rather boring if it turned out to be him so I’m taking him out of the running. Nyjer Morgan? Do the Natinals even have a GM? And would such an inept organization actually care about advanced defensive metrics?
I’d like to believe the player in question is BJ Upton. Friedman seems like the type who’d keep track of the latest defensive metrics. Plus, I’d like to think that the Rays don’t like Upton and are looking to trade him (as a buy low, and to the A’s).
…eh, what was the point of this again?
That’s all well reasoned.
Two other theories:
1. It’s Doug Melvin — from first-hand observation, Cameron’s maybe lost a step or three and really is coasting, Rafael Palmeiro-style, on reputation at this point. (Z worked for a long time in the Brewers system with Melvin.) Cameron’s a FA, so Z’s comment doesn’t harm the GM in question, and is neutral to Z since he already has a CF.
2. It’s Mark Shapiro, and the CF in question is Gutierrez — whom Z acquired last year. Note that there’s no explicit time frame given by Z for the alleged comment (nor is there for when it was told by Z to Crasnick, for that matter). Z’s sharing of the alleged comment is ultimately (slyly) self-serving.
Re W4: The nice thing about Bayesian statistics (of which regression to some value is kind of a special case) is that it gives you a theoretical framework in which you can combine any sort of information, not just statistical measures.
There’s simply way too much WTF (on both/all sides of the Palin/media contretemps) here.
Two remarkable examples:
• PalinIt? (WTF squared?)
• “where enormous box stores line the highway and workers in safety vests were loading up deer carcasses into a pickup truck” — uh, dude, those aren’t “workers in safety vests,” they’re hunters in bright orange vests that keep them from being mistaken for deer by other guys with guns.
I don’t understand the WTF2
Enthusiasms.
(If I were starting a baseball blog from scratch, I’d probably call it “Enthusiasms.”)
8. That’s an, um, unfortunate verb choice there
Hey, look — it’s Mitt!
The best writer in Hollywood is a dead writer.
Better call Saul!
I called it!Mehserle trial to be moved tomilitary tribunalLA.I called it! Oprah to be VP nominee in 2012!
Riiiiight. So now that you’re rich, you have free will? If you do now, you most certainly did then. I guess “free will” is now a euphemism for “chances in your favor”.
Unless, of course, she was addicted to drugs or subject to some chemical imbalance that robbed her of her ability to make her own choices.
Or if she was being controlled — by the government!!! And the implants!!!
OR…
Free will = the ability to do whatever the hell you want, because you have more money than some countries.
I mean, she wasn’t even able to have her own jet before this!
When there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Forces beyond her control made her become a successful, wealthy talk-show host.
It’s the reptilians, man! They’re CONTROLLING her BRAIN!
In former Soviet Union, your brain controls th–
Wait.
I like to think I have free will in spite of my middle class standing.
But then my wife tells me that I don’t have free will, that I am to do as she says and that all of her stuff is hers, as well as half of my stuff. Therefore, I’m not even middle class!
Ah… the joys of marriage.
I had a wife once. She hated Florida more than she loved me.
I feel the exact same way.
What?! You don’t love me, either?!
Man, I can’t fuckin’ win.
Maybe she’s quitting to star in yet another remake of The Prisoner.
Pickled heads of cabbage made me think of this. Was it already linked here?
Also, the fact that you go so far out of your way to keep them from getting revenge means that THEY ARE WINNING.
Yeah, but at least their souls won’t be making provocative statements to the media or on the stand.
Their souls are not the master of magnetism.
I wonder by what percentage you could shrink someone’s head before Yoo and Bybee would consider it impermissible.
I wonder by what percentage you could shrink someone’s head before Yoo and Bybee are the only words they can say.
BTW: this = true
“rowing for the Oakland Strokes” goes in the ED
He’s a real resource on that stuff.
No, no, mb. You’re going the wrong way–it’s south.
Wasn’t me.
Hmmm — I wonder who else it could be, though …
Too tall to be me.