Oh, my, this is one of the funniest things I have ever read.
Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters: "If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer." I'll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah's not clear on that.
As the terrible events of Wednesday night unfolded, the staff of what had been Bombay’s finest hotel leapt into action. Scores of tales later emerged of unnamed workers hiding guests, barricading doors, tending the vulnerable and issuing orders.
Dalbir Bains, a British businesswoman, was with friends beside the hotel pool when the first crackle of automatic gunfire was heard a short distance away. “We heard shots and saw a man who’d just been shot. The terrorists were just behind us as we ran,” she said.
She made her way upstairs to Sea Lounge, a café on the first floor of the hotel, where the guests were still unaware of the fast-approaching threat. “Within seconds the staff had locked the doors, turned off the lights and told everybody to get on the floor,” she said. “They were fantastic. They saved lives.”
Maddow's partner, artist Susan Mikula, believes the "unlikely" label is just code for lesbian: "She goes from Stanford to Oxford to activism to radio, then TV? What's so unusual about that? Is it because she is a gay lady?"
Yes, because it is so unusual for lesbian women to host talk shows. Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O'Donnell and now Rachel Maddow.
What's really unusual is how far left Maddow is; that's the "unlikely" part of the story, not that she's gay. Rosie's a liberal but Rachel's a flaming leftist.
It's time to acknowledge that Obama's appointments thus far are quite reassuring. One of the reasons why I opposed Obama during the general election campaign was that he was the blank slate, the tabla rasa on which people were writing their own hopes and dreams. My concern was that we didn't know what we were buying. That was why Ayers and Wright were so troubling.
But Obama's nomination of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff was a very good sign. Emanuel is one of the most despised Democrats by the netroots, right up there with Joe Lieberman. The nomination of Hillary Clinton (not yet official at this point) to State again indicates more a centrist position than a liberal posture. Ditto with Gates, if he is asked to stay on at Defense.
Indeed, the netroots are grumbling that they are not getting anything out of this administration for "progressives". Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace seems to be going nowhere.
It's not the same as getting a centrist Republican. But it's about as good news as we could get coming out of the election.
"The list [of disappointments] is getting awfully long," wrote the blogger bmaz at Firedoglake. "Almost as long as Barack Obama's arm that he used to take our money and efforts to get himself elected. All we have seen is the short arm he has used to punch us in the face and collect street cred with villagers for having done so." Open Left's Chris Bowers wrote on Friday that he felt "incredibly frustrated ... [W]hy isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left?" Even Pat Buchanan -- not exactly the world's most liberal guy -- apparently thinks Obama needs to throw a bone to progressives after the start the transition is off to.
The New York Times has now published not one, but two OpEds suggesting that Bush should step down now, and not wait until Obama's inauguration.
Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible. Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush. In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.
Obviously. And let me suggest that this whole senate confirmation of Obama's cabinet should be eliminated. And he should be allowed to add, say, twenty members to the Supreme Court, and let's do away with his reelection in 2012 because that's just a formality that's going to get in the way of his enacting the will of the people. And let's also do away with that pesky little amendment that bans presidents from serving more than two terms.
Mike Mussina was a solid pitcher, great at times. He never got hurt and was never awful. For the most part, every time he took the mound his team had a chance to win. But he’s not an all-time great, he’s not an immortal. Only immortals should go into the Hall of Fame.
Right now, there are six or seven (depending on where you stand on Roger Clemens) current or recently-retired hurlers who are pretty much locks to go into the Hall over the next 5-8 years. Those pitchers are Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Mariano Rivera, John Smoltz and possibly Clemens. Does Mike Mussina really belong in the same group as those guys? Of course not. You could argue (and the Yankee fans are gonna love this one) that Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling deserve to go ahead of Mussina, and you wouldn’t be nuts.
It's my considered opinion that Mussina should definitely go into the Hall of Fame; he's way above the dividing line. Consider his 270-153 career won/lost record. That's 127 games above .500. Granted, Mussina labored for some good teams in his career, but that's an extraordinary number. Tom Glavine is 102 games above .500. Greg Madddux is 128 games over sea level. Randy Johnson is 135 games up.
Price brings up a few pitchers who have a few more wins than Mussina:
Many Moose supporters will bring up his 270 wins, but if you’re gonna use that as a barometer, then Jim Katt (283), Burt Blyleven (287) and Tommy John (288) should go in ahead of him.
But they also have lots more losses; Kaat was only 46 games above .500, Blyleven only 37 games and John 57 games over even.
He got a lot of attention for his interesting charts and graphs, but like a lot of math-oriented folks, he doesn't analyze things other than numbers very well:
This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.
Perhaps Nate could provide us with a similar analysis for the question of why the New England Patriots don't win Super Bowls anymore. Hilariously, the exchange that leads to this observation is when Nate denies that Barack Obama launched his political career at Bill Ayers' house. He's just amazed that the guy he's interviewing seems to believe this nonsense, and concludes that it must come from listening to too much conservative talk radio.
Now, of course, Barack Obama did launch his political career at Bill Ayers house. Now maybe Nate has some sort of definition of "launch" or "career" or "house" that enables him to deny it. Maybe there was a phone call that Obama did just before going over to meet Ayers that really is the official launch.
But Nate doesn't bother with that, because he doesn't see the necessity of persuasion. Everybody knows that Barack Obama didn't launch his political career at Bill Ayers' house. Ayers is just a professor of education who lives in his neighborhood.
TalkLeft, which is actually a pretty sensible liberal blog, talks about the silly indictment of Dick Cheney for abuse that went on in a Texas prison. But get this:
Unfortunately, of all the real and imagined crimes for which Cheney and Gonzales deserve indictment, these are far down the list.
3
Cheney and Gonzales deserve indictment for imagined crimes?
Did anybody catch NBC's "going green" for Sunday Night Football yesterday? At halftime, they featured Bob Costas and Meredith Viera somberly (but not soberly) presenting a segment on global warming. To let us know how seriously NBC takes global warming, they had flown Viera, a camera crew and I presume her makeup artist and hair stylist to Sydney Australia, which according to Viera is facing the loss of its famed Opera House due to the rising sea levels. Viera informed us that the sea levels could rise as much as 200 feet; that's only one order of magnitude greater than Al Gore's nutty claim of 20 feet (which is in turn, an order of magnitude greater than the IPCC's claim of 18 inches). Viera also mentioned that the Today Show would be broadcasting from the Snows of Kilamanjaro, which are disappearing, possibly because of NBC's lighting for the Today Show set.
Guys, if you really want to set an example, get the NFL to move your game to the mid-afternoon, when all those stadium lights won't be necessary. And tell the audience to turn off the TV and sit quietly for three hours, trying not to breathe too fast.
Look, folks, this is fruitcake stuff. Don't buy into it. The evidence that Obama was not born in Hawaii is non-existent. The evidence that he was is abundant. We'll look like idiots for believing this nonsense.
Obviously both of them, but more important for the future is whether it was the GOP that dragged down McCain or McCain that dragged down the GOP. As I noted in my last post Jeff Goldstein seems to think that if the Republicans had just nominated Fred Thompson, they would have won easily.
So I thought I'd take a look at the issue. McCain/Obama wasn't the only race on the ballot on November 4th, there were also many states (33 to be precise) that had statewide races for the US Senate. How did McCain do as compared to the Republican candidates?
Pretty well, actually. For starters, we throw out Arkansas, as Mark Pryor did not have a GOP opponent on the ballot. Excepting that state, McCain did better than the GOP candidate for Senate in North Carolina, Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota and West Virginia, for a total of 19 states. McCain did worse than the GOP candidate in Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, for a total of 13 states. Of the states that McCain did worse in, only two (Maine and Minnesota--pending recount) elected a Republican to the Senate, yet gave their electoral votes to Obama. On the other hand, there were five states (Alaska, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia) which went for McCain but sent a Democrat to the Senate.
In the thirty-two states, McCain got 49.3% of the vote, while the GOP candidates for Senate got 46.8% of the vote, a 2.5 percentage point swing. Note also that in the two cases where McCain lost but a GOP senator won (Maine and Minnesota), in neither case was it some "real" conservative. Susan Collins is currently the third-most liberal Republican senator with a 52.2 rating from the American Conservative Union, and Norm Coleman's lifetime rating of 73.0 puts him comfortably on the left side of the GOP. Essentially they were more liberal than McCain, so they did better in their home states.
So it appears obvious to me that the GOP dragged down McCain rather than the opposite. I can understand why those who supported some other guy in the primary would try to claim that McCain cost the GOP the election; the evidence does not back them up.
The theory is almost too perfect to be true. Barack Obama, the son of politically progressive parents, was born Aug. 4, 1961—almost nine months to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House. Is it possible Obama was conceived on that historic night?
And if so, could history repeat itself? In the hours and days since Obama's victory, many of his exhilarated supporters have been, shall we say, in the mood for love.
Hilarious. First, there was no baby boom in 1961. In fact, by 1961 the baby bust was on. And considering these are liberals, it seems more likely that we will see an Obama abortion boom a few months down the road.
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on Friday became one of the first high-profile Republicans to publicly criticize John McCain following his electoral defeat, blaming the Arizona senator for betraying conservative principles in his quest for the White House.
There's this bizarre notion that somehow the Republicans would have won if only they'd nominated a "real" conservative--Mitt Romney, I suppose, whom DeMint endorsed for the nomination. This is simply denial of the realities of 2008. The Republicans were going to lose this election no matter whom they nominated; McCain at least kept it close.
"McCain, who is proponent of campaign finance reform that weakened party organizations and basically put George Soros in the driver's seat," DeMint said. "His proposal for amnesty for illegals. His support of global warming, cap-and-trade programs that will put another burden on our economy. And of course, his embrace of the bailout right before the election was probably the nail in our coffin this last election. And he has been an opponent of drilling in ANWR, at a time when energy is so important. It really didn't fit the label, but he was our package."
And which of those issues hurt the GOP in the fall? Answer: None of the above. Obama voted in favor of the bailout. So essentially what McCain did was take all those issues off the table. And, oh, did anybody mention immigration during the fall campaign? I can't remember it even coming up.
Jeff Goldstein endorses DeMint's comments and adds a note in the comments that he thinks Fred Thompson would have crushed Obama. This is denial. Thompson performed in the primaries like he'd taken a couple of Sominex; why on earth would anybody think he'd suddenly come to life in the general? The simple fact is that Thompson didn't have the fire in the belly that you need to win an election. Do you really think he would have been out there campaigning day after day like McCain did? Heck, his team had a tough time getting him to do more than one campaign event a day back during the primaries.
Maybe this debate doesn't matter. Maybe Obama will be a Jimmy Carter and the conservative base will be able to nominate whomever they want in 2012. We shall see.
Note as well that unlike some others, I am not blaming Sarah Palin for the loss. I do that for two reasons: first, because I like Sarah Palin and felt she got jobbed by the media; and second, because it's the same argument that the conservatives are raising about McCain, that we coulda won if it hadn't been for X. Unless X is the financial crisis, I don't buy it.
In a new afterword to his memoir, 1960s radical William Ayers describes himself as a "family friend" of President-elect Barack Obama and writes that the campaign controversy over their relationship was an effort by Obama's political enemies to "deepen a dishonest narrative" about the candidate.
Is community service synonymous with slavery? Whether that service is mandated or suggested, could it in any way be construed as enslaving citizens? This week, an acquaintance noted the “irony” that college students would be required by a black president to do community service. She then pointed out the 13th Amendment.
The plan as originally floated was to make it compulsory, which would not be slavery, but would probably end up being "make work". What a shock, a former community organizer wants to require people to do volunteer work?
Michele used to be an excellent blogger, but to be honest, I mostly read her comic-book related posts, not her political stuff, even though we were on the same side of the aisle back then. Here it seems she's tilting at strawmen.
Well, looks like the Holy War for the soul of the Republican Party is on. One of the warriors who would like to drum folks like me out of the tent is old Cat Scratch Fever himself, Ted Nugent.
As the Republican Party begins to retool, rebuild and return to the "less government is best government" conservatism that makes America work, the first thing the GOP needs to do is to lock the RINOs out of the discussion. Heavily armed with an abundance of conservative attitude, my hunting buddies and I will provide security to ensure RINOs are kept downwind from the discussion. If allowed to participate, RINOs will continue to rot the Republican Party from within and diminish it in the eyes of the public. Enough is enough.
John McCain has been a RINO on campaign finance, immigration, global warming and other issues and look what happened to him. He had reached across the aisle so many times to cut deals with the liberals that he had to pick Governor Palin, a true conservative, to try and lure disenfranchised and disgusted conservatives back into the fold. Didn't work. Senator McCain was the wrong candidate at the right time. RINOs lose elections; conservatives win them.
So is Ted saying there that disenfranchised and disgusted conservatives didn't come back into the fold? That they let Obama win rather than vote for someone they consider a RINO? I hope that's not what he's claiming, because in that case he's the one who's a RINO.
Look, there are two realistic scenarios for the next 4-8 years. One has the Republicans regrouping, and tacking towards the center on some issues, not all. The other has them saying "Screw the moderates we can win it without them." There is a possibility that one could work out, but it really depends on Obama being another Jimmy Carter, not something that I am going to root for.
This is a center-right country. It is not a right-wing country, no matter how much crunchy cons might wish it to be so. Ronald Reagan won with a big tent; if we shrink the tent we will not win.
In reading this post about how some gal got tickets to see the election night special at the Daily Show, and then got hosed when VIPS were pushed to the front of the line:
I don't believe in being entitled to anything just because I'm a fan, or am a bigger fan than this person or that person.
But I am owed. Not the cost of my flight. Or the cost of my hotel. Or even the vacation days I took, which I could have used to visit my family. What I'm owed is the experience of witnessing history take place somewhere other than alone an empty bar on 11th Avenue, sucking on a can of Bud Light, feeling completely emotionally empty.
I can appreciate that the experience sucked, and that you feel like you got hosed. But nobody can give you back that evening, and so it's silly to claim that's exactly what you're owed.
Part of the enjoyment of reading the post comes from the fact that she's clearly an Obamabot.
John Cole's Balloon Juice used to be a conservative blog; now it's a liberal blog, and in the future it will probably be a libertarian blog the way he's going.
And before I close, let me finish with this. I left the right because they were such *ssholes I could not stand it anymore. You left good graces with the left because you were too much of an *sshole, and they troll-rated you into oblivion. I may have been wrong about a lot of things in the past, and will be in the future, but I left the GOP because it was a cult.
Note that here he is addressing another liberal blogger in those sorts of terms. Personally, I am glad he's no longer on our side.
There have been layoffs at Current Media, the cable network co-founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
A statement from Current put the number of layoffs at about 60 positions, with 30 more to be refilled, the company said in a statement. That's less of a hard hit than the 20 percent cuts that a source close to Current hinted to CNET News on Tuesday. The statement read: "Approximately 60 positions have been eliminated in the company's three U.S. offices, and approximately 30 new positions created," the statement read. "Many of those whose positions were eliminated have been placed in the new positions. Current will have approximately 410 employees (after these staffing adjustments)."
Al Gore firing people? Couldn't he have just sold some of his Google options and kept them on? My god, he's become Gordon Gekko!
In short, the Republican Party will probably veer right in the years ahead, and suffer more defeats. Then, finally, some new Reformist donors and organizers will emerge. They will build new institutions, new structures and new ideas, and the cycle of conservative ascendance will begin again.
That's spot on. The problem with the Republican Party is that they've been so successful with some of their ideas (lower taxes encourage growth) that the Democrats have now co-opted them. Oh, sure, Obama may fiddle around with the upper-end tax rates a bit, but nobody's talking about bringing back the 90% marginal rates of the 1950s or even the 70% bracket of the 1970s.
Proven? Where? And where in the MSM did anyone report that Trig was not her biological son? All I did was ask questions - and never received any proof of anything.
Yep, and that's exactly what the 9-11 Troofers say. "We're just asking questions. Nobody will give us proof!"
On the Trig question, I tried for two months to get some kind of basic, evidentiary proof. I asked publicly; I asked privately; the McCain campaign simply refused to give any actual records and attacked the press merely for asking questions.
He tried for two months? What kind of a retard would keep asking stupid, offensive questions about this nothing-burger of a story?
I'm helping a friend of mine who's taking a finance course. The textbook for the course is called Fundamentals of Corporate Finance by Brealey, Myers and Marcus. In general the book is solid, but I did find one gaping error.
In Chapter 7, while discussing some of the problems with IRR, they give an example of an office building with two options. Under scenario one, they construct the office building for $350,000 and sell it one year later (after completion) for $400,000. In the second scenario, they lease it out for three years at 16,000 per annum, and sell it at the end of the third year for $450,000. They point out correctly that the IRR under the first scenario is 14.29% and the IRR under the second scenario is 12.96%. However, they claim that an NPV calculation of the cash flows at a 7% discount rate is higher for the second scenario, and therefore the second scenario is the better option. Here are the cash flows they present (000s):
What did they miss? It's a bit tricky, but they missed what the developer did with the $400,000 at the end of the first year. Assuming he could reinvest it safely at 7%, there would be additional cash flows of $28 (000s) in years two and three, which have to be factored into the analysis. If you add those cash flows back in and do the NPV analysis, you'll find that the first scenario is indeed the better option.
Note: This is not to say that there are not other problems with IRR. But the example given is quite plainly mistaken.
By now you've probably heard that lots of new parents are naming their baby boys "Barack". While certainly some people are doing this, this detail from the past makes me dubious:
There have been other presidential naming trends in the past century, according to Social Security Administration data. Franklin jumped to No. 33 in 1933, up from No. 147 in 1931. Dwight surged in the 1950s and Lyndon in the 1960s. Theodore hit its peak in the first decade of the 20th century.
Okay, I was born in the 1950s, and was a youngster in the 1960s. I didn't know anybody named Lyndon or Dwight growing up. Indeed, the only other Lyndon I've ever heard of was Lyndon LaRouche, and he plainly wasn't named after LBJ.
Beer will taste better and contain fewer calories, our cars will all get 1000 miles to the gallon, and the bitter partisanship will end.
There are some who now believe that although power politics is here to stay, the era of intense polarization and frenzied demonization might begin to recede as a President Barack Obama goes back to that old standby of American politics used by so many Presidents: the task of trying to forge consensus. Consensus does NOT mean not taking strong stands or upsetting some who oppose specific policies. It means trying to get as many Americans from as many walks of life on board as possible by trying to woo, sway and win over, versus to simply politically dominate.
Of course, that's stuff and nonsense, as is much of the rest of the article. Get this:
Given the number of votes Obama got — the most a presidential candidate has gotten since LBJ in 1964 — and his big electoral college margin, his backers will argue persuasively that he has a mandate. But even there that doesn’t mean (a)riding roughshod, targeting, and demonizing those who disagree with him, OR, (b)not taking a stand, advocating policies and enacting them.
I don't know what the heck Gandelman means by that. Obama got more votes than anybody since LBJ in 1964? LBJ got 43 million in 1964, a number that was surpassed by Nixon's 46 million in 1972, Reagan's 44 million in 1980, Reagan's 54 million in 1984, Bush, Sr.'s 48 million in 1988, etc. Electoral college votes? Nope, Obama's 349 is fewer than any president got from 1980-1996. Percentage of the vote? Negative as well.
The idea that Obama is not going to be every bit as partisan as Bush is wishful thinking. I've commented before (as has Obama) that he's a tabla rasa, a blank slate on which people have projected their own hopes and desires.
A law school professor feels compelled to tell us why she voted for a former law school professor. It's not because Obama was a former law school professor, it's the economy, stupid.
How did McCain lose me?
1. He did not understand economics, the most important issue.
2. He lost the ability to make the experience argument.
3. He never defined himself as a principled conservative.
4. Erratic and incoherent, he lacked sufficient mental capacity.
Note what she does not say:
1. Obama understands economics. Of course, we know that she could not make that argument with a straight face.
2. Obama has experience. Indeed, this is the reason why Althouse phrases the point so oddly; making it a campaign strategy argument.
3. Obama is a principled conservative.
4. Coherent and unerratic, Obama has abundant mental capacity.
In short, it's a silly exercise to attempt to rationalize an irrational choice. And I don't mind that it's an irrational choice; as I have pointed out in the past, most people do not make rational choices when it comes to the presidency. It's something of a mystical process where people attempt to become comfortable with a candidate.
That's why I was more amused than annoyed at the Washington Post's ombudsman's admission that the Post's coverage of the race was biased in favor of Obama. Part of what she griped about was that too much of the coverage was focused on the "horse race" and not enough on "issues". Liberals always bemoan the lack of coverage of the issues, because they believe the issues favor them. But voters don't vote on the issues; they vote on the person.
David Sirota, writing in Salon says that Obama should go "progressive" (i.e., socialist). But get this bit of nonsense:
Democrats need to discard other lies, too -- especially those about Bill Clinton. To hear the pundits tell it, Clinton's first-term pitfalls underscore why the next administration should avoid "governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left," as the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus most recently asserted. History, of course, proves the opposite. Recounting Clinton's early years to Politico, a lobbyist correctly noted that the new president didn't move left -- he pushed conservative policies like NAFTA, thereby demoralizing his base and helping Republicans take Congress.
I think we can all recognize that as fantasy, that governing from the left led to Clinton's downfall. NAFTA did not pass during Clinton's first two years. Sirota's wrong here, but of course, he is wrong in a way that works for his argument.
So it is with conservatives who are claiming that the demoralized right wing was the reason we lost this election. Look, if the right wing didn't come out to prevent Obama's winning the presidency, what good are they? Fair-weather friends are not what you want when you're fighting a war.
But I don't believe the right wing sat on their hands this time. They may have been reluctant to support McCain whole-heartedly, but they for damn sure didn't want Obama. So they did the right thing. But it wasn't enough.
We all recognize how foolish the left sounds when they lose an election and claim it was because their candidate wasn't radical enough. So why do some conservatives find the argument compelling when the shoe's on the other foot?
See, we were going to go to the Mormon Temple and scream our lungs out about the damned Mormons not letting gays get married. A little Mormon-bashing never hurt anybody. But then people started calling us the N-Word.
A number of Rod 2.0 and Jasmyne Cannick readers report being subjected to taunts, threats and racist abuse at last night's marriage equality rally in Los Angeles.
Geoffrey, a student at UCLA and regular Rod 2.0 reader, joined the massive protest outside the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Westwood. Geoffrey was called the n-word at least twice.
Horrors! All these sensitive liberals using the N-word?
We're about halfway through the season, so we can look at the passing stats year to date and break the passers into three groups:
The Studs:
1. Kurt Warner, Arizona Cardinals. Warner has a passer rating of 104.2, second only to Philip Rivers. My choice for MVP thus far.
2. Philip Rivers, San Diego Chargers. A fine player having his best season so far despite the struggles of his team.
3. Drew Brees, New Orleans Saints. Ditto.
4. Tony Romo, Dallas Cowboys. His team's miserable performance without him shows what an excellent find he has been for big D.
5. Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers. Quietly having a super season after being the forgotten man in the Brett Favre circus, Rodgers has 13 TD passes and only 5 interceptions.
6. Chad Pennington, Miami Dolphins. Shunted out of New York in favor of Favre, Pennington has already led the fish to three more wins than they had in all of 2007.
7. Jason Campbell, Washington Redskins. Campbell has shown progress every year he's been in the league and appears poised to move into the elite category. Has thrown just two interceptions in 273 attempts.
8. Donovan McNabb, Philadelphia Eagles. Consistently excellent player.
Second Tier:
9. Jay Cutler, Denver Broncos. Another player who looks ready to make the leap into the elite class.
10. Kyle Orton, Chicago Bears. Doesn't do anything great, but avoids mistakes and has upped his game enough to look like a potential future star.
11. Matt Schaub, Houston Texans. Quietly performing well but getting no recognition due to his team. Needs to cut down on his interceptions.
12. Trent Edwards, Buffalo Bills. The surprise team of the league appears to have found a player who can lead them to the promised land. Young, and making huge progress over 2007. Only negative is that he doesn't throw enough TD passes.
13. Eli Manning, New York Giants. Surprised he rates this low, but he only averages 6.9 yards per attempt (everybody rated above Manning here has over 7 yards a toss). Still, his team is 7-1 and looks like the class of the NFC.
14. Jeff Garcia, Tampa Bay Bucs. Solid player, but not having as good a season as in 2007, and not likely to return to his past form at age 38.
15. Jake Delhomme, Carolina Panthers. Always one of my favorites for his playoff performances, but doing nothing special this year in the regular season.
16. Brett Favre, New York Jets. Leading the league in interceptions, but considered a success in New York.
17. Matt Ryan, Atlanta Falcons. Doing very well for a rookie QB.
Below Average:
18. David Garrard, Jacksonville Jaguars. Has slipped quite a bit from his excellent 2007 campaign. Not hurting his team, but not helping them, either.
19. Matt Cassel, New England Patriots. Yes, it was Tom Brady and not the system in New England.
20. Peyton Manning, Indianapolis Colts. Having his worst season since his rookie year.
21. Ben Roethlisberger, Pittsburgh Steelers. An off year despite the success of his team.
22. Dan Orlovsky, Detroit Lions. Actually not playing bad compared to the rest of his team, which stinks.
23. Gus Frerotte, Minnesota Vikings. I'm surprised to see he's still in the league and will be even more surprised if he makes it to 2009. Not playing terribly like the guys below him, but at 37 you can't be mediocre.
24. Marc Bulger, St. Louis Rams. A reminder that good young QBs don't always take that next step forward.
The Bad:
25. Carson Palmer, Cincinnati Bengals. Currently injured but was performing very poorly when he went out. Another guy whose career took a sharp u-turn away from stardom in the last few years.
26. Joe Flacco, Baltimore Ravens. Not doing badly for a rookie, but not at Matt Ryan's level either. Has played well the last few weeks and could be moving up.
27. JT O'Sullivan, San Francisco 49ers. Hard to believe that Alex Smith could be worse than this.
28. Kerry Collins, Tennessee Titans. No, this is not a mistake. Averaging only 6.0 yards per pass attempt; among those rated higher only Carson Palmer is throwing shorter. Has not made the costly mistake, but is clearly not the reason the Titans are undefeated.
29. Tyler Thigpen, Kansas City Chiefs. Still only 24 and could move up, but a 51% completion rate and 5.5 yards per attempt are not encouraging signs.
30. Matt Hasselbeck, Seattle Seahawks. Has been injured lately but doing very poorly before he went down.
31. JaMarcus Russell, Oakland Raiders. Sub-50% completions. Young and very talented but needs to show progress.
32. Derek Anderson, Cleveland Browns. Huge step back from his solid 2008 campaign.
President-elect Barack Obama has drafted a star-studded short list of cabinet candidates, with political heavyweights Caroline Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Colin Powell and John Kerry among the most notable names being eyed by his transition team.
That's RFK, Jr., of course. He's the horse's ass that wrote a ridiculous article for Rolling Stone on how the Republicans stole Ohio in 2004. It's a classic piece of conspiracy theorizing as I discussed here.
John Kerry's being bruited about as Secretary of State. Good God! The Boston Fog Machine at Foggy Bottom? I can only hope that's somebody's idea of a joke.
The media are doing their best to convince people that Obama had a big win. Don't buy it. Just looking at the two-party vote, Obama won by about six percentage points. That's a only a slightly larger margin of victory than Clinton in 1992 and smaller than Clinton's margin in 1996, Bush Sr.'s margin in 1988, way smaller than Reagan's in 1984 and 1980, and Nixon's in 1972.
These guys--and the others who are counseling Barack Obama and the Democrats to "go slow"--couldn't be more wrong. They are looking at Obama's election through the prism of Jimmy Carter's win in 1976 and Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. Both Carter and Clinton did misjudge the mood of the country. They tried unsuccessfully to govern a country from the center-left that was moving to the right (in Carter's case) or that was only just beginning to move leftward (in Clinton's case), and were rebuked by the voters. But Obama is taking office under dramatically different circumstances. His election is the culmination of a Democratic realignment that began in the '90s, was held in abeyance by September 11, and had resumed in the 2006 election.
Nonsense. America is not becoming more liberal. Obama plainly ran a campaign that for the most part was patterned after Bill Clinton's "third way". He benefited from a terrific tailwind due to general Bush fatigue and the economic crisis. And he still barely won, losing (as I write) some traditional bellwethers like Missouri.
I am not going to sit here and hope that Obama turns out to be another Jimmy Carter; I'd much rather have another Bill Clinton (albeit without the raiding of the intern pool), even if it means two terms instead of one. The country has too many problems for us to pray for four bad years so we can make it into power again.
What lost this election was the cloth-eared cluelessness of George W. Bush, the timid squeamishness of John McCain, and the deep lack of interest in conservative principles among Republican primary voters.
Sour? You bet I’m sour. Where was conservatism in this election? Where was restraint in government? Where was national sovereignty? Where was liberty? Where was self-support? And where are those things now? Where are they headed this next four years? Down the toilet, that’s where. Pah!
My vision of hell is a world where the only two political pundits are Derb and Sully.
I am hearing via my niece who is at Johns Hopkins that the police have been unable to maintain order.
Update: News report here; predictably the focus is on the fact that the police were supposedly too aggressive in getting the celebratory crowd away from a hospital's emergency entrance.
Sterling Clifford, a Baltimore Police Department spokesman, said officers had been monitoring the gathering at St. Paul and E. 33rd streets for two hours. About 2 a.m., police received five complaints from the neighborhood concerning the loud noise, including one from nearby Union Memorial Hospital, and "made the determination it was time to close it down."
"As is sometimes the case, there were people who did not want to go home," Clifford said.
Clifford said Union Memorial reported that one of its entrances and an intersection near the hospital were blocked by members of the crowd. He said that a student liaison from Hopkins was trying to help police disperse the crowd with a bullhorn but that the crowd chanted: "These are our streets. We won't go."
Yeah, those words stick in my craw, but let's face it. The guy may be an empty suit but he ran a very disciplined campaign. Aside from Joe the Plumber, Obama didn't make any major mistakes; all his problems were from his past.
Senator McCain will no doubt get a ton of second-guessing, but I don't think there's any doubt that the financial crisis eliminated any chance a Republican candidate had of winning today. I'll try to run the numbers, but I suspect strongly when all is said and done that McCain did better than the party in the aggregate.
Obviously the major trendlines are pointing towards a Republican slaughter in the House and Senate. McCain so far seems to be outperforming the Senate candidates quite handily. For example, with 5% in from Virginia, McCain is leading by 15 in precincts where the incumbent Republican, Gilmore, is losing by 14 points. Ditto with Kentucky, where McCain is leading by 15 in precincts where the incumbent Republican, Mitch McConnell is only up by 4.
It seems clear to me so far that it is not John McCain being repudiated by the voters here, but the Republican party in general. I'm still hopeful, but my reading of the tea leaves right now is that Obama will win by a modest margin, not the blowout that many people were predicting.
We have been given no actual records of the last pregnancy, or any reccords at all, although we are told by the elusive Dr. Catherine Baldwin-Johnson that labor was at 35 weeks - not as premature as previously believed (if you research the average weight of full term DS babies, you find, by the way, that Trig was not underweight). There is no time for any reporters to ask any questions, of course, or any time for the questions raised by the pregnancy to be aired in the press.... We need documentation to verify the last pregnancy: the amniocentesis results with Sarah Palin's name on them, for example, would be readily available and easy to disseminate, and would help raise awareness of Down Syndrome.
Lol! I still respect his writing skills, but he's gone completely insane. The Trig Truthers, indeed.
Poll workers told me that voting was steady and that at least 50 voters were lined up when the polls opened. The guy in front of me didn't have his current address on his driver's license, and the workers demanded additional ID from him. Fortunately he was prepared with an APS bill and a cable bill, so they let him vote, but I was very pleased to see Arizona's tough voter ID bill being enforced.
I did vote for one Democrat; the guy who was running against Sheriff Joe Arpaio. I used to be an Arpaio fan, but he's become a parody of his former self and I would be very pleased to see him voted out (although I expect him to win).
This is supposed a minor distraction on the way to be the coronation of King Obama I, but remember, the Super Bowl was supposed to be a mere formality before we could all acknowledge that the New England Patriots were the greatest football team of all time.
I cannot guarantee our efforts will be crowned with success. But I can guarantee you that if we sit home and sulk we'll lose big time. Let's do our part today, and if the miracle occurs we can all say we were part of the greatest comeback in political history since... well, since John McCain became the Republican nominee.
1. It would be a victory for an underdog. Liberals are supposed to like underdogs. McCain is a lonely guy standing up against an unprecedentedly well-financed, superorganized, ExxonMobil-like Obama juggernaut. A McCain upset victory would be a classic liberal happy ending.
Another moron Obamacan claims that Obama is the "real" conservative:
Social Security has long been considered one of the most successful New Deal programs, working well now for 70 years. Yet in 2005, the Bush plan to establish private accounts that could be invested in the Stock Market got nowhere. McCain, too, has embraced this idea. In 2008 it looks ridiculous. The Stock Market! Again, this is a radical proposal, not a conservative one.
Yes indeedy, keeping your money earning that 1-2% that it does in Social Security is better than investing in the longer term winner of the stock market. And this is hardly conservative:
Ever since Roe vs. Wade, abortion has been a salient controversy in our politics. But the availability of abortion is linked to the long advancement of women's equality. Again, we are dealing with social change, and this requires understanding social change, a Burkean imperative that Obama understands.
How is the availability of abortion linked to the long advancement of women's equality? That goes unanswered, as does whether the long advancement of women's equality is good for the country.
Asked for a comment, Andrew Sullivan said that Obama's position was actually the conservative position. "He talked about markets, and that's conservative."
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.
That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.
It's kind of like the logic that says raising taxes further on cigarettes will not only stop people from smoking, but will generate lots of revenues.
