Baseball adopts instant replay; Piniella ready to throw down

I'm honestly pretty ambivalent about baseball finally following the lead of other major U.S. sports and adopting the instant replay. But quote of the day on this or any other subject clearly goes to notoriously explosive base-tossing manager Lou Piniella. "What's the format? I'd love to be able to throw a red hankie or a green hankie," Piniella said, referring to the NFL system in which a coach throws out a red flag to challenge a call. "Imagine being able to throw something on the field and not be ejected."

Things To Do In Denver When You're A Democrat

Pardon the lame movie-title pun, but after a couple of weeks of summer doldrums (read: watching the Olympics instead of blogging), there is suddenly so much raw material to commentate upon that my head is spinning and I hardly know where to begin. Fine, let's go with the Democratic National Convention for $1000, Alex.

In no particular order:

Is it possible not to be moved by the very sight of NBC's new "youth correspondent" at the convention -- Tim Russert's son Luke? I think not.

Newsweek columnist Ellis Cose raises the deeper issue that's been lurking behind the conspiracy-theory-wingnut disinformation campaign that has attempted to paint lifelong Christian Barack Obama as some sort of closet Muslim. The real issue being, so what if he was? There is no religion test for the Oval Office. Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and, yes, Muslims are all welcome to apply. Right?

As for the convention itself, all I can really say there is thank God for The Daily Show...

Good Reads: Middlesex and Chasing Darkness

After a dry spell in the reading department, I just finished two terrific books that could hardly be more different. A few words about each:

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, which means (a) I was late to the game as usual, and (b) I was predisposed to believe it would be overwritten, pretentious and deadly serious. Instead I found myself immersed in the book almost immediately. Eugenides writes beautifully, of course, but his genius is the way he draws you into his characters' experience with a series of deftly staged and deeply interconnected story arcs. The story is nominally of a family of Greek immigrants who come to Detroit early in the 20th century, and how generations of inbreeding bring about the novel's unique narrator, the intersex wunderkind Cal, nee Calliope, who lives her childhood as a girl and his adulthood as a man. Reflections on the immigrant experience, the nature of sexuality and identity, and all sorts of other fascinating ideas emerge through Cal's witty, self-aware and ultimately deeply wise observations. A "great book" that earns the label.

Robert Crais started out as more or less just another detective novelist searching for a niche. There are plenty of those; the difference with Crais is that he's found it and is busily mining it for one great story after another. His prose is rather clipped and direct in the Raymond Chandler - Robert Parker school, but over the course of ten novels featuring LA private detective Elvis Cole he has brought such rich three-dimensionality to Cole and his supporting cast that every page sings with wonderful character bits. To top it off, Crais' plots are better than ever, as evidenced by Chasing Darkness, which starts out with Cole guilt-ridden for having provided evidence clearing a man whose later suicide suggests he was a serial killer. Cole's driven search for redemption takes some terrific twists as he discovers that just about everything he thinks he knows about the case and those involved with it is false.

Enjoy...

Deadline day doldrums

It's trade deadline day in the major leagues -- the last day of the season on which teams can make trades without having to pass players through waivers first, giving every other team in the majors the chance to block a deal.

For a team as badly in need of total teardown-and-rebuild as my frankly pathetic San Francisco Giants (teams in the major leagues with a worse record = 3; runs scored in the last 23 innings played = 0), the priorities should be obvious: trade whatever role-playing veterans will fetch so much as a bag of batting practice balls in return, and play the kids the rest of the year so that you know what you've got already on your roster before contemplating trades or free agent signings over the winter.

Of course, said priorities assume the collective management of said team has any common sense whatsoever left. Not this group. They're still talking about "competing" next year (for what, "Fastest Exit From The Playoffs Ever"?), still touting can't-hit, can't-field Pirates castoff Jose Castillo as a keeper, and still bad-mouthing their own young players who've never had a genuine chance to prove themselves as major leaguers (see: Dan Ortmeier, Nate Schierholtz, Emmanuel Burriss, etc., etc.).

I've been a fan of this franchise for 40 years and this is the most brain-dead, incompetent front office I have ever witnessed. The 1985 team that lost 100 games was more fun to watch than this one -- at least you had a sense that crew knew they were bad and were trying to get better. This ship just looks completely lost.

The biggest problem in America today

Is it the war in Iraq? High gas prices? The effects of global warming? The continuing plague of the American League's designated hitter rule?

Some would argue -- and on any given day, I might agree -- that it's the steadily growing gap between rich and poor, a.k.a. income inequality. A new story published today by that bastion of left-wing thought the Wall Street Journal only bolsters this perception. As the rest of the nation simmers in a frying pan of rising food and gas prices, a sluggish economy and a wave of foreclosures, how's the other half -- er, 1% -- doing?

Better than ever. According to IRS data obtained by the WSJ, "the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income in two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929." At the same time, "the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years."

In other words, if you get the sense that the rich are in fact getting richer while everyone else struggles to stay afloat, you are not a whiner engaging in class warfare, but rather an objective observer of a measurable phenomenon. The question now is, what are you going to do about it?

Morality play

It sure is nice every once in a while as I'm wading through the gossipy superficial slop that passes for online news to find something of genuine substance and interest. Thank the folks at MSNBC for this one, an article which explains what recent research illustrates about the inner workings of human morality. Given that decision-making based on moral assessment is one of the defining characteristics of human beings that separates us from other life forms, it's more than a little interesting to take an inside look at how our moral compass actually functions and where rationalization comes into play. The study described in the article suggests that "we are intuitively moral beings," but that "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad." The fact that people are able to rationalize actions that most would reflexively identify as wrong is at the root of more modern problems than there is space here to list.

Where The Hell Is Matt?

Many of you have probably already seen this video, which recently became such a phenomenon that the New York Times devoted an entire article to it. The most amazing thing about it for this particular viewer (i.e. me) was that I recognized people in it -- and so will anyone reading this who received our 2000 holiday card, complete with photos of our family with a group of tribal dancers in full makeup and feathers in Papua New Guinea. (If you prefer, higher def original version is here, and more about Matt Harding is here.)

The latest threat: tabloid spam

As if the real tabloids aren't bad enough, now we've got tabloid spam. No, it's not a subscription pitch from Weekly World News... it's a vicious Internet worm designed to hijack your computer, that's simply wrapped up in the tempting bow of a tabloid-headline subject line. I got one yesterday myself, some nonsense about Tom Cruise dying in a plane crash. I was of course briefly tempted to find out if poor Katie was finally free of her megalomaniacal spouse, but the better angels of my nature won out and I deleted with prejudice. Better luck next time, guys. "Giants trade seven veterans for one young slugger" -- that's how you'd get me.

Tim Lincecum: The Freak

The Giants haven't given this fan a whole lot to cheer for this season. Sure, they've done better than some expected and it's been great watching younger players like John Bowker and Fred Lewis and Jonathan Sanchez get the chance to develop. But the team has been so poorly managed that it's become actively painful for me to watch as Bruce Bochy and Brain Sabean have let half a season go to waste playing veterans and pretending they're in a pennant race instead of embracing the need to rebuild and playing the kids.

That's a rant for another day, though; today we're here to celebrate "The Freak," as some call him, or "The Franchise," as others have dubbed the most unlikely pitching hero you've ever seen throw a slashing 98 MPH heater across the outside corner. Tim Lincecum, all of 24 years old, 5' 11" and 172 pounds, is well on his way to being a national story, and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci has given The Franchise just the sort of awestruck write-up that he deserves. The kid is for real, and it's going to be incredibly fun watching his legend grow.

Tyson Gay and the dangers of auto-replace

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford's rant of the day for today pointed me to one of the funniest things I've seen in weeks. It seems that the wing-nut Puritan cult that is the American Family Association (Hmm, my family is as American as they come... why don't I see my values represented there?) is so virulently homophobic that they installed an auto-replace filter on their "family-friendly" news feed that changes the word "gay" to "homosexual" wherever it appears in stories that post onto their site. This is merely pathetic until a major athletic figure with the last name of "Gay" starts appearing regularly in news stories, leading to headlines like the one below. Hilarity ensues.

The David Palmer Factor

I wrote back in January ("Where reality and fiction blur") about the possibility -- which even I regarded with some skepticism -- that Dennis Haysbert's four-year run on the television drama 24 playing a strong, courageous African-American president might have laid some of the cultural groundwork necessary for the success of Barack Obama's run for president. As it turns out, Haysbert agrees.

The part that's a little scary, though, is where Haysbert talks about all the people who still to this day come up to him -- the actor who played the president -- and urge him to run. Maybe on a ticket with Harrison Ford...?

The new national security threat: global warming

Here's a conundrum for the handful of far-right flat-earthers who are still trying to deny the existence and/or significance of global warming. What to do when that most rational and conservative group of institutions -- the Bush Administration's own intelligence agencies -- collectively comes to the conclusion that global warming poses a major threat to national security. It's the sort of news that makes you worry about certain peoples' heads exploding...

Of religion and sports bras

I suppose it's part of the nature of blogging that items sometimes catch my eye that might seem on the surface to have no logical relationship to one another. But sometimes they just call out to me, and at least my chosen title is more thoughtful than my second choice: Americans -- Smarter Than We Look.

• The more religious leaders try to narrow our minds to accept only their view of the universe, it seems, the more Americans cling to our tradition of stubborn individualism. MSNBC reports this afternoon that "a new survey finds most Americans don't feel their religion is the only way to eternal life — even if their faith tradition teaches otherwise." Maybe the most startling finding: "57 percent of evangelical church attendees said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life," in direct contradiction to the teaching of most of their church leaders. Thinking for yourself -- there's just no substitute.
  
  
• All this second one really needs is the headline: "Sports bra saves U.S. hiker trapped in Alps." But will she send a thank you note to Brandi Chastain?

The Bush Administration's war crimes

I admit, I have been known to roll my eyes when friends on the left begin frothing at the mouth at all that has been wrought by the dastardly Bush Administration. Yes, it's been a horrible eight years. Yes, the country is crying out for change. But no, verbal bomb-throwing is not going to get us anywhere. The more spittle that apoplectic liberals spray in the general direction of the nation's moderate swing voters in this country, the more likely we are to be watching John McCain's inauguration next January. The best thing we can do, folks, is simply to remain calm and keep pointing out the facts.

There are two reasons for this. One is that yelling and screaming and name-calling doesn't get you anywhere. The other is that it's so unnecessary. One more left-wing flamethrower calling George Bush a war criminal is not news -- hell, at this point, it's practically satire. What's news is when one of Bush's own generals accuses his Administration of war crimes. Now we're getting somewhere!

Tim Russert 1950-2008

One of the strange truths of post-modern America is that people on television sometimes come to feel like part of your family. Even as technology isolates us into individual information cocoons, it brings us into daily contact with certain people, so much so that you can come to feel like you know them.

I never met Tim Russert, who died at 58 today after being stricken at NBC News studios in New York, but that didn't stop him from feeling like family. Insightful, tenacious, balanced, intellectually curious and blessed with a warm wit, he was one of those people I found myself more than once putting on the imaginary list of ten famous people I'd like to have over for dinner. In fact, my lists rarely filled all ten seats; most celebrities seem so insufferably full of themselves that I couldn't imagine their heads fitting in my door.

Russert, by contrast, always seemed so approachable, so human, so real. He was like the neighbor you'd strike up a conversation with in line at the hardware store, and keep it up all the way out into the parking lot because he just had so damn many interesting things to say, and said them with such a unique combination of conviction and affability.

Russert leaves behind a wife and son and a studio full of heartbroken colleagues who have been, somehow, broadcasting all day about the friend they lost quite literally from their midst. After my daughter came in to see if I'd heard the news, she talked about how he'd been NBC's chief political reporter for her entire life. She's thinking of majoring in political science. I like to think I had something to do with that, but Tim probably did, too. His enthusiasm for the political world was contagious. He could make it seem entertaining, yes, but mostly he made it seem like it mattered, like it was a subject worthy of every ounce of the enthusiasm and precision he poured into his work.

Condolences to his family and colleagues on this huge loss. And Godspeed, Tim.

Cell phone nation

The fact that Obama leads McCain 47-41 in the national popular vote in latest post-primary polling is mildly interesting to me at best. After all, it’s five months until the election and we don’t even elect presidents by popular vote. In our system, which awards electoral votes on a state-by-state, winner-take-all basis with just a couple of exceptions (Maine and Nebraska award them according to the winner of the vote in each congressional district), the state polls are the ones the campaigns will be watching.

What I found fascinating about this Mark Blumenthal column about the latest polling is the emergence of a new phenomenon in the polling world – the cell-phone-only household. Pollsters have historically used the phone book to reach prospective voters, but “(a)s of late 2007, one in six American households had wireless service only (no landline) and would thus be missing from traditional telephone samples.” That’s right, more than 16% of American households today don't bother with a standard wired telephone, and the number is growing.

"It ain't over 'til.. " well, Saturday

I met Congressman Charlie Rangel many years ago in Washington D.C. He's a friendly, plain-spoken man of strong beliefs and loyalties who doesn't hesitate to tell it like it is. You've gotta love it when someone inside the Beltway breaks through the haze of rhetoric and spin and offers a dash of uncensored truth:

Mrs. Clinton had initially said she wanted to wait before making any decision, but her aides said that in conversations, some of her closest supporters said it was urgent that she step aside... "We pledged to support her to the end,” said Representative Charles W. Rangel, a New York Democrat who has been a patron of Mrs. Clinton since she first ran for the Senate. “Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is.”

The end, Senator Clinton and her backers now agree, is Saturday, when she will formally suspend her campaign a la Mitt Romney. Not giving up those delegates just yet, but no longer pretending she can do anything but harm her own party by continuing to campaign. Thanks for doing the right thing, Senator.

Obama: "America, this is our moment"

Ted Williams and his speechwriter had a heck of a night last night.

As someone who's written a few speeches in my time, I have a keen appreciation for the fine art of it. It might look easy to some on the outside, but it's not. You have to not just cover the subject matter in a comprehensive, detailed and imaginative way, but also capture the voice and character and cadence of the speaker in such a way that the speech comes out of their mouth as naturally as if the entire thing had been delivered spontaneously.

Barack Obama's whiz-kid head speechwriter Jon Favreau -- who earlier this year described his job as like being “Ted Williams’s batting coach” -- and his candidate hit a home run last night. If you didn't see the speech, it's well worth reading the text here, or watching the video here. It was gracious, statesmanlike, visionary, inspiring, powerful and the adjectives go on and on.

Former Bush press secretary lambastes administration

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, point man for the Bush Administration media machine in the run-up to the Iraq war, apparently isn't feeling too proud today about his role in hoodwinking the American people. In a new memoir he writes that "Over that summer of 2002, top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war... it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage... History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder."

Summing up his three years manning the White House podium, McClellan concludes, "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary." Strong words from the guy in charge of spinning the media into supporting the war. Nice to see he has a conscience, though.

Excerpts are here and here.

"A generational shift in attitudes"

It sure looks that way. Which just goes to show you that human beings have a fundamental desire for fairness and equity that no amount of dogma or propaganda can stamp out.