Polls closed

I've taken the "Who Is Atrios" poll down. Thanks to everyone who voted. Here are the results. I'll be sure to drop a line to Kaus and let him know.

Name                Votes    Pct

================================

Mahir!                 56  26.8%

Sidney Blumenthal      37  17.7%

Bob Shrum              23  11.0%

Norah Vincent          21  10.0%

Mickey Kaus            19   9.1%

Christopher Hitchens   19   9.1%

Mark V. Shaney         18   8.6%

Jennifer Liberto       16   7.7%

UPDATE: Apparently, some people have never heard of Mahir! How soon they forget. Read up on one of the biggest net.celebrities of 1999.

I'm moderately surprised that no one asked who Mark V. Shaney is. Read about him here and here. Finally, Jennifer Liberto was the writer of a much ridiculed piece that attempted to unmask the woman who runs Media Whores Online. One of the people she emailed with questions while researching that article was...Atrios. Coincidence? I report, you decide.

Cloned baby arrives in US

Yeah, I know, "allegedly cloned", at least until DNA tests can be performed. In any event, the baby and her mother arrived in Florida yesterday and were transported to a secure undisclosed location. Testing will be done later, at which point we'll know for sure if these folks are as fradulent as they are nutty.

Meanwhile, it's a good thing that they didn't arrive in Texas, where a bill has been filed to outlaw human cloning.

It's the second attempt by Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, to make cloning humans a first-degree felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison and $10 million in civil penalties.

We sure know how to git tuff on crime around here, let me tell you. Hey, Jane, why not get together with Warren Chisum and see if you can join your bill with his? After all, why should Texas be forced to recognize anyone who was cloned in one of those decadent liberal states like Vermont if we don't want to?

Some days, everything's a song cue

A couple of headlines in the Chron today have me in a musical mood. First, there's this story, about the 50th anniversary of the death of the great Hank Williams:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Just before sunrise on New Year's Day 50 years ago, a sleek baby-blue Cadillac roared up to the rural Oak Hill, W.Va., hospital in the cold Appalachian darkness. The driver was just 17, exhausted and scared. The passenger was barely 29 and dead.

At the wheel was Charles Carr, a college freshman on Christmas break from Auburn. The man in the back seat was singer-songwriter Hank Williams Sr.

"I ran in and explained my situation to the two interns who were in the hospital," said Carr, now a 67-year-old Montgomery businessman. "They came out and looked at Hank and said, 'He's dead.'

"I asked 'em, 'Can't you do something to revive him?' One of them looked at me and said, 'No, he's just dead.' "

It was a last ride that would help define American music and pop culture for decades to come.

[...]

The last hours of his troubled life long ago passed from reality to myth. Biographers have speculated about what really happened. Officials have issued sketchy reports that only increased the mystery. Songwriters and playwrights still rhapsodize about it. A Web site dedicated to Williams estimates that more than 700 songs have been written about the singer, whose own recording career lasted only five years.

One of those songs, naturally enough, was written by the Austin Lounge Lizards. Here's a clip from The Car Hank Died In (requires RealPlayer).

Then there's this story about an actual smoke-filled room where Houston politicians meet and greet each other:

Many Houston politicians prefer to do business over a single-malt scotch and an imported stogie.

The place of choice? Downing Street, a River Oaks cigar bar.

Walk in on any given weeknight, and a cadre of elected officials and political operatives is packed into the lavish mahogany and leather booths.

"Politicians gravitate toward smoke-filled rooms," said political consultant Dave Walden, who used to be a regular. "That place has more smoke than any place in town."

Well, it's scotch and cigars instead of martinis and cigars, but I think the Asylum Street Spankers' song Smells Like Thirty-Something still applies. (You can get the whole song from this page if you're MP3-compatible.)

Taxpayers to bear cost: Film at 11

A two-Claude headline in the Chron today: Taxpayers may feel brunt of Kmart sting. Who'd have ever thought of that?

Actually, we're not even talking about potential lawsuit costs, but the costs of cleaning up all the arrest records:

City Council will consider a contract today to hire the law firm of Winstead, Sechrest & Minick to help expunge the arrests from the records of nearly 300 people arrested during an ill-fated August sting on drag racing.

Charges already have been dropped against those arrested, but the arrests remain on their police records. Because the city's legal department will represent the city in several lawsuits stemming from the arrests, it cannot represent those arrested in getting their records expunged.

As a result, the city will consider hiring outside counsel.

"We are trying to rectify a wrong," said Robert Cambrice, a senior assistant city attorney. "We are trying to help out people who are trying to get into school or apply for jobs and are denied that opportunity because they have an arrest record."

Cambrice said that, if the contract is approved, those arrested will be notified of the service by mail. If the city's offer is accepted, arrest records will be expunged at a cost to the city of $484 each.

$484 each? I admit to not knowing much about the procedure here, but that sure sounds like a lot to me. Why is this so hard?

Halftime controversy

The Continental Tire Bowl, one of those bowl games you've never heard of (in this case, because it's new this year), has produced some controversy. Seems the governor of West Virginia has his panties in a bunch because the UVa pep band made fun of West Virginians in their show.

During the Cavaliers-Mountaineers matchup at Charlotte, N.C., Virginia's independent pep band staged a parody of "The Bachelor,'' with a male Virginia student choosing between two female contestants.

One female, purported to be from West Virginia, had blue overalls, pigtails, a talent for square dancing and a dream to move to Beverly Hills, Calif. -- a reference to "The Beverly Hillbillies.''

Virginia officials said they plan to address the issue Tuesday. A West Virginia spokesman said school President David C. Hardesty would wait for Virginia's statement before issuing his own.

Leonard Sandridge, Virginia's executive vice president and chief operating officer, declined to say what, if any, sanctions could be imposed on the pep band. In previous years, officials barred the band from marching at halftime of home games.

"I wouldn't rule out any possible outcome, as we look more carefully at what has occurred and the reactions,'' Sandridge said. "The performance of the band was perceived as offensive by a number of persons -- Virginia fans as well as West Virginia fans. A performance that causes that kind of reaction is inappropriate.''

Boy, you'd think that given the UVa band's reputation for naughtiness, that someone might've demanded script approval beforehand, right? Well, they did:

Ken Haines, the Tire Bowl's executive director, said he approved a five-paragraph script presented by band officials before the game but decried the performance as "childish.''

"Their performance was more embellished,'' Haines said Monday from Charlotte. "The execution by the pep band was not in the same tone that we were led to believe. We were dismayed at the halftime performance of the pep band.''

He said the pep band is not welcome at future Tire Bowls.

"We'd be happy to have a Virginia marching band, if they should have one,'' Haines said. "Apparently, (the pep band) has a reputation for being rather unconventional.''

The pep band also lampooned West Virginia at halftime of a 1985 game in Charlottesville, Va. That performance, a parody of "Family Feud,'' included derogatory references to indoor plumbing and birth control in West Virginia.

School officials later apologized. Saturday's Tire Bowl, a 48-22 Virginia win, was the first football meeting between the two schools since that game.

Darn those embellishments! So what was this nasty, horrible, insulting show? Judge for yourself. Here's the script, as approved by the UVa Athletic Department and apparently this Tire Bowl guy:

Continential Tire Bowl Show (exactly as approved):

intro: ladies and gentlemen- welcome to the final episode of the
continental tire bowl's "the bachelor". and please welcome our
bachelor to the field, DUDE{insert real name here}! [guy walks out
onto the 50] DUDE has a great sense of humor, likes candlelight
dinners, and enjoys long walks on the beach. he's also a member of
the finest scramble band in the acc, The Award Winning Virginia Fighting Cavalier Precision Marching Pep Band!!!

ann: we have just two bachelorettes left, GIRL_1[insert real name
here], a sociology major from wvu [girl walks out, wearing blue and
yellow]... and GIRL_2[insert real name here], a biology major from
uva [another girl walks out, wearing blue and orange]. so who will
it be? stay tuned to the continental tire bowl's "the bachelor" to
find out.

[the three dance during the song, with each girl pulling him away
from the other, vying for his attention]

ann: well, it's going to be a tough choice for our bachelor,
deciding between these two bachelorettes. GIRL_2, from uva, will be
attending medical school next fall and plans to be a pediatrician.
After she leaves wvu, GIRL_1 will be heading to california, out to
beverly. hills, that is. swimming pools, movie stars!

ann: now the moment you've all been waiting for- who will get the
continental tire and who will go home with a broken heart? will it
be GIRL_1 from wvu? [guy walks over to where GIRL_1]... or will it
be GIRL_2 from uva? [guy walks over to GIRL_2] who will it be?!?!

[guys goes back and forth between the two girls, and during
the "singing" part of song, he runs over to GIRL_2, drops to one
kness, gives her the tire, she shrieks in joy, they hug and he
carries her off the field toward the front sidelines]

Boy, they should sure be ashamed of themselves for befouling the honored traditions of the Tire Bowl. It's an outrage, I tell you.

UPDATE: Here's what I think the apology should be, as I suggested to the Rice MOB mailing list:

"The UVa Pep Band would like to apologize to any West Virginians who may
have misinterpreted our show as being disrespectful to their heritage. We
have the utmost respect for pigtails, overalls, and square dancing, and
never meant to imply that they were in any way less than honorable. We're
sorry for the confusion."

Will someone please tell Trent Lott that I'm available for his next gaffe?

Internet privacy

From today's Chron, via the AP wire:

In the days after his stepdaughter's murder, Tim Remsburg funneled his fury into phone calls to anyone he thought might help explain her death.

"At two o'clock in the morning, I was trying to get President Clinton's number. I couldn't sleep. I just wanted to rattle everyone's cages and get some answers," he said.

His stepdaughter, Amy Boyer, was 20 when she was shot to death Oct. 15, 1999, by a former high school classmate, Liam Youens, who had paid an Internet information broker to track her down.

For the three years since the murder, her parents have fought to protect other potential victims, most recently by suing the broker for negligence and invasion of privacy.

I'm always a little nervous when I tune in to a story about people who claim their privacy has been violated by "the Internet". I know there's plenty of data out there about all of us that we'd prefer didn't exist in any organized fashion, but blaming "the Internet" is often an exercise in misdirected blame, just as is blaming "pornography" for serial killers.

Generally speaking, the sort of information about you that is freely available on the Internet was freely available long before the Internet entered the public consciousness. I can find all sorts of useful information at the Harris County Tax Assessor web page, for example, but it's all stuff that's public record. I could also get it by taking a trip downtown, or calling them on the phone, and asking for it. The Internet makes it easy for me to get this information, but it didn't make it possible for me to get it.

Getting back to the story, I see that "the Internet" is not really the focus of this lawsuit:

Youens paid Docusearch Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla., about $150 to get Boyer's Social Security number and other information, including her work address.

"Docusearch pulled through (amazingly) it's like a dream," Youens wrote on his Web site.

A few weeks later, Youens pulled alongside Boyer's car after she left her job at a dental office and shot her 11 times before killing himself.

[...]

The Remsburgs filed a federal lawsuit against Docusearch in April 2000. The case is on hold while the state Supreme Court clears up several legal questions, including whether private investigators or information brokers have any legal obligations to the people whose information they sell.

The Remsburgs argue Docusearch should have notified Boyer that Youens was requesting the information, and made sure he had a legitimate reason.

But a Docusearch lawyer said the company has such a duty only if it knows the sale would significantly increase the risk of a violent attack. In this case, Youens already knew Boyer's home address and didn't need her work address to kill her, Andrew Schulman said at a hearing last month.

The court also is deciding whether someone whose Social Security number was obtained without permission can argue invasion of privacy, and whether the same argument can be made about a work address.

The facts of the case are pretty horrible, but I'm not sure why the private investigator is liable. Again, unless they obtained non-public information by illicit means, all they did was facilitate. Liam Youens could have found that information on his own had he chosen to. And what constitutes a "legitimate" reason to find out someone's work address? What if he'd said he was an old friend who wanted to send her flowers for her birthday? What if he said he'd met her at a convention and wanted to send her a resume? Seems to me this is a pretty low hurdle to clear.

Schulman did not immediately return calls seeking comment, but at the hearing, he argued that none of the information Docusearch provided was private. Docusearch had hired a woman who called Boyer and her family to get her work address without revealing why she was calling, a technique known as "pretexting."

In hacker circles, this is known as social engineering, though that usually refers to getting information that's supposed to be secret, such as passwords. This may sound sleazy, but let's face it: Once they know where she works, all it takes is a phone book for the rest.

My heart goes out to Amy Boyer's family and friends, but I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on. I certainly favor efforts to keep private data private, but only if those efforts focus on availability. I fear they are casting too broad a net, and I don't think any good law will result from it.

What holiday?

You know how it's supposed to be calm and quiet at the office during the holiday weeks? People are on vacation, no one's really thinking about work, not much gets done, etc etc etc?

Well, bugger that. I'm up to my clavicle in two projects that are due this week, and one of them is going through a change approval process from hell. So much for my usual end-of-year in-cube sabbatical. Good thing I hadn't planned on taking vacation at this time, I would've had to cancel it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to crawl under my desk and suck my thumb. I'll be back later when the coast is clear.

Where they come from

In case you're wondering what Ann Coulter might have been like in college, here's a taste. Of the many sad things about this person, I think the saddest is that she's an English major. But hey, she's kinda cute and she's not deterred by the finer points of logic, so look for her on Fox News any day now.

BTW, Alex, I can just about guarantee that you were a better writer than that when you were in college.

Off the Kuff retrospective: Referrers

Here's how people have found me for the past three months, according to the canned CGI referrer script that my domain host provides. They only keep two months' worth of data at a time, and I only bothered to think about this in November, so that's all I've got.

There's quite a bit of data here, so I've just put the tops here, and the full report under the More link.

For October:

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc:

=======================================

644: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator

202: http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/


Weblog referrers:

=================

498: Atrios

416: The Daily Kos

287: TAPPED

Top search terms:

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

  372: women of enron

  175: madelyne toogood

  162: bush upside down book

For November:

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc:

=======================================

640: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator

177: http://www.dansanderson.com/blogtracker/


Weblog referrers:

=================

393: TAPPED

359: The Daily Kos

332: Atrios

Top search terms:

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

  368: ron kirk

  321: kermit washington

  278: women of enron

For December:

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc:

=======================================

650: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator

407: http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/


Weblog referrers:

=================

1481: Atrios

578:  Ted Barlow

423:  TAPPED

Top search terms:

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

  153: women of enron

   93: trent lott racist

   82: marnie rose

For October:

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc:

=======================================

644: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator

202: http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/

173: http://www.weblogs.com/

126: http://www.dansanderson.com/blogtracker

104: http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/

100: http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/

74:  http://blo.gs/

57:  http://www.blogrolling.com/br/sidebar.phtml

48:  http://organica.us/r


Weblog referrers:

=================

498: Atrios

416: The Daily Kos

287: TAPPED

130: MyDD

102: Matt Yglesias

79:  Tom Spencer

78:  Cooped Up

78:  The Poor Man

65:  Kevin Whited

64:  Binkley

63:  Coffee Corner

59:  Ted Barlow

57:  Frothing At The Mouth

57:  Karin Kross

53:  Amish Tech Support

52:  Through the Looking Glass

52:  Little Green Footballs

50:  Owen Courreges

47:  The Sideshow

Top search terms:

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

  372: women of enron

  175: madelyne toogood

  162: bush upside down book

  141: bush book upside down

  123: prime number algorithm

   91: redneck neighbor

   74: enron auction

   66: marnie rose

   65: kermit washington

   54: madelyne toogood video

   41: women of enron nude

   41: dr marnie rose

   37: bush holding book upside down

   32: the women of enron

   32: women of enron photos

   28: jake young bali

   26: bush upside down

   25: ron kirk

   23: talk like a pirate day

   21: madelyne gorman toogood

For November:

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc:

=======================================

640: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator

177: http://www.dansanderson.com/blogtracker/

167: http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/

152: http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/

123: http://www.weblogs.com/

106: http://blo.gs/

94:  http://www.blogrolling.com/br/sidebar.phtml

48:  http://organica.us/r


Weblog referrers:

=================

393: TAPPED

359: The Daily Kos

332: Atrios

230: Calpundit

142: MyDD

82:  Matt Yglesias

80:  Coffee Corner

77:  Through the Looking Glass

71:  Body and Soul

65:  Tom Spencer

59:  Owen Courreges

54:  Cooped Up

48:  MaxSpeak

47:  Oliver Willis

46:  The People's Republic of Seabrook

46:  PLA

45:  Karin Kross

Top search terms:

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

  368: ron kirk

  321: kermit washington

  278: women of enron

  219: permissioned media

  202: prime number algorithm

  161: madelyne toogood

  117: bush upside down book

  115: alex michel

   92: kermit washington rudy

   76: shari daugherty

   73: marnie rose

   65: khjz

   65: rudy tomjanovich kermit washington

   65: rudy tomjanovich kermit

   61: the bachelor scandal

   57: kermit washington rudy tomjanovich

   53: bush book upside down

   47: rudy tomjanovich and kermit washington

   41: rudy tomjanovich punch

   41: kermit washington punch

For December:

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc:

=======================================

650: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator

407: http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/

194: http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/

143: http://www.technorati.com/

141: http://www.weblogs.com/

108: http://blo.gs/

101: http://www.blogrolling.com/br/sidebar.phtml

50:  http://www.dansanderson.com/blogtracker/


Weblog referrers:

=================

1481: Atrios

578:  Ted Barlow

423:  TAPPED

317:  The Daily Kos

107:  Tom Spencer

103:  Calpundit

79:   Matt Yglesias

68:   Cooped Up

67:   Owen Courreges

67:   The Rittenhouse Review

65:   Greg Wythe

65:   Coffee Corner

65:   Through the Looking Glass

56:   The Sideshow

50:   Oliver Willis

46:   Binkley

45:   Amish Tech Support

45:   MaxSpeak

45:   Ruminate This

45:   ArchPundit

Top search terms:

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

  153: women of enron

   93: trent lott racist

   82: marnie rose

   76: prime number algorithm

   61: ron kirk

   57: madelyne toogood

   53: wicked weasel

   39: khjz

   35: bobby joe hill

   33: mastercard moments

   33: shari daugherty

   31: dr marnie rose

   28: amber kulhanek

   23: kermit washington

   23: atrios

   19: girls with glasses

   18: texas nocall

   17: women of enron nude

   17: trent lott comment

   16: women of enron photos

Off the Kuff retrospective: Traffic report

I suppose everyone wonders, when they start a blog, if anyone will actually read it. I told family and friends about it, so I knew I had at least a few readers from the beginning. Some of these friends were already blogging or about to begin, so I also had a few referrals from the beginning as well. Still, the first time I heard from a stranger was a kick, as was the first time I heard from a fellow blogger who'd added me to his blogroll. (That would be Brian Linse, by the way.)

My traffic has increased more or less steadily over the year. I can point to a few discrete events that helped. First was a referral from Matt Welch to this post. (Welch had in turn spotted a link to that post on Matthew Yglesias's old Blogspot blog.) I had just installed a hit counter a few days before, and was amazed to see over 200 visits on the day that Welch cited me. It was a long time before I had a day that good again.

I got another boost, both in terms of traffic and getting onto blogrolls, from Tony Adragna back when he and Will Vehrs ran a popular BlogWatch. (It's kinda funny to me that blogwatching was a big deal back the days when I had a 20-link blogroll and plenty of time to read everything I wanted to in a given day. Ah, well.) Tony and Will did a nice job of highlighting new voices, and I considered it an honor to be in their rotation.

The next big traffic day I had was in early May when I criticized a post by Alex Rubalcava that claimed to show an embarrassing chain of emails involving Alex Michel of The Bachelor. InstaPundit had pointed to Rubalcava's post, so when Rubalcava in turn pointed to my dissent, I got a second-degree Instalanche, which was about as much traffic as I'd gotten from Matt Welch in February. This remains the closest I've ever come to a cite from Glenn Reynolds, for what it's worth. In the end, I was right to doubt this "scandal", albeit for the wrong reasons.

In July I got my own domain and migrated from Blogger/Blogspot to Movable Type. (Note to all you Blogspot users who think you might want to migrate some day: Don't wait until you have over six months' worth of archives to import.) Here's my monthly traffic stats before and after the move.

Since the move, I've gotten boosts from The Lefty Directory, from TAPPED, which was kind enough to put me on their blogroll when they went Movable Typing, from The Daily Kos and MyDD in the runup to the election, and of course from Atrios for pointing to my silly little poll about his Secret Identity. As noted before, that not only gave me my biggest day ever, it helped push me over 6000 visitors for December, making this my biggest month ever.

As things stand now, I've had about 45,000 visitors. I should get number 50,000 sometime in January, a bit before the one-year mark of my stat-tracking. An average weekday sees 220-270 hits. It's a bit humbling to realize that. I'm very grateful to everyone who's read my words, and especially to those who've made it a habit. I thank you all and I hope to continue to be worthy of your time in 2003 and beyond.

Let the year-end salutes begin

The Chron is doing its end of the year thing today, and I must say that their look at the silly side of 2002 was pretty darned funny. This first item is one I wish I'd known about earlier:

AND SHE ONCE ATE A KOSHER PICKLE, TOO
State representative candidate Martha Wong ran an ad in the Jewish Herald Voice citing her qualifications, including this one: "Martha's sons have participated in their friends' Bar Mitzvahs."

Yes, this is the woman who replaced Debra Danburg. God help us all.

There's also a more serious (and way more boring) retrospective, if you're curious.

Seduction of the Innocent

Since we're debating comics, I find it timely that Mark Evanier has a bit about Seduction of the Innocent, a 1954 book by Fredric Wertham which was about the allegedly pernicious influence of comic books on children. Wertham's books led to Senate hearings, chaired by future Presidential candidate Estes Kefauver, and calls for censorship that eventually led to a "voluntary" industry-imposed Comics Code.

The parallels with TV/movies/music/video games/the Internet/whatever, as described here, are pathetically amusing. Seduction of the Innocent is long out of print and its methodology has been widely discredited, but that sort of trivia never bothers anyone.

You can download a copy of Seduction of the Innocent if you want to see for yourself the case that Wertham made.

An open letter to Rolling Stone

A rock musician named Maya rips Rolling Stone a new one for putting Britney Spears and two other pop queens whom I don't even recognize on the cover of an issue entitled "Women In Rock".

Jewel and Mandy friggin' Moore have full page features as Rock Icons...Meanwhile Joan Jett gets one line. ONE LINE. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, who have never stopped touring, recently did 10 days in the Middle East playing for the troops stationed in Afghanistan. In AFGHANISTAN, Joan would come onstage wearing a birkha, which she ripped off and stomped on before blazing through the purest and nastiest rock show ANYWHERE. But even in the RS WOMEN IN ROCK issue, a story like that gets ONE SENTENCE on the bottom of the last page of Random Notes. Britney's Rock credentials? Well, she butchers the song "I Love Rock'n'Roll" on her latest record, and when asked about it the genius replies "Well, I've always loved Pat Benatar." And SHE is your Rock issue cover girl??
You should be REALLY embarrassed.

Amen. Via Thoughtcrimes, which I found via link to something else on The Sideshow.

Comics carping

On Monday, the Chron added two new comics, La Cucaracha, and The Boondocks. Some people don't find them funny:

As a longtime student of comic strip culture, I am appalled by the two new comics the Chronicle has decided to include. I find them highly racist and offensive.

A "longtime student of comic strip culture"? Do you mean "Someone who's read comics since I was a kid"? What a pompous bozo.

The Dec. 27 comic strip The Boondocks was nothing more than a mean-spirited and prejudicial attack on Southern Republicans. To intensify the smear, the language used was particularly offensive and inflammatory and unacceptable in contemporary discourse.

This strip is not funny and does not belong on the comic pages of a family newspaper.

Oh, cry me a river. I have to put up with Mallard Fillmore, B.C., and Marvin. Don't read what you don't like and quit whining.

I note, by the way, that the letter writers come from the suburbs (Sugar Land and Katy). Make of that what you will.

Houston cloning connection

Brigitte Boisselier, the scary-looking woman from the group that claims to have cloned human babies, was a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Houston. Her thesis advisor remembers her as a good student and a non-whacko.

Not anymore, and what's more, she appears to be handing it down:

Boisselier has at least one child, a daughter who reportedly will be used as a surrogate mother in a cloning procedure.

Great.

McKellen to play Dumbledore

Sir Ian McKellen is set to take over the role of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies from the late Richard Harris. I'm glad to hear it.

The story goes on to note that the producers' first choice was apparently still Richard Harris, using available footage and computer animation. After having seen the creepy effect of Nancy Marchand's head grafted onto another woman's body in Episode Two of Season Three of The Sopranos, I'm beside myself with relief that they've chosen a living replacement.
UPDATE: Or maybe he won't. Durn British tabloids. Thanks to Greg Morrow, who pointed this out in the comments.

Campbell's upgrades condensed soups

Campbell's is making changes to its line of condensed soups in an effort to halt a slow decline in sales.

The alphabet soup, for example, now has 40 percent more letters, and the vegetable chunks are crisper.

Doug Conant, who became Campbell's CEO nearly two years ago, said the company does not expect to revolutionize dinner tables.

"Our goal is to stabilize our condensed soup business," he said.

Confession time: I have a mad jones for Campbell's tomato soup. I could eat it for days on end if I had to. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it, in fact.

Hooters in the sky

The owner of the Hooters restaurant chain has finally succeeded in his quest to buy an airline.

In a news release, [Hooters of America Chairman Robert H.] Brooks said he plans to establish a charter air service called Hooters Air and would provide leisure travel service for the golf industry to Myrtle Beach, S.C. Brooks also has a home there.

In September, bankrupt Vanguard Airlines rejected Brooks' offer to buy the assets of the failed Kansas City, Mo., company.

"While things did not work out with Vanguard, I learned through my due diligence efforts that the charter service segment is a healthier business arena and much better suited for extending the Hooters brand," Brooks said.

I suppose going from hot wings to airplane wings is a brand extension. I'm just wondering if the flight attendants will be required to wear those orange short-shorts.

Aliens cloned my baby!

Or something like that, according to this story:

A member of a sect that believes life on Earth was created by extraterrestrials claimed Friday to have produced the world's first human clone, a baby girl.

The 7-pound baby was born Thursday by Caesarean section, said Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist and head of a company that did the experiment. She wouldn't say where the baby was born; she did say the birth was at 11:55 a.m. local time.

I'm not going to spend any time debating the merits (snort) of this claim. I'm just going to point you to the accompanying picture of Brigitte Boisselier and note that it does lend a certain air of credence to talk of cloned extraterrestrial alien babies. Nanoo nanoo!

RIP, Herb Ritts

Famed photographer Herb Ritts has died of pneumonia at the age of 50. Ritts was one of the best ever at photographing supermodels, but there was a lot more to his work than that.

It's the end of the year as we know it

I don't know about you, but my loins are fully girded for the inevitable onslaught of end of the year awards, retrospectives, Top N lists, and so on. Such awards are already showing up while others promise to soon.

I'm not one for award-giving, but it happens that January 1 will be my First Official Blog Anniversary. Couple that with the import and publishing of that last of my Blogspot archives, from February and January (still a work in progress), and I'm at least somewhat in the mood for looking back at The Year That Was. I hope you'll indulge me as I do a few posts between now and Jan 1 on this topic.

The first thing I'd like to do is to salute the blogs that have been on my blogroll continuously since I started. They are as follows:

Ain't No Bad Dude
Coffee Corner *, my blogfather
Page Fault Interrupt *
Amish Tech Support *
Garden Spot *
Rick Jones *
Karin Kross *
Little Green Footballs
Mark Evanier
Matt Welch
Matthew Yglesias, who should be pleased to note that I alphabetize by first name
Michael Croft *
Oliver Willis
Quasipundit
War Liberal
Josh Marshall
Virginia Postrel

The ones with an asterisk are people I knew in Real Life first. The others were on just about all the other blogrolls that I encountered at the time. That's 17 out of 105 total blogs on my blogroll, so obviously there's quite a few excellent blogs that didn't exist a year ago or didn't come to my attention until a bit later. Sadly, there are also some excellent blogs that are no longer with us.

I'll have more to say about my first year of blogging in the coming days.

Thank you, Midland

Remember Baby Jessica, the little girl who was rescued from a well in Midland in 1987? She's sixteen years old now and hopes to live a normal life.

"I've always wanted to be a normal person," McClure told Tyler television station KETK. "But I could never imagine my life without being Baby Jessica because it's all I've ever been."

McClure, now 16, said she doesn't remember anything about the day that has defined her life.

But much of the world can still recall the 2 1/2 days of anxiously awaiting word from rescuers, who worked desperately to free the toddler from a pipe only 8 inches wide.

Her family, rescuers and a television audience of millions shared a collective sigh of relief when a paramedic rose from a rescue shaft with Jessica in his arms.

McClure said she hopes to go to college, get married and have four children.

I wish her luck. In the meantime, she's in a select group of people who've had a song written about them by the Austin Lounge Lizards.

Is fish farming bad?

Argh. As if I didn't have enough to worry about, now I have to worry about whether fish farms are a threat to the environment or not.

From the Northwest to New England, salmon farming's critics contend the operations are a waterborne version of the terrestrial feed lot, contributing to ocean pollution, competing unfairly with wild fish and spreading disease.

Now a group called the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform is aiming a "Farmed and Dangerous" campaign directly at consumers, who can now get salmon year-round, often for as little as $3.99 a pound.

It's the usual he-said/she-said argument, where Industry Officials say that they meet the strictest standards and Industry Critics say the standards either suck or aren't being met at all. I don't have enough feel for this yet to know who's blowing more smoke.

In the end though, flavor might determine consumers' choice more than anything.

"Wild salmon tastes better, in our opinion," said Lane Hoss, a spokeswoman for Anthony's Restaurants, which has 18 restaurants from Olympia to Bellingham.

While Hoss had not heard anything about the boycott, she said: "We've just always been committed to wild salmon."

To each his own, [Washington State Sen. Dan] Swecker said; some people prefer the taste of farmed salmon.

"They are blander in taste because of what they're fed. Typically Americans prefer white fish that are deep-fat fried. It's a matter of preference."

I weep for my country's taste buds. No wonder the French sneer at us.

The Christmas story

Teresa posted from Luke 2:1-14 on Christmas Eve. I've always thought these were some of the most beautiful passages in the Bible. You'll recognize the last three paragraphs as the explanation Linus gives for "what Christmas is all about" to Charlie Brown.

So when T and I attended church that night, what did we get for the Gospel reading? The first chapter of Matthew, which is mostly an enumeration of the lineage from Abraham to Jesus and which has all the charm and poetry as an annual report. The only interesting bit is Verse 17:

So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.

So the answer to the question "How many generations are there in the lineage from Abraham to Jesus?" is: Forty-two. I wonder if this was Douglas Adams' inspiration.

Dallas rail quandary: Too many riders

The light rail system built by Dallas 20 years ago now has more riders than they know what to do with. Areas that were not originally part of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) plan are now asking for access to the system.

I'm sure we'll be hearing from Owen any minute now to explain why Dallas is nothing like Houston and all of the predictions of failure for light rail in Houston are nothing like all of the predictions of failure for light rail in Dallas.

The Tulia drug bust fiasco

Atrios points to this Bob Herbert column which gives an update on the situation in Tulia, Texas, site of one of the most botched drug-bust cases in recent memory. Atrios has some links to background information on the case, but here are a few more: the original Texas Observer story, a short followup from a few months later, and a story from this November by the same reporter.

That last link requires registration. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Beginning with a few arrests in the mid-nineties, building momentum with a school drug-testing policy passed in 1996, and culminating in the big busts of 1999, the drug war in Tulia coincided roughly with the razing of the Flats and the black community's move across the tracks—essentially pushing black and white Tulia into the same space for the first time ever. Of course, the timing also corresponded with the arrival of crack in the tiny towns of the Panhandle but not with the arrival of drugs per se; Tulians black and white had always had access to them, though perhaps not in proportion to their counterparts in the bigger cities. So why now, and why black Tulia?

"Propaganda is a funny animal," said Gary O. Gardner, a farmer who lives in the nearby village of Vigo Park. Few reporters on the Tulia beat have filed their stories without a visit to Gardner's compound, where he holds court from a converted pool room piled high with transcripts, writs, and affidavits, along with the occasional box of ammo. If [Joe Moore, currently serving a 90-year sentence] is the mayor of black Tulia, then Gardner, who is white and hails from one of the area's original farming clans, is the mayor of rural Swisher County. Critical of the busts from early on, he has now made it his personal crusade to get Moore and the others out of prison. He blames politicians like [District Attorney Terry] McEachern for creating the atmosphere in which the busts could happen. "If you're gonna make your living off the backs of somebody that you want to convict, you have to make 'em the enemy," he said. "And in Tulia, everything is blamed on the black drug dealers."

[...]

WHAT BECAME OF THE OTHER players in the sting? Officer [Tom] Coleman—presented with an Outstanding Lawman of the Year award by [then-Attorny General John] Cornyn following the busts—has since been fired from two narcotics postings and has gone to ground in Waxahachie; his lawyer deflects the media inquiries that still regularly come, from Court TV to the London Independent. Thirteen of the defendants are still in prison and serving long sentences, despite the fact that the state legislature passed several reforms in 2001 in response to what one member termed the Tulia fiasco; a team of attorneys, led by Jeff Blackburn, of Amarillo, and Vanita Gupta, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in Washington, D.C., has taken up their cases. The governor's office has reorganized the grant program that funded the operation, putting agents like Coleman under the supervision of the Texas Department of Public Safety. An FBI investigation announced two years ago seems to have petered out. Local authorities, for their part, have refused to condemn McEachern and [Sheriff Larry] Stewart's handling of the cases or to call for the release of those still incarcerated. "The lesson in all of this is that there is no political benefit to ruling for these defendants, and the judges saw that clearly," one defense attorney said. "They asked themselves, 'Am I going to give up my career for these people?' And the answer was 'No.'" Or as one person in the black community put it, more succinctly, "There are a lot of good, honest people in this community. They just don't have any balls."

Paul Holloway found that out the hard way. An attorney in nearby Plainview, Holloway took on several of the cases in the original sting as a court-appointed attorney, and it was he who discovered much of Coleman's personal and professional history. The son of a well-known Texas Ranger, Coleman had, as deputy, skipped town on two different sheriff's offices over the past five years; in Cochran County, he also left $7,000 in unpaid bills. In interviews and documents collected by Holloway and other defense attorneys, former co-workers and associates of Coleman's in both towns referred to him as a pathological liar and a paranoid gun nut. Cochran County's sheriff filed charges against him in an effort to collect restitution and placed a letter in his official file warning future employers not to hire him in law enforcement. Deep cover in Tulia was apparently his last chance to make good. Sheriff Stewart discovered the Cochran County warrant about six months into Coleman's tenure but decided to continue the undercover operation anyway. (Stewart would not be interviewed for this story.)

Holloway packaged up what he thought he had found and presented it to district judge Ed Self. He asked for money for expert witnesses, though he figured he wouldn't need them. "I thought that if somebody knew about Tom, it would all be stopped," Holloway said. Instead, Self sealed the information Holloway had spent weeks collecting and denied his request. "Do you know what this means, Judge?" Holloway asked to no avail.

"My kid is twelve years old," Holloway told me as we rolled through the wide, quiet streets of Plainview in his gold Mercedes, "and we just watched To Kill a Mockingbird. I told him the difference between me and Atticus Finch is this: At the end of the trial—this complete railroading of an innocent man—Atticus turned to his client immediately and said, "Don't worry. We're going to appeal.'" But Holloway's grasp of reality would not allow him to do that in Tulia. "I took an oath as a lawyer not to disgrace this system, but I knew in my heart they would win no appeals. If this will be stopped, it will be when the prosecutor puts a stop to it."

Bob Herbert notes that there's a new judge looking into the case, replacing Ed Self. That's clearly a good thing, but unless that judge can free those that are already in jail, I think Paul Holloway is right. Look at the case of Roy Criner, for example. He wasn't freed until the Montgomery County DA finally (and very reluctantly) asked for his freedom. The system likes closure. It doesn't like overturning jury verdicts.

What's in your garbage?

The Willamette Week, a weekly rag from Portland, OR, recently rifled through the garbage of some high-profile Portlanders and printed the results. They did so after Portland police had found evidence of drug use in the garbage of Portland police officer Gina Hoesly and used it to get a search warrant for inside her house:

Hoesly, a 13-year police officer who occasionally was an undercover decoy in police prostitution stings, became the subject of an investigation early this year, when she told police she'd been assaulted by her ex-boyfriend, Joshua David Rodriguez. Rodriguez has a history of drug arrests and convictions, and when officers booked him on assault charges, they found meth in his pocket.

Subsequently police began investigating Hoesly, hearing rumors from police informants that she had used drugs. On March 13 at 2:07 am, narcotics officers Jay Bates and Michael Krantz took her garbage. The order to do so came from Assistant Chief Andrew Kirkland, who dated Hoesly in the early '90s.

Searching through her trash back at Central Precinct, they found traces of cocaine and methamphetamine, as well as drug paraphernalia. They also found a bloody tampon. They sent a piece of the tampon to the state crime lab, where forensics experts tested it for drugs, DNA and, for reasons that remain unclear, semen. The results of those tests have not been released.

The police didn't seek a search warrant to take Hoesly's trash because, as the Multnomah County District Attorney's office conceded, officers didn't at the time have sufficient evidence to convince a judge to issue a warrant. But once they had drug residue from Hoesly's trash, officers were able to persuade Judge Dorothy Baker to issue a search warrant for Hoesly's house. Inside, they found more paraphernalia and a diary that described apparent drug use. An indictment was issued in June.

Hoesly's attorney successfully argued that this search was unconstitutional. City attorneys had argued that since the trash had been put out at the curb, it was public property. Willamette Week used that reasoning to search the trash of the mayor, the chief of police, and the district attorney. The mayor and police chief were not amused (the DA shrugged it off).

All in all, very interesting reading. Makes me want to rush out and buy a shredder, though I already have a pretty effective strategy for dealing with credit card receipts - I leave them in my pants pockets and let them run through the laundry before I throw them out. If you can pull a card number off them after that, my hat is off to you.

Via Alas, A Blog.

A true gift

Here's a great Christmas story from the news:

A New York City police officer got a Christmas gift of $3,000 from homeless people who wanted to thank him for standing up for them.

Officer Eduardo Delacruz was suspended for 30 days without pay last month after he refused a sergeant's order to arrest a homeless man found sleeping in a parking garage.

In gratitude, organizations for the homeless put together the fund for the 37-year-old officer, his wife and their five children. Homeless people also contributed change scrounged from passers-by, money earned from recycling cans and bottles, even a portion of their welfare checks.

"We just wanted to thank him by contributing however we could," said Joe Bostic, one of 30 former and current homeless men and women who announced the gift. "And a lot of us gave quarters, nickels and dimes."

According to police, Delacruz told his superiors in the police department's Homeless Outreach Unit that he would not arrest a homeless man for trespassing on Nov. 22 because the man had nowhere else to go.

The man was arrested by another officer and pleaded guilty to trespassing.

In a statement Tuesday, the Police Department stood by the suspension and said Delacruz had been punished for failing to comply with a lawful order.

Homelessness has surged to record levels in New York in recent months, and advocates have filed a lawsuit claiming the city is trying to sweep the homeless off the streets by having police arrest them.

Arrests of the homeless are up, but police deny there is any concerted effort to push them off the streets.

The check was made out to Delacruz's wife to avoid creating a personal conflict for the officer. The suspension cost him about $3,600 in net pay, said his lawyer, Norman Siegel.

Siegel said the officer was back at work Tuesday but was "very moved" by what the homeless did. The officer and his family "specifically asked me to say, 'God bless everyone, especially the homeless,'" Siegel said.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

For those last minute gifts

It just isn't Christmas any more without Dave Barry's Gift Guide. I told Tiffany I plan on getting her one of the Duct Tape Purses next year (here's a picture). She was duly impressed.

Merry Christmas, Mel Torme

Mark Evanier has one of the best Christmas stories I've ever read, about Mel Torme and a group of slightly clueless Christmas carolers. Read it and smile.

Football Is A Sucker's Game

Just finished reading this NYT magazine story about the realities of bigtime college football today. It's pretty gnarly. Read the whole thing, but be prepared to feel the need for a shower afterwards.

This bit here is the reason why I hate the Bowl Coalition Series and all of its privileged members:

''We are receiving letters and calls from conferences that want in,'' Mike Tranghese, coordinator of the five-year-old B.C.S., told me. ''And we have formed a presidential oversight panel to form an answer.'' But letting more members in would mean splitting up the money more ways. I asked Tranghese if I was missing something in assuming the B.C.S. had no incentive to cut more schools in. ''If you were missing something, I would let you know,'' he said. ''The B.C.S. consists of the major teams as determined by the marketplace. Any other system is socialism. And if we're going to have socialism, then why don't we share our endowments?''

Let me suggest another word to you, Mike: oligarchy. "Cabal" also works. Whatever it is we've got today, it sure ain't an unfettered free market.

There's a third word that also applies: "Desperation".

One reason B.C.S. members do not want to share is that college sports have become so immensely expensive that even some of the biggest of the big lose money. The University of Michigan, which averages more than 110,000 fans for home football games, lost an estimated $7 million on athletics over the course of two seasons, between 1998 and 2000. Ohio State had athletic revenues of $73 million in 1999-2000 and ''barely managed to break even,'' according to the book ''Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports,'' by Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor. A state audit revealed that the University of Wisconsin lost $286,700 on its Rose Bowl appearance in 1998 because it took a small army, a traveling party of 832, to Pasadena.

If the Michigans and Ohio States of the world don't make money, it can't be done.

The USS Meredith Victory

I'll be scaling back on posting for a day or two (there's some kind of holiday coming up). In the spirit of that holiday, read about the USS Meredith Victory, which rescued 14,000 Korean War refugees on December 22, 1950. More information is here, including a page of photos. That page sadly lacks any captions, but you can see from this picture what it was like on board. I'd never heard anything about this great story before.

Thanks to my dad for the link.

Enron movie update

The Enron movie that I mentioned in August is set to air on CBS on January 5.

Whether the movies are any good remains to be seen, but the scandal certainly has the stuff of which a great movie can be made, said Jim Ragan, director of the University of Southern California's professional writing program.

"Many of the great movies are about backdrop. Doctor Zhivago had the Russian Revolution. Gone with the Wind had the Civil War," he said. "Enron has greed, deals in Washington, a company trying to show profits at all costs. That's the approach I would take. That would be the backdrop.

Enron also has Shari Daugherty, though sadly the screenwriters appear to have overlooked her. If only HBO had made this movie.

(For no particularly good reason, I'm reminded here of what Yogi Berra said when someone asked him what he thought of Doctor Zhivago: "It sure was cold in Russia in those days.")

It's hard to know where to start with the snarkiness on this one. Christian Kane! Mister Blue! Little Kenny Lay flashbacks! Someone please get to work on the Enron Movie Drinking Game so we can all be properly prepared when it airs.

And what could be more fun than an Enron movie? Why, two Enron movies, of course:

FX plans on skirting satire to present a sobering take on Enron, said Gerard Bocaccio, senior vice president of entertainment.

Enron "almost rose to a mythical status, with Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and (Andrew) Fastow. It became the precursor of the meltdown of the Clinton, go-go 1990s," he said. "We're taking the issue of corporate excess very seriously."

[...]

The Enron movie, Bocaccio said, will be loosely based on the still unreleased book Power Failure by local writer Mimi Swartz (who is married to a Chronicle assistant managing editor) and Sherron Watkins, who wrote a famous memo criticizing Enron's accounting.

Shockingly, some people doubt that a second Enron movie would be a good thing:

Some Hollywood observers doubt that FX will make the movie. Only rarely will a network or cable channel decide to make a second made-for-TV movie on the same subject, said Barbara Corday, chair of USC's television production division and former head of prime-time programming at CBS.

"They try to avoid it like the plague," she said. "I don't believe anybody will make a second movie."

I'm sure she's right. It's not like this is the Amy Fisher story, after all.

WTC Stadium

Eric McErlain expands on a suggestion by Instapundit for what to do with the World Trade Center site. Instapundit had jokingly suggested a baseball stadium; McErlain seriously suggests a football stadium.

I like this idea. The Jets have never really had a home of their own - they used to play in Shea Stadium, now it's Giants Stadium. It's time they stepped out of the shadows and formed their own identity in their own stadium.

When I say "formed their own identity", I mean this: Who's the first person you think of when you think of the New York Jets? If it's not Joe Namath, you're either a true fan or really confused. Namath last played for the Jets in 1976. They've had a few good players since then, and they have an exciting young team now, but as long as they play in the Meadowlands, they'll be the Giants' kid brother.

(There'll be another benefit to a Jets stadium in Manhattan: my dad will have to stop referring to the Buffalo Bills as "New York's football team". I don't think that'll help overcome any financing issues, but I figured I'd throw it out there anyway. You never know.)

Finally, it goes without saying that the Yankees need to stay in Yankee Stadium. Anything else is a sacrelige. If you want to argue otherwise, I'll be sticking my fingers in my ears and singing "Row Row Row Your Boat" at the top of my voice. Some things just can't be discussed maturely.

A season for giving

Forty-eight families donated $34 million to the Texas GOP this year, more than half of the $64 million total that the state party raised.

I'm not going to act all shocked and indignant about this. "GOP gets big bucks from rich folks" is as much a secret as Trent Lott's despicable racism. It isn't even news any more.

So, I'm going to focus on a couple of interesting bits in this story. I'll start by quoting Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, one of the five biggest GOP benefactors:

[McNair] said the way to improve the campaign finance system is to require greater transparency and timely reporting of who donates to political funds.

"That's the answer, because you smoke everybody out and you know who is putting the money up," he said. "If I'm in the construction business and there's construction legislation up there, then it's clear."

I agree. It surely would have been nice for this story to have been written in October rather than December, for example. Consider this little nugget:

The second-largest donor to Texans for a Republican Majority was the Farmers Insurance employees committee, which gave $150,000.

Farmers' threats to pull out of the Texas homeowners insurance market have led Gov. Perry to say he will declare insurance reform an emergency legislative issue in January.

I suspect that might have been a campaign issue had it been known before the election. It may not have made any difference, but it would have been nice to know.

Former #1 giver James Leininger was #2 this year, but he's already had plenty of influence. Be sure to read the linked stories, or do a Google search on "James Leininger". It's an eye opener. One word of advice: If you're a Democrat, don't buy any products from Promised Land Dairy.

Then there's Bo Pilgrim. What can you say about a man who once handed out $10,000 checks on the state Senate floor when a bill on workers' compensation insurance was being discussed? Here's what he says for himself:

Pilgrim now says that money was not donated for the good of his company but for the good of all Texas workers whose jobs might have moved out of state if the workers' compensation system had not been overhauled.

"I'm a large contributor, but I have 24,500 employees," Pilgrim said. "I'm contributing for them. I know they are not able to contribute, some of them.

"It's my responsibility to support the right candidates for the right reasons. It's not selfish. It's interpreted that way by the individual who doesn't have or can't have the same input."

Yes, that really was selfless of him. I should be ashamed of myself for being snarky about it. Maybe if I'd get off my butt and become a millionaire so I could do what he does I wouldn't be such a crab.

The big winner this year was Houston's own Bob Perry, the man behind the evil soulless townhome development company Perry Homes. The sidebar story gives some background on him. I have a strong dislike for Perry Homes because of what they've done to Montrose, the neighborhood I used to live in. Now I have even more reason to feel this way.

The last of the Top Five is a Dallas dusinessman named Wayne Huddleston. The article refers to hims as a "different kind of Republican", and for once I actually agree with that assessment:

A resident of Highland Park, a Dallas enclave that is home to the state's wealthiest school district, Huddleston wants to get rid of the "Robin Hood" school finance system that takes money from rich districts and gives to poor ones. But he also is willing to propose the usually unthinkable in Texas politics -- a flat state income tax to pay for schools.

"Ultimately, no one can argue with educating every child in the state of Texas," Huddleston said. "My goal is not to do it well in the short term but to put something into play in the long term that does the job."

Anyone who'd advocate a state income tax is definitely not a conformist. I can't say he'll get much return on his investment, though.

Throw in a large order of fries and you've got a deal

This, from Jonathan Feigen's NBA notebook, is exactly what's wrong with salary caps, in a nutshell:

Though he has not played this season and likely will never play again, the Raptors are shopping Hakeem Olajuwon.

There does not seem to be a market for a player who already has announced his retirement, but undaunted, Raptors general manager Glen Grunwald has spoken to teams around the NBA about trading Olajuwon's contract.

Neither Olajuwon nor the Raptors have officially filed retirement papers with the league, and Olajuwon remains on the Raptors' injured list. Grunwald has kept Olajuwon's contract active since the Raptors are going to have to pay him anyway.

Grunwald is searching for a team desperate for salary-cap room in the summer of 2004 that might be willing to trade a serviceable player who is under contract for longer than Olajuwon, who is due $6 million in each of the next two seasons.

"There's some talk, nothing imminent, but it's a concept teams may want to explore," Grunwald said.

Trading a live body for a retired player so you can free up cap space next year. Only in the NBA.

Mount Union beats Trinity

Congratulations to Mount Union for their impressive win over my Trinity Tigers in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl. The Purple Raiders won their third straight national championship and sixth in seven years with a dominating 48-7 victory. Senior running back Dan Pugh scored four touchdowns, giving him a record 41 for the season, two more than Barry Sanders.

Would the presence of suspended quarterback Roy Hampton have made a difference? I don't know, and Trinity coach Steve Mohr refuses to play the what-if game:

"I don't think that is a fair question," Mohr said. "And I'm not going to subject myself to answer that."

Mount Union head coach Larry Kehres addressed the question in the AP wire story:

"It was a very difficult thing for Trinity to play without him," Kehres said. "I really respect Coach Mohr for the way he was able to handle it, but no team can, on short notice, deal with a problem like that."

As I said before, I'm sad for Hampton's teammates, who deserved a chance to play for the title with their leader. I initially thought that Hampton's sin was not suspension-worthy, but I now believe it was appropriate and I'm glad that my alma mater did what they thought was right.

Any season that ends 14-1 and national runnerup has got to be considered a smashing success. My sincere congratulations to both teams. We'll get 'em next year, Trinity.

Picture Yourself

Congrats to Christine for the blurb in the NYT about her self-portrait site Picture Yourself. Here's the relevant bit for those who don't feel like registering a bogus logon ID:

Self-portraits in words abound on the Web. Now a visual complement to the written outpourings found on so many autobiographical home pages is developing.

The three-year-old Mirror Project is often cited as the inspiration for a trend in Web self-portraiture. At first glance, the site seems gimmicky: it accepts only photographic self-portraits shot in reflective surfaces, like mirrors and Mylar balloons. But its popularity - there are nearly 12,000 photos at the site - reflects how creatively people have taken up the challenge posed by its founder, Heather Champ, a San Francisco Web designer.

By contrast, Picture Yourself focuses on straightforward self-portraits, particularly those obtained by sticking out your arm and snapping, said Christine Selleck of Houston, who started the site in September. As with the Mirror Project, people who submit photos can include a paragraph about why they decided to capture that particular moment.

The Daily Photo Project, on the other hand, eschews one moment in favor of many. Each day for two years, Jonathan Keller of Brooklyn has taken a photograph of himself for this site. The photos are eerily the same, except for variations in shirts, the occasional pair of glasses and bad hair days.

Mr. Keller said that the project started as a joke as a way to justify his investment in a digital camera, but that he soon "started to see the potential that it had from the perspective of 20 to 30 years down the road" in documenting the "subtle shift" in one person over time. If he continues the project for decades, he may deliver the first time-lapse photo of a human life.

Way to go, Christine!

New frontiers in sports

You've been hearing all along how streaming video on the Internet is going to be the Next Big Thing. Well, Rice University sure hopes so - they just signed a deal to have their basketball and baseball games broadcast in that fashion.

The subscription-based serviced was created by by MaxVu Sports Broadcasting Network (MSBN), subsidiary of MaxVU, Inc., a Houston-based company, which teamed with the Owls to bring fans this exciting new way to see their favorite teams play live on the Internet.

[...]

Rice will offer the Tulsa game on Jan. 11, 2003, and the women's game against Hawaii on Jan. 30, free of charge. Links to OwlVision are located at RiceOwls.com or at MaxVuSports.tv. Following those games, all scheduled baseball games will be available to viewers at a low subscription cost of only $8 per game. Season packages for the baseball season are also available. Rice baseball, coming off of its third College World Series appearance, is scheduled to make 20 appearances on OwlVision, including games against defending national champion Texas, Texas A&M, Houston, Nebraska, and Mississippi.

It sounds like a pretty good deal, especially for a school like Rice that gets little exposure otherwise and has a powerhouse baseball team that most of its alumni never get to see. Obviously, this is somewhat of a niche market - fans of schools like Notre Dame and UCLA have no trouble seeing their teams play - but it's not necessarily a small market. Consider all of the non-Division 1A football teams, the less visible sports like baseball, hockey, soccer, and volleyball - if the cost of setting up a broadcast for a given game are sufficiently moderate, the total potential audience is pretty vast. This will bear watching.

What to do with the Dome?

So now that we have the shiny and new Reliant Stadium for football, the Rodeo, and presumably monster truck rallies, what shall we do with the erstwhile Eighth Wonder of the World, the Astrodome? Well, State Rep. Ron Wilson has an idea: Turn it into a casino. All you need is a new state law, local voter approval, cooperation from the Commissioner's Court, and $25 mil or so in development costs. Piece of cake.

County Judge Robert Eckels just chuckles, asking if "all the silliness" in Austin is to celebrate the upcoming holidays.

He said gambling would create a net loss for Houston, not a gain as it drains local dollars that would have been spent on other entertainment.

Eckels dismisses the dream that turning the Astrodome into a giant roulette wheel somehow will draw out-of-state visitors to Houston.

He argued that, bad budget times or not, Texas should have learned its lesson that the lottery wouldn't solve all money problems forever, and pari-mutual horse racing is more a disappointment than a panacea.

"I would hope we can find a better use for the Astrodome," Eckels said. "I certainly question the viability of a casino in the Houston market, and beyond that, the benefit of casino gambling for Texas."

I hate having to agree with Robert Eckels, but I agree with Robert Eckels. People in Houston go across the border to Louisiana to gamble. A casino here would be a big white elephant.

I, of course, would like to see it turned into a rail depot, where the current downtown line would meet up with a line that follows US 90 to Sugar Land and maybe a line that goes along Loop 610. The casino is more likely to happen, but if Ron Wilson can dream big, then so can I.

UPDATE: Larry has some advice for Rep. Wilson.

Survey says

Here are the results after one full day of the Who Is Atrios poll:

Name              Votes   Pct

=============================

Mahir!               50   27%

Sidney Blumenthal    32   17%

Bob Shrum            21   11%

Mickey Kaus          18    9%

Christopher Hitchens 17    9%

Mark V. Shaney       16    8%

Jennifer Liberto     14    7%

Norah Vincent        13    7%

If your favorite candidate wasn't listed, it's all Katherine Harris' fault.

Total traffic yeserday was slightly over 800 visitors, more than double my previous all-time high. Referrals from Atrios accounted for more than 700 of those visits. I hope some of those folks come back, but whether or not they do it was fun. I'll keep the poll up through the end of the month. For those of you from Chicago, you can vote once per day, so take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Stagg Bowl

Less than 24 hours to the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, the championship game of Division III football. My alma mater, the Trinity Tigers, have the Herculean task of defeating the Mount Union Purple Raiders, by far the best college football program in the nation. How good are they? Here are the winningest teams of the 1990s:

Division I-A: Florida State, 109-13-1 (.890)
Division I-AA: Dayton, 92-17-0 (.844)
Division II: Pittsburg State, 103-18-2 (.846)
Division III: Mount Union, 120-7-1 (.941)

How good are they? They have two of the three longest winning streaks in college football: a 54-game streak from 1996 to 1999, and a 41-game streak that started immediately after that and is still going. That's 95 wins in their last 96 games. They have never lost a title game, and they've won 84 consecutive regular season games. Were it not for that one playoff loss in 1999, they'd have won the last six Division III titles.

All this in a program that's not allowed to give athletic scholarships. Pretty damned impressive.

Kickoff is tomorrow at noon Eastern time on ESPN2. The official web page of the Stagg Bowl is here. Full coverage of D3 football is here. They'll be webcasting the game if you're cable-free. The experts don't give my Tigers much of a chance, not that I can blame them given Mount Union's history. Mount Union has a good fan site here. The Tigers, alas, don't have such a page, but their official athletic department page has some good stuff.

GO TIGERS!

Viva prairie dogs!

It's a great day for prairie dog fans, as the city of Lubbock has approved a plan to relocate 15,000 of the critters instead of exterminating them from their current home in a wastewater treatment area. Full coverage of the Great Prairie Dog Saga can be found here.

Feds examining Fastow and Lay families

Missed this yesterday: Federal prosecutors have brought testimony before the grand jury about Lea Fastow, wife of indicted exec Andy Fastow. They have also interrogated Ken Lay's adult children, though only about Kenny Boy himself.

There had been speculation for some time now that the feds might zero in on Lea Fastow as a wedge against Andy. She has financial savvy, including an MBA from Northwestern, and her name appears in a number of questionable places. The Kremlin watchers see this as a sign that Andy has not been playing ball:

"She is the final and ultimate piece of leverage prosecutors have over Andy Fastow," said Jacob Frenkel, a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer and former federal prosecutor based in Washington, D.C. "He does not want to go to trial with his wife at the defendant's table instead of in the gallery."

So far, there are no indications that the government and Fastow's defense team have been negotiating.

"If he has been cooperating on a level that the government found in the least bit satisfactory, they would not have resorted to this kind of pressure," Frenkel said. "His dilemma now is if he is willing to go to trial if the price could include the liberty of a family member."

The feds don't have the same leverage over Kenny Boy, but you can be sure that if they eventually succeed in flipping Fastow, he'll give up some juicy bits on Lay and Jeff Skilling. Keep your fingers crossed.

Transsexuals

Ted Barlow has a fascinating post about the mating strategies of straight vs. gay male transsexuals. Go check it out.

Instalanche, bah

If there were any doubt that Atrios is the Liberal Instapundit, I can offer some pretty conclusive evidence. Since he posted an announcement of my poll at a little after 9 AM CST, I've gotten over 400 hits. That's 400 hits in four hours, enough to be my biggest day ever and it's only 1:19 PM. Wow.

And so far, with 128 votes cast, the leader is Mahir! with 34, followed by Sidney Blumenthal with 23, Bob Shrum with 17, Kaus and Hitchy-poo with 14 each, Mark V. Shaney with 12, Norah Vincent with 8, and Jennifer Liberto with 6. Go Mahir!

I apologize for not offering a write-in spot, but that's what I get for using a free poll service. Next time I'll roll my own.

Lott Steps Down

Trent Lott has just announced that he will not seek the Majority Leader post. Good riddance. I think he realized that this story wasn't going away. Looks like it'll be Bill Frist replacing him. Wanna bet Frist will be hailed as a "moderate", even though his voting record is anything but?

The immigrant roundup

I agree with Atrios, this post on eRiposte about the mass arrest of immigrants who had responded to an INS request to come in for some paperwork processing is a must read. This is bad on many levels, and it deserves to get some harsh scrutiny.

Lott and Hispanics

Remember how Bush and Rove's grand strategy was to woo Hispanic voters to the GOP? Well, so far many of them are not impressed by the President's reaction to L'Affaire Lott:

"It doesn't look good for Senator Lott ... but there is a lot that President Bush can do. The Republicans now control the White House and both houses of Congress. If they are in fact serious about appeals to minorities and their commitment to civil rights, it will show up on their agenda when we come back in January," Cecilia Munoz, vice president for policy for the National Council of La Raza, said Thursday.

[...]

"The core issue remains for the president: Regardless of the minorities he puts in the White House, there are people he will still associate with who have certain views that are beyond abhorrent," said U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' civil rights task force.

The most interesting thing in this article is a brief reference to former Texas Commissioner of Health William 'Reyn' Archer, who was appointed to that post in 1997 on the recommendation of Governor George W. Bush. Archer's record is a colorful one. In April 2000, he told NYT reporter Adam Clymer that Texas' Hispanic population "lacked the belief 'that getting pregnant is a bad thing.' Archer is the son of former Congressman Bill Archer and spent time in Daddy Bush's administration as an official in HHS. He was a controversial choice for Health Commissioner because he also has some interesting things to say about women and blacks.

This Austin Chronicle article, written shortly after Archer was finally forced to resign just before the November election (more than six months after his remarks about Hispanics were first published) gives a glimpse into how Bush has operated when confronted with a Lott-like situation in the past:

Later, Archer backed away from some of his statements [about how the birth control pill gave "too much power" to women]. After he was hired by Gov. Bush, his critics in the Texas Legislature agreed to give him the benefit of the doubt. Now, those legislators say Archer should have been fired even before he made national headlines in April with his comment that Hispanic communities encourage teenage girls to become pregnant. Archer apologized for those statements, and Bush said he was satisfied. But the governor was finally forced to depose Archer when a former TDH administrator who is black sued him last month for questioning her allegiance to her race.

Emphasis mine. Sound familiar? Note how long it took for Bush to finally abandon Reyn Archer, and that it took a lawsuit to do it. Archer was in a much less visible role than Trent Lott, but by the same token he was more closely connected to him.

Here's some more detail about that lawsuit.

Dr. Demetria Montgomery, who was a top-level administrator in the department before she was fired last month, had secretly tape-recorded a February meeting with Archer, who is white.

On the tape, Archer can be heard making references to "lynching" and suggesting Montgomery used her brain to advance her career and "that's what white people do."

[...]

Archer can be heard referring several times to Montgomery's race and said "you are fair (skinned) as a black woman, you get certain privileges in white culture that others don't get for that." Archer also suggested that she had her brains instead of her heart to advance her career and "that's what white people do."

This Salon article gives the context of the "lynching" quote. Remember, Reyn Archer was recommended for his position by George W. Bush. Bush didn't inherit him.

And if you thought the tale of Reyn Archer couldn't get any more sordid, how about this story, in which proposed restrictions on weight-loss products that contain ephedrine (a stimulant that has been linked to health problems) were dropped after Archer met with industry leaders and some $40,000 was funneled to Bush's 1998 reelection campaign. This CNN story has more details.

All of this information was found by a simple Google search. Makes you wonder why the Chron didn't fill in the blanks a bit more.

So getting back to Trent Lott, we see again that the perception of racism puts the Republicans in a bind regarding issues that blacks and Hispanics care about:

As for Bush, [Marisa Demeo, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund] said, "He did part one, which was to condemn the statements, but he hasn't done part two. He hasn't come out and said, `This is what I believe and this is what I'm going to fight for in the next Congress: I'm going to reduce the Hispanic drop-out rate,' for example. What is his commitment to immigration issues, to healthcare, to affirmative action?

"The Republican Party did a lot in 2000 and 2002 to reach out to the Latino community, which is great," she said. "But in order to keep that support and make it grow, a party has to deliver something."

[...]

Tatcho Mindiola, director of the University of Houston's Center for Mexican American Studies, said that while most Americans may think of segregation as affecting African-Americans in the South, older Texas Latinos also grew up with segregated schools and lunch counters, and they haven't forgotten.

"Bush's personal popularity seemed to help Republicans begin to move beyond that, at least in Texas," he said. Bush received about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in his last run for governor, a record for Republicans. "But remember, California did not go for him, and in Florida he had help from his brother," Mindiola said. "Republicans tout the (improving) Hispanic vote, but it's probably not long-lasting. Republicans are still very fuzzy on bilingual education. They are adamantly opposed to affirmative action."

As others have noted, Trent Lott can't make the non-racist case against things like affirmative action because he has no credibility on the issue. He won't have any credibility to make the non-racist case against bilingual education, either. The question is whether Bush will lose this credibility as well. If the media start to revisit the Reyn Archer case, maybe he will.

The Truth Is Out There

Many have speculated about the identity of Atrios, also known as the man behind the Mighty Casio and the Liberal Instapundit. Well, I say there's only one way to find out: It's poll time! Go vote at the right and we'll see who wins. You can vote once per day. I'll keep the poll up until after New Year's Day.

(Note: I realized after I created the poll at Pollhost that I should have included Frank Morgan, the actor who played the Wizard of Oz, as a choice. I tried manually editing the HTML that Pollhost supplied to include him. That made his name appear as a choice, but he wasn't in the back end list, so votes for him wouldn't have counted. Alas.)

Could budget problems slow the War on Drugs?

Holofernes points me to this NYT story about how state budget battles are affecting the War on Some Drugs and other crimes:

After three decades of building ever more prisons and passing tougher sentencing laws, politicians now see themselves as being forced to choose between keeping a lid on spending or being tough on crime.

As a result, states are laying off prison guards, or giving prisoners emergency early releases like those in Kentucky. Some states have gone so far as to repeal mandatory minimum sentences or to send drug offenders to treatment rather than to prison in an effort to slow down the inflow of new inmates.

And in other locales, prosecutors or courts have placed a moratorium on misdemeanor cases like shoplifting, domestic violence and prostitution.

I've already advocated drug law reform as a way of saving money in our bloated corrections allocation. As noted in this recent Chron story, Texas spends some $73 million annually incarcerating small time drug offenders (most of which come from Hang 'em High Harris County, incidentally). That's a drop in the $5 billion budget shortfall bucket, but you gotta start somewhere.

Aside from the budget issues, I have the same problem with these kind of drug busts that I do with increased DUI intolerance, namely that we're criminalizing a larger and larger portion of our population. A felony arrest has huge repercussions on a person's ability to get a job, find housing, and get credit, not to mention losing the right to vote. This in turn imposes all kinds of other costs on society, and for what? Are you safer in your home now that Harris County has sent thousands of recreational stoners to the hoosegow?

Some day, some politician will connect the dots between our endless desire to git-tuff-on-crime and the many ways in which it costs us, and will have the courage to ask if this is really the best way to do business. I can only hope it will be sooner rather than later.

Drinking and driving

According to the Chron, "the rate of alcohol-related traffic deaths in Texas has declined 63 percent in the last 20 years", from 2.24 per 100 million vehicle miles travelled to 0.83. That's good news, right? Not if you're MADD:

"The bad news, of course, is that Texas is still number one in the total body count," said Bill Lewis, public policy liaison for the Texas office of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, someone has to be. Texas is a big state with a lot of people and not a lot of mass transportation, after all.

In 2001, Texas lost an estimated 1,798 people in alcohol-related crashes, compared with an estimated 2,801 in 1982.

Let's put some of these numbers in context. In 2001, Texas had 21,325,018 people. In 1982, Texas had 15,332,000 people. Thus, the rate of alcohol-related fatalities to population fell from 18.27 per 100,000 to 8.43 per 100,000. The mortality rates overall were 759.2 per 100,000 in 1980 and 736.1 in 2000. That means that alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped from 2.4% of all deaths to 1.1% of all deaths.

So, to recap, in the Great State Of Texas in 2001, fewer than one person out of 10,000 was killed in an alcohol-related traffic accident. Over the period of time in which Texas' population grew by 40%, the annual number of such deaths dropped by 40%. How is it that Bill Lewis can see any bad news at all?

It gets better. "Alcohol-related traffic fatalities" does not mean "people killed by drunk drivers". As others have noted, it's any fatal accident in which someone is killed and one of the parties, not necessarily the one who caused the accident, had had something to drink. The real "drunk driver" toll is undoubtedly a fair bit smaller.

Yet the story has a completely negative tone about it, as if we were back in the bad old days when drunk driving was winked at:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Wednesday released statistics that, for the first time, document the extent of alcohol-related fatalities for every state. Only eight states and the District of Columbia had more alcohol-related fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles of travel in 2001 than Texas.

Lewis said public attitudes about drinking and driving have changed in the past two decades. He credits the Texas Legislature with passing strong laws such as reducing the blood-alcohol level required to prove legal intoxication.

But in other areas Texas has lagged behind California and other states, said Lewis. For example, it was only in the last legislative session that Texas eliminated a requirement that a police officer must see someone sipping a beer in their vehicle before that driver could be arrested for violating a ban on open containers.

MADD recently graded Texas' efforts to stop drunken driving a C-minus. California received a B-plus.

The problem here is that we're rapidly approaching the point of severely diminished returns. If we wanted to, we could get alcohol-related traffic fatalities down close to zero, but the price we'd have to pay - regular "sobriety checkpoints", more and more people arrested for smaller and smaller infractions - would far exceed the benefit.

I find myself in agreement with the National Motorists' Association's position on drunk driving (found via TalkLeft). It's time we put a sense of proportion back into this debate.

Oh, and one last thing: Candy Lightner, the woman who founded MADD after her 13-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver who then got a slap on the wrist from the court, is no longer involved in MADD. She believes the organization "has lost its focus".

Hampton suspended for Stagg Bowl

Trinity University has suspended All-America quarterback Roy Hampton for the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl that will determine the Division III football champion.

"He is no longer with the team in any way," Trinity Athletics Director Bob King said. "We have determined that Mr. Hampton's actions were not consistent with the standards for a student-athlete leader on the Trinity campus."

Hampton's previous legal troubles also factored into the decision, King said.

Hampton, who's from Burleson, and three other students were accused in October 2001 of breaking into a student's off-campus apartment.

Trinity officials initially suspended the students for one year, but after reviewing the case allowed those involved the option to resume classes in August.

The other three students transferred.

Hampton "agreed to a number of things (to be reinstated) and we feel that has been violated with the second incident," King said. "The culmination of the two led us to where we are. There was really no other decision to make."

I'm sad that this happened, but I respect the university's decision. Mostly I'm sad for Hampton's teammates, who deserved a chance to play for the title without this kind of handicap or distraction. Hopefully, they'll rally around junior backup QB Dan Desplaines and look forward.

This in a nutshell is the difference between D3 and D1 athletics:

Trinity Coach Steve Mohr, while disappointed, understands the university's decision.

"It's a matter of he's a student here first, a high-profile student-athlete, and he stepped out of bounds and now he has to face the consequences," Mohr said.

Can anyone imagine Bobby Bowden or Dennis Franchione or Rick Neuheisel saying these words in any context, let alone after having their star quarterback suspended before a championship game?

Trentless Thursday

In honor of Alex, Off the Kuff will be a Lott-free zone for today.

Enron Broadband coughs up back taxes

My buddy Binkley points to this story about Enron Broadband Services copping to a charge of avoiding over $1 million in taxes.

A Harris County grand jury indicted Enron Broadband Services on Monday for claiming that a North Shepherd warehouse contained furniture and fixtures worth about $500, rather than more than $20 million in computer and telecommunications equipment.

The charge, made against the business itself and not individuals, is a Class A misdemeanor that carries a $4,000 fine.

[...]

Under Texas law, owners of tangible property used to generate revenue -- computers, office equipment and work vehicles -- are required to annually provide lists of that property and its value to the tax appraisal district. Appraisers use the lists to determine how much property tax a business owes, said Jim Robinson, Harris County Appraisal District's chief appraiser.

But it's estimated that nearly 60 percent of the 160,000 or so businesses required to fully divulge their property on the lists do not. Many companies and the tax consultants they hire to file renderings interpret the language of the law to mean the reports are optional, said Assistant County District Attorney Lester Blizzard.

"The laws at this point are rather nebulous," said Blizzard. "We're hoping with this case the state Legislature will take a look at the problem and bring forth more definitive laws that make it easier to understand and enforce."

Boy, if those are the penalties, it's no wonder so many companies look for favorable interpretations. There's a loophole for the Lege to address, if they have the guts and want to take deficit reduction seriously.

The story notes how the Enron warehouse, about a mile and a half from where I live, was an open secret and that it was former employees who narced the company out. Says Binkley, who used to work for EBS:

[I]t seems that EBS claimed there was nothing inside [the warehouse] but office furniture. Overlooking, of course, the stacks and stacks for Sun and Cisco hardware stuffed inside. Did you know that at one point Enron was the single largest purchaser of Sun hardware, at least on paper? That sure made for a cozy relationship. I'd spill more, but who needs troubles like those?

Oh, Binkley, you tease. We're all ears if you do decide to spill more.

Chafee to Trent: Step down

Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee says to Trent Lott "Put down the Majority Leadership, and slowly back away."

"I think the biggest problem has been that his apologies haven't connected," Chafee told WPRO-AM.

But "the only way to have a change, in my opinion, is for the White House to come in here and say to Majority Leader Trent Lott, 'It's time for change," the first-term senator said.

Well, the fact that his apologies haven't connected is one way of looking at it. Perhaps the fact that he's unclear about what he's apologizing for, and the fact that he's unclear about how to make up for his sins is more important.

What concerns me about this whole thing is the possibility that in the end, Trent Lott will be removed not because he has longstanding ties to various racist organizations and such associations are no longer acceptable in civilized society much less in political leadership, but because he got caught saying something stupid. In other words, as time passes and the conservative chattering classes decide that it's safe to resume attacks on John Kerry's hair again, Lott's passing will not be seen as a triumph of truth, justice, and the American Way but another example of Political Correctness stifling free expression and sending a Good Man to oblivion for a mere slip of the tongue.

And in a way, those who make such claims will be right. We now know of at least three prior occasions, including two within the last three years, where Lott has spoken fondly of our segregationist past and wished for President Thurmond, yet it's only now, in an otherwise slow news cycle, that his remarks have caused a furor. Surely the fact that he's made an identical statement at least three times on tape means that this is part of his standard schtick. So why is it just now that the media and his fellow politicians seem to care? Is it because we as a country, having finally been forced to face this garbage, ringingly reject it and those who stand for it, or is it "gotcha" politics?

We know that Trent Lott is not the only person in a leadership position who holds these views. We know that John Aschcroft is of a completely similar mind, yet he got through his confirmation hearings last year with barely a peep being raised. We know that Don Nickles, the outgoing Senate Majority Whip and strong contender for Majority Leader if Lott gets lost, has a very similar voting record and some equally intolerant views as Trent Lott, yet the only person raising an objection is Trent Lott himself with his use of the traditional he's-as-bad-as-I-am defense. If we're really rejecting Lott for his repugnant beliefs and not his loose lips and bad timing, then shouldn't we be rejecting these two as well? Should we not be consistent in what we condemn?

It's hypocritical for the Republicans to jettison Trent Lott and then say "See? We cleaned out our closet just like you told us to", and it's hypocritical for Democrats to let them off that easy. If this really is about a catalog of beliefs that Trent Lott subscribes to and not an example of "poor word choice", then Republicans should either make the case that Ashcroft and Nickles are different, or they should apply the same standard to them. If the GOP chooses the former, then Democrats should either make the case that Aschcroft and Nickles are indeed the same or agree that the matter is closed and move on. If what we get is a continued pileup on Trent Lott that gets discarded as soon as he is, without any other considerations, then this whole exercise really was just a feeding frenzy. And that would be a shame.

Finally, if you think that turning the spotlight on Ashcroft and Nickles and anyone else like them who might be lurking about would be a clear win for the Democrats and their agenda, think again. Radley Balko is right when he talks about all of the things that a Trent Lott-led Senate can't address, though he doesn't take this thought to finish line. However clean GOP skirts may be on racial matters overall, until most people believe that to be the case, many issues can't be put on the table. Once again, that would be a shame.

Lincoln v. Calhoun

Kevin points me to this NRO article which addresses the question "what is it that Republicans really stand for?" I don't agree with his assessment of what Democrats stand for, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

One quibble: It was John Cougar Mellencamp who sung "You've got to stand for something/Or you're gonna fall for anything" (warning: multiple obnoxious popups; use Mozilla or a popup killer).

Whither the WNBA

Justin Slotman has been your one-stop-shopping center for all things WNBA lately. Unfortunately, as he notes here, it's been mostly bad. Two franchises have folded and will either find new homes or have their players dispersed throughout the league. The Utah Starzz have moved to San Antonio, the Seattle Storm is looking to move elsewhere in Washington, and now Paul Allen is looking to dump the Portland Fire.

One thing I dispute is in this WashTimes article that he cites:

But many of the WNBA's attendance counts remain dependent on free or heavily discounted tickets; the recently relocated Starzz gave away more than 3,000 a game last season. And aside from teams in New York and Washington, the league's franchises have not established a niche in the local sports markets.

Speaking as a season ticket holder to the Houston Comets, I can say that they're fairly well established in their niche. Their fan base is extremely loyal and passionate about the team. I suspect this is just lazy reporting.

I like the WNBA and hope it survives. This will be a rocky season, though.

Test your hoax IQ

The Museum of Hoaxes has a quiz to test your knowledge of hoax photos. I got seven out of ten on both Level One and the harder Level Two. Try it for yourself. Via Mark Evanier.

Trinity update

It just gets weirder: An assistant coach was also busted along with star quarterback Roy Hampton. Offensive backs coach Mike Burton "was charged with interfering with the duties of a public servant" stemming from Hampton's arrest. He was released on $1500 bond.

You can look at this a few ways, but my head hurts just thinking about it. Trinity still hasn't decided what to do, though Hampton did not participate in yesterday's practice. At this point, whatever happens, happens.

On the brighter side, the Chron has a nice feature story on the Trinity football team today. It's important to remember that in Division III, there are no athletic scholarships. Athletes truly are regular students in every way. In my mind, that makes the sustained success of schools like Mount Union and more recently Trinity even more astonishing.

I heard from an old classmate today, a woman who was the editor in chief of the Trinitonian during my sophomore year when I joined the staff as a sports writer and later sports columnist (that was the original "Off the Kuff"). She and her husband (the sports editor that year) will be attending the Stagg Bowl on Saturday. We remember the football team as being hapless losers - in fact, after a winless season in (I think) 1986, some people were calling for the program to be abolished. Now it's going to be on ESPN2 playing for a national championship. Wow.

And that's what really upsets me about the whole Roy Hampton thing. I'm not mad at a 23-year-old kid for committing the sin of excessive celebration, but I am sorry that what he did is casting a shadow over the accomplishments of him and his teammates. They deserve a fair shot at winning, but we all know about life and fairness. I'll settle for a fair judgment from the administration and go from there.

Oh, by the way: GO TIGERS!

Party on down to the station house

Argh. My Trinity Tigers clinch a spot in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl and the next thing I know their star quarterback is arrested for public intoxication while out celebrating on the Riverwalk. Help, I'm trapped in an After School Movie!

Trinity has not decided what to do about Roy Hampton yet. He's 23, so it was legal for him to imbibe, and public intoxication is a misdemeanor. I admit my bias here, but I don't see that this should prevent him from playing on Saturday. If he were the captain of the debate team and were set to go to a national tournament, would you expect the school to suspend him from the team for this transgression? I wouldn't.

For what it's worth, the drug and alcohol policy leaves the issue of drinking by those of legal age up to the individual:

Students are personally responsible for conforming their behavior so that it complies with state and local laws and the University’s alcoholic beverages policy. Trinity University respects students’ privacy and autonomy, assumes that they will behave legally and responsibly, and will not closely monitor the activities of individual students or members of student organizations.

Alcohol consumption is mostly forbidden on campus (students over 21 can drink in some dorms). That rule was loosely enforced when I was there - if you weren't causing a disturbance, no one really cared. That was a million years ago, of course, so take it for what it's worth. Punishment for violating school alcohol rules vary:

Violations of the alcohol policy are punishable by sanctions ranging from probation to community service, fines, referral for drug use assessment, eviction from the residence halls, or expulsion from the University.

I say leave it up to the coach and the courts. I have all kinds of contempt for schools that coddle and shield star athletes from their lawlessness in the name of Winning The Big Game, but I don't see any need to intervene here. Let Roy Hampton have his day in a Bexar County court when his case comes up, and let him play on Saturday.

So what have term limits accomplished?

Chron politics writer John Williams asks a simple question: "Can you list tangible evidence that Houston has benefited as the result of term limits that voters approved in 1991?" He asks several term limits proponents, and not too surprisingly, gets not much of an answer.

He does get some unintentional comedy gold from Clymer Wright, the bozo who came along at the right time to foist term limits on a gullible public:

"Of course, Dallas and San Antonio are better because they have two two-year terms and we have three two-year terms -- that's a joke, that's a joke," Wright laughed.

He continued.

"I'm not interested in talking with the Chronicle anymore," he said. "You guys slant the news so much.

"Look, all you are doing is going around promoting the homosexual agenda, rail. You know, you have your agendas and you slant your news stories to support your editorial policy -- just the opposite of what any newspaper ought to do."

Mature response.

BWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH [klunk]!

Sorry about that, my ass just fell off. Give me a moment here...

Okay, that's better. This was a more thoughtful answer:

[Barry Klein, head of the Houston Property Rights Association] referred to a Cato Institute study showing that term limits tend to reduce regional disparities created when a representative for one area has more seniority than another.

In Houston, Klein said, discourse about issues like tax reduction and property rights (read: no zoning and abbreviated historic preservation) has increased since 1991.

But Klein admitted he has difficulty finding a specific improvement or initiative in his hometown after a decade of term limits.

"It's a little hard to find good examples where candidates who ran for office announced good ideas and then actually come through with those ideas when they took office," Klein said.

I can't speak to the first point, though it sounds like a pretty thin reed to me. As to the second, the main action I've seen regarding zoning and historic preservation has been at the neighborhood association level. The zoning referendum was in 1993, and I can't say I've heard much about it since then. This is an awfully subjective evaluation (granted, it's a fairly subjective question) and I just don't see it the same way.

I think and have always thought that term limits are a dumb idea that do nothing but thwart the will of the people. Can anyone else suggest a concrete example of a good result stemming from Houston's term limits law? The comments await you.

A little humor

Take a break and look at some funny roadside photos. Work safe, standard beverage warning applies. Gave me a Quicktime install prompt, which I cancelled, so do be aware of that.

Rose redux

Some people were a lot harsher on Pete Rose and his possibly reentry into baseball than I was. Derek Zumsteg at the Baseball Prospectus, who has really dogged Rose and his dupessupporters, minces no words:

Pete Rose is scum. His actions threatened the integrity of the game that he professed to love. He betrayed the trust of every fan who appreciated him, and he especially betrayed those still in denial, those now fighting his battles for him and voting in goofy online polls. Baseball should have continued the investigations, forced him to cough up more bank records, more checks, and refused to let him plea out. They should have banned him from baseball, sued him into bankruptcy, bought his house for pennies, burned it to the ground and salted the earth so nothing could grow there. Instead of trying to play the issue down, they should have made it entirely public, showing everyone that baseball takes gambling seriously, that it would aggressively pursue those who did it, and would grant them no quarter.

Fans should spit at Rose when they see him on the street, and boo him when he hangs around stadiums. His autographed items should repel people in shock and horror. When Rose walks the street in shame, we should shake our heads and say "what kind of man would do that?"

Yowza. Rob Neyer at ESPN.com is not much more forgiving:

[W]hat's truly puzzling to me is the public love for a man who's firmly established himself as one of the more despicable people to wear a major-league uniform. Peter Edward Rose Sr. is a convicted tax cheat and a crummy husband and father who has, for many years, surrounded himself with drug dealers and various other unsavory types. Granted, none of us are perfect, but it seems to me that Pete Rose is significantly farther from perfection than just about anybody you would want to know.

Forgiveness is divine and compassion is wonderful, but very few of us are blessed with an infinite capacity for compassion, and I don't understand why so many of us would spend part of our precious ration on Pete Rose when there are so many others far more deserving. Just in baseball, there's Ron Santo and Bert Blyleven -- left out of the Hall of Fame because baseball writers don't understand how good they were -- plus all of those hundreds (thousands?) of brilliantly talented young pitchers whose careers foundered on the rocks of Major League Baseball's collective apathy and ignorance.

Scrappleface and David Pinto note that Rose is in a Catch-22: We'll consider lifting the ban if Rose admits he bet on baseball games, but betting on baseball games is a bannable offense. Oopsie. Dan Lewis has takes here and here, the latter being a clear explanation of why a manager betting on his own team is A Bad Thing.

I've explained my disdain for Rose and those who shill for him before, and though I would be willing to entertain thoughts of forgiveness in return for true contrition, my mind hasn't changed much. I'm mostly willing to forgive because I know there's no way Rose will ever truly ask for forgiveness. He wants in on his own terms, and even I think Beelzebud Selig is capable of saying No to that. So it's no skin off my nose to be magnanimous. If he surprises me, then I'll stick to my word. Forcing Rose and his supporters to truly face what he's done will be nearly sufficient compensation.

Luxury camping

Scott Chaffin gets a nice mention in the San Antonio Express-News in a story about His Tiny Biz, a luxury campground called Buck's on the Brazos.

Now, as a born-and-bred citified Yankee boy, I'm a world-class tenderfoot. To steal a line from Jack Benny, "roughing it" to me is when the cable goes out. But even I can feel morally superior to this story's author:

After five hours in the car and stopping only once, it was time for a visit to the bathhouse. While the cinder block structure was only a few yards from the tent, we had to climb a small hill to get there — something I was not willing to do in the rain. So my husband, gentleman that he is, happily drove me up the hill each time I needed to heed the call.

On our first visit, Jim went in ahead of me to check for uninvited guests. The coast was clear, or so he thought. Moments after I went in, Jim came running back in response to my screams. There it was — a tiny field mouse perched on a rafter watching me and cockily lunging forward as if challenging me to a fight. Since we were the only guests at the campsite, my husband offered to let me use the men's. We discovered mice travel in pairs.

"My wife used to react the same way," [Chaffin] said later. "But now she feeds them."

Ah, the great outdoors. If only there weren't so much wildlife around, it'd be perfect. I should note that my parents, who were here in town visiting last weekend, have become Actual Outdoors People since moving from New York to Portland, OR, in 1999. They hike, they kayak (!), they do all sorts of things. So maybe there's hope for me yet.

What Trent Lott might have said

Alex points me to this interpretation of Trent Lott's recent poor-choice-of-words. Author Lew Rockwell does not claim that Lott believes what Rockwell writes, nor does he suggest that choosing these words would have kept Lott out of the soup. He merely offers it as "a mental experiment in truth telling". I don't know if Rockwell himself believes what he's writing or not, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that he does.

Rockwell makes a rather valiant effort to recast Lott's words as an endorsement of "state's rights". He goes to some lengths to make Lott's words sound heroic rather than troglodytic, being sure to observe Rule Number One for public apologies, which is "Always claim victimhood status":

I grant that my comments were highly unusual in American public life. Even more intense than the race taboo is the rule against expressing any regret for the astonishing centralization of power in America since World War II. Question that, and you will have few friends, and legions of opportunistic enemies. Such is the fate of any dissident living under Leviathan.

Yes, we surely do marginalize our libertarians more than we do our racists in America. I hear that the folks at Cato can barely get more than one op-ed per week printed in the dailies.

Rockwell next makes the fascinating claim that "states' rights" was the better way of ending segregation, and that it was interference from that bad old Federal Government which really caused all of "those problems":

In the American lexicon, federalism is the same as the Jeffersonian phrase "states' rights," which means that the states as legal entities are to have rights against the federal government. In this way, America was different from Prussia or any other nation-state of the old world that had a unitary state apparatus. American federalism was the embodiment of political tolerance and decentralization – the expression of the liberal conviction that society can manage itself and needs no central plan.

No, this does not lead to perfection. It does restrain power, and permits flexibility and competition among legal regimes. It is this very flexibility that would have best handled the issue of race relations in the period after World War II. As for segregation, if anyone believes that the states could have successfully preserved legal segregation, he knows nothing about the South or American politics. Segregation was on its way out in 1948 – already under fire in state legislatures and towns – and would have been repealed peacefully and constitutionally, in time, and without the antagonisms that always accompany political impositions.

Most Southerners, however, understood that the federal government wanted to do more than end legally sponsored segregation. They understood that the federal government wanted to take charge of their schools and communities, not only ending legal segregation but also managing their lives by prohibiting voluntary choice in the exercise of private property rights. This is what they predicted and this is what occurred.

[...]

Instead of allowing segregation to fade away, the federal government got involved in the business of regulating the states and created a very ugly backlash in the South. This tragic error has resulted in unnecessary racial conflict and the consolidation of federal power. This has not been helpful to American race relations, and it has taken away essential freedoms and property rights from all Americans.

And I'm sure that if left to their own devices, Augusta National will start extending invitations to women, too. Whether anyone now reading this will be alive to see it when it happens is a separate question.

While I agree that "we wouldn't have had all these problems" if white people in general and Southerners in particular had suddenly had an epiphany about racial equality back then, I have a real hard time believing that anyone who would earnestly make this claim today would be treated with more respect than Trent Lott is getting right now. Does anyone truly believe that letting the South sort things out in their own time was the right call?

But what really flabbergasts me about this is the assertion that holding states to the idea that "all men are created equal" is somehow "[taking] away essential freedoms and property rights from all Americans". Is there one freedom that applies to "all Americans" that was taken away by the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act? Was lynching an example of "voluntary choice in the exercise of private property rights"?

There's a point at which all "state's rights" arguments break down for me, and that's the point at which the exercise of state's rights leads to a lessening of freedom for some class of Americans who happen to live in the wrong state. If we can't agree that all Americans, in all 50 states, have the same basic right to vote, buy property, hold a job, marry, raise children, and live free then we may as well declare this whole "United States" thing to be a failure. Let all 50 states go their own way and be done with it, for if the federal government cannot guarantee the rights of all its citizens then it truly has no purpose. At least then we won't be subjected to tedious debates about how those overreaching know-it-alls in Washington have cruelly and arbitrarily ended someone's precious way of life just because it clashed with an inconvenient sentence in an old document in a museum somewhere.

There's more, but I've run out of energy to deal with it. Suffice it to say that any attempt to defend Trent Lott's words as an endorsement of "state's rights" is just a defense of the right of some Americans to oppress other Americans over the right of all Americans to live as free men and women. If you truly believe there's a palatable way of phrasing that, then you're as bad as he is.

UPDATE: Patrick also has a few thoughts about "state's rights".

FURTHER UPDATE: Instapundit and Jim Henley are also on this. (I suspect there are others that I'll come across as I catch up on my blog reading.) Henley also addresses this same Rockwell piece as well as giving some background on Lew Rockwell. Having read that last piece, I now believe that Rockwell probably does agree with what he wrote, so everything I said can be properly directed at him.

The mistletoe king

Here's a story in the Chron about Robert "Speedy" Tiemann, a West Texas rancher who claims to be the primary provider of fresh mistletoe in the United States. Check it out.

Not Gore in 2004

Well, it's official. We won't have Al Gore to kick around in 2004, as he has announced that he is not a candidate for President. Part of me is sorry to see this, as I think he's still the best person for the job, but more of me is glad that for this decision.

"I think the current policies have to be changed," said Gore. "I think that my best way of contributing to that result may not be as a candidate this time around."

A rematch with Bush, Gore said, "would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would in some measure distract from the focus on the future that I think all campaigns have to be about."

He's right. A rematch would inevitably focus on 2000, and I think Gore would get the same shabby treatment without the benefit of the is-Bush-fit-to-lead questions. Someone else can make the case that Bush has done a bad job without that baggage.

Despite Gore's demurrals that his announcement "probably means that I will never have another opportunity to run for president", I wouldn't completely count him out. For one thing, if Bush does get reelected in 2004, Gore will be only 60 years old in 2008. He could run again if he wanted to. The main problem is that he won't have much of a platform from which to be visible any more. If he doesn't find something with a relatively high profile to do between now and then, he'll be considered irrelevant.

So who do you like now that Gore is no more? Count me as an undecided. I'll need to survive the Houston mayoral race in 2003 first.

We sing to thee, O Trinity

My alma mater Trinity University will play in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl for the Division III football championship after beating St. John's of Minnesota in the semifinals game. Trinity has been in the Div III playoffs for the last six years but this is their first shot at a title. Go Tigers!

The bad news is that they must take on Division III powerhouse Mount Union, winners of 54 straight games and 94 of 95. (Take that, Miami!) The Tigers lost to Mount Union 34-29 in their only prior meeting, the 1998 playoff semifinals. It should be a good game, one I'd much rather watch on TV than any overhyped Corporate Sponsorship Bowl featuring a couple of 7-5 teams from the Big XII and the Big Ten or whatever. Check your local listings and hope for the best, I guess. And in case I didn't say it loudly enough before, GO TIGERS!

UPDATE: My local listings say that this game will be on ESPN2 at 11 AM on Saturday (that's CST). Not that the ESPN web page has any info on this. Advantage: disgruntled small-school alumnus.

The nanny car

The Swedish National Road Administration is testing customized GPS receivers in about 1000 cars, according to this article in Technology Review. You can only see a brief excerpt right now, though the full article should be online eventually. I'll quote the bit I'm interested in:

The digital map databases built into the receivers included speed limit information for roads in several cities. In some of the cars, a black box on the dashboard flashed a light and emitted a warning noise whenever the driver exceeded the local limit. In others, the box displayed the speed limits in addition to the warning signal; and in a third group, the box was linked electronically to the gas pedal and imposed resistance whenever the driver was speeding.

The tests worked, in that most drivers responded by slowing down. What amaxed me was the report that two thirs of them liked the devices. Far fewer complained of "less joy in driving" and a "feeling of being controlled". Sweden hopes to make these systems mandatory by 2015. Will the US follow? I doubt it, but you never know.

There are other GPS-related innovations on the way, though none quite as annoying as this one. You libertarians and unreconstructed leadfoots out there might want to start practicing your letters of protest now.

Squaring the circle

The TNR blog &c recently referred to squaring the circle in reference to Team Bush's new economic advisors. The point they were making was that the nominees, who have a history of advocating fiscal discipline and balanced budgets, will have a hard time reconciling those views to the tax-cut fervor of Team Bush.

All well and good, but after Matt Yglesias' admission that he didn't know what "Mayberry" was, I wondered how many folks really understand what "squaring the circle" means. So I thought I'd dust off some of my math skills and have a shot at it.

The ancient Greek mathematicians spent a lot of time doing geometry problems in which they attempted to construct various types of shapes, angles, and curves. They would do this by means of a collapsible compass (that is, a compass that would not retain its form when lifted from the paper, or in their case the ground) and an unlined straightedge (i.e., a ruler with no distances marked).

A very basic construction is a right angle to a given line. Use the straightedge to draw a line. Take the compass and put the point at one end of the line and the pencil at the other end and draw a circle, then reverse where the point and pencil are and draw another circle. Take the straightedge and draw a line from the intersection of the two circles to the original line. The angle formed by the intersection of those two lines is a right angle.

The problem of squaring a circle is actually this: Given a circle C with radius r, construct a square S whose area is equal to the area of the circle. Since the area of circle C is (pi)*(r^2), you need a square whose sides are the square root of pi times r. Since r can be defined as one unit, you need a square with side sqrt(pi).

The Greeks were never able to construct a line of such length with these methods and the additional requirement of a finite number of steps. (The Greeks understood the concept of infinity but weren't hip to the idea of an infinite sequence converging to a finite limt; if they had, then Zeno's Paradox wouldn't have been a paradox.) The problem is equivalent to the problem of whether there exists a polynomial equation with all rational coefficients and integer exponents that has the number you want (in this case, sqrt(pi), or equivalently, pi itself) as a root. All numbers that are roots of such polynomials are called algebraic. Numbers that aren't are called transcendental.

It turns out that pi is transcendental, so it cannot be constructed by Greek methods and thus the problem of squaring the circle cannot be solved. This result was not proven until 1882 by the German mathematician Lindemann, though it had been suspected for at least a century before that. In fact, in the late 1700's both the Paris Academy and the Royal Mathematical Society announced that they would no longer accept papers that purported to show a method for squaring the circle. Most of those misguided papers either disregard the Greek restrictions or assume a rational value for pi, such as 25/8.

There are two other classic Greek problems that are generally grouped with circle-squaring: doubling the dube (i.e., given a unit cube construct a cube whose volume is exactly twice that) and trisecting an angle (i.e., given an angle of d degrees, construct an angle of d/3 degrees). Both of these fail because in general cube roots and sines are not constructible. Note that being algebraic, as the cube root of two certainly is, is not sufficient to be constructible; constructible numbers are a subset of algebraic ones.

The most interesting results to come out of this was actually the work of Georg Cantor, who demonstrated that the set of transcendental numbers is not countable. A countable set is one that can be put in a one-to-one relationship with the positive integers (that is, the counting numbers - one, two, three, etc). Cantor demonstrated such a relationship for the set of algebraic numbers, then showed that the set of real numbers, which is the union of the algebraics and the transcendentals, is not countable. Since the algebraics are countable, and since Cantor also showed that a countable union of countable sets is still countable, the transcendentals must be uncountable.

In practical terms, though both sets are infinite, there's more transcendentals than algebraics. Cantor's ideas were quite revolutionary at the time, and he was thoroughly vilified by his mentor, the mathematician Kronecker, for them. The whole story is fascinating; I recommend Amir Aczel's book The Mystery of the Aleph if you want to know more.

Some other interesting links: How to square the circle by not-acceptible to-ancient-Greeks means, a proof that shows the impossibility of circle squaring by Greek methods, and this detailed history of the problem and how it was finally understood.

So that's the story of squaring the circle. Feel free to look a little smug the next time someone uses the phrase in your presence.

We really are a one-paper town

The Houston Chronicle bought out the Houston Post in 1995 in order to acquire its better printing facilities. The Post was shut down, with barely a chance to say goodbye, and Houston has been a one-daily town ever since. The last vestiges of the Post for most people was via the Chron's archives, which included stories from its former rival going back to 1985.

Alas, not any more. Thanks to the SCOTUS decision in New York Times v. Tasini, the Post archives are permanently offline. The case was one in which freelance writers who sold articles via contract sued because publishers were making those articles available in archives such as LEXIS/NEXIS. The contracts had expired, so the writers alleged that this was an unauthorized republication of their work. The Supremes agreed, so bye-bye archives, including the Post's since no one at the Chron knows which stories would be affected.

I really have mixed feelings about this. I sympathize with the writers, since their writing is their livelihood and they deserve to get paid for it or to agree to waive that pay. But it really sucks that the practical upshoot is that an entire class of information gets lost because there's no way for the Chron to tell what's covered by this decision and what isn't. The Chron's own archives are free to subscribers (I believe they're also free to non-subscribers if you register, but I don't recall offhand), as was the case before this happened. They're surely not a cash cow for them, so where's the harm? It seems like it's analogous to things like Napster - what may be lost to illegal downloads may well be offset by the increased exposure to a wider audience.

My annoyance is slightly out of proportion here because there's a particular Post story from circa 1989 that I've been wanting to find. It'd take me hours to slog through microfilm, since I don't know the exact date of publication, just a rough estimate. So much for that.

Aguirre appears in court

Captain Mark Aguirre and Sergeant Ken Wenzel appeared in court yesterday to be arraigned on five counts of official oppression. (Why five counts? There were 270 arrests, not that I'd expect 270 counts. Why not one count? Where do the other counts come from? Please feel free to speculate in the comments.) They waived the reading of the charge so as not to taint any future trials that these guys might testify in, and set the next court date at January 17.

This has been an Eyewitless News Update. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Is there another shoe?

One reason I read Unqualified Offerings is that there's always an interesting link to something I don't find elsewhere. Here Jim points to this Gene Healy piece that asks if al Qaeda is as big a threat as we think:

Since 9/11, we’ve had Bali and Kenya. Domestically, nothing beyond the El-Al counter shootout (unless you count the anthrax mailings, which, to the best of our knowledge, were domestic). This suggests two possibilities:

1. AQ’s planning something huge, something that rivals 9/11;
2. AQ has tapped its well.

If the American Jihad/mullahs under the bed/the-country-is-riddled-with-sleeper-cells theory is correct, then why so quiet? If Al Qaeda wants to trash the U.S. economy, why didn’t we hear from them the weekend after Thanksgiving—the busiest shopping weekend of the year?

[...]

[It's] worth considering that perhaps we’ve weathered the worst. And if so, it’s also worth considering whether the measures we’ve adopted domestically—USA Patriot, a parallel court system for citizens accused of terrorism, Total Information Awareness—are not only unconstitutional, but vastly disproportionate to any threat currently presented by the enemy.

He goes on to address the question of whether or not attacking Iraq is an equally misguided response to the threat we face. Go check it out (and read his take on The Sopranos while you're at it), but be warned that he's been infested by a comments troll. I sympathize with your lack of time, Gene, and I agree that deleting a comment in Movable Type (if that's what you use) is a pain, but c'mon: Does it really take more than ten seconds to ban an IP address?

Drop 'em a line

TAPPED invites people to email Mark Steyn and inform him that his latest column contains a big, fat, long-since-debunked lie.

Meanwhile, Atrios is on Day Three of his campaign to get Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan to apply the same principles they've admirably stated about Trent Lott's racism to the equally appalling racism of Washington Times editor Robert Stacy McCain. He's encouraging folks to drop J-Go and Randy Andy a note as well. And be sure to post any interesting replies if you do.

(By the way, if you haven't read that article about R.S. McCain yet, get cracking already. It's ugly with a capital UGH.)

What bodies?

I knew we were largely whitewashed about Gulf War I. I didn't realize it was this bad.

In manipulating the first and often most lasting perception of Desert Storm, the Bush administration produced not a single picture or video of anyone being killed. This sanitized, bloodless presentation by military briefers left the world presuming Desert Storm was a war without death.

That image was reinforced by limitations imposed on reporters on the battlefield. Under rules developed by Cheney and Powell, journalists were not allowed to move without military escorts. All interviews had to be monitored by military public affairs escorts. Every line of copy, every still photograph, every strip of film had to be approved -- censored -- before being filed. And these rules were ruthlessly enforced.

When a Scud missile eventually hit American troops during the ground war, reporters raced to the scene. The 1,000 pound warhead landed on a makeshift barracks for Pennsylvania National Guard troops near the Saudi seaport of Dahran. Scott Applewhite, a photographer for the Associated Press, was one of the first on the scene. There were more than 25 dead bodies and 70 badly wounded.

As Applewhite photographed the carnage, he was approached by U.S. military police who ordered him to leave. He produced credentials that entitled him to be there. But the soldiers punched Applewhite, handcuffed him and ripped the film from his cameras. More than 70 reporters were arrested, detained, threatened at gunpoint and literally chased from the frontlines when they attempted to defy Pentagon rules.

Army public affairs officers made nightly visits to hotels and restaurants in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi town on the Iraq border. Reporters and photographers usually bolted from the dinner table. Slower ones were arrested.

Journalists such as Applewhite, who played by the rules, fared no better. More than 150 reporters who participated in the Pentagon pool system failed to produce a single eyewitness account of the clash between 300,000 allied troops and an estimated 300,000 Iraqi troops. There was not one photograph, not a strip of film by pool members of a dead body -- American or Iraqi. Even if they had recorded the reality of the battlefield, it was unlikely it would have been filed by the military-controlled distribution system.

I'm sure none of that will happen in Gulf Wars Episode II.

Via Rob Humenik, who's gotten his mojo working again.

Peanut Johnson

I almost missed this story about Mamie "Peanut" Johnson, one of three women to play (and the only one to pitch) in the old Negro Leagues in the 1950s. She spends her time now talking about her experiences playing baseball and about the other two women, both now deceased, who played with her.

This story about how she learned to pitch amused me:

"I started playing baseball at a very early age. I'd say around the age of seven or eight years old...because that's all we had to do in South Carolina where I was born," Johnson recalls. "The more I played the better I got; the better I got the more I wanted to play."

She said she honed her skill by knocking birds off fences with homemade baseballs in her hometown of Ridgeway, South Carolina. "That's how I learned to throw strikes," she said.

The "baseball" was a rock wrapped in heavy twine and held together with gaffer tape. "You get it wrapped real tight, you get a needle and you sew it and then you put the tape on it and after you put the tape on it, it'll fly," Johnson said.

Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean used to tell people that he developed his fastball as a kid by throwing rocks at squirrels. If he were hunting the squirrels for food, though, he had to throw lefthanded, because he threw so hard righthanded that there'd be hardly anything left of the squirrel after he beaned it. (Cue voice of Inigo Montoya: "I am not lefthanded!") Whatever works, I guess.

Via Eric McErlain, also spotted by Chris Quinones and Jeff Cooper.

They knew

There's a trifecta of Enron-related stories in the Chron today. In the first, we see a law firm's memo written in October, 2000, where Enron was told that its strategies to manipulate the California energy market were illegal. What did they do? They kept on doing what they were doing anyway.

An Oct. 30, 2000, memo written by an outside law firm detailed the charges Enron and its employees could face. One was wire fraud, a charge that Timothy Belden, former chief trader for Enron Power Marketing in Portland, Ore., pleaded guilty to in October. He is now cooperating with prosecutors.

"If Enron is found to have engaged in deceptive or fraudulent practices, there is also the risk of other criminal legal theories such as wire fraud, RICO (racketeering statute), fraud involving markets and fictitious commodity transactions," the memo reads in part. "In addition, depending upon the conduct, there may be the potential for criminal charges prosecuted against both individuals and the company."

When they get around to the made-for-TV movie about this, I suggest renaming the memo's author "Cassandra".

"According to the lawyers, once the memo was written, the traders were instructed not to use the strategies," said Christian Schreiber, investigator for the California Senate committee investigating market abuse during the energy crisis. "We believe it continued."

He said an analysis of power trades has shown that the strategies were used until the FERC imposed a price cap on energy sales in June 2001 -- at least six months after traders were supposedly told to stop using them.

And Belden, when he entered his plea, stated that the practices were used in 2001.

Robert McCullough, managing partner of McCullough Research, said his analysis shows that Enron traders continued to use some of the strategies into 2001, but were forced to discontinue others because of the changes in the way regulators scheduled power transmissions.

"Fat Boy probably lasted to the bitter end," McCullough said. In that maneuver, traders would schedule more power for transmission the next day than its customers would need, then sell the unused power at favorable rates when demand exceeded supply.

Erik Saltmarsh, acting executive director of the state Electricity Oversight Board, said his staff's analysis of electricity movement in 2001 also indicated that Enron continued to use the practices long after the warning memo was written.

It's funny how all this is finally coming to light now, since some people were writing about it while it was happening. Of course, they were just dangerous cranks who don't understand the Genius of Capitalism.

Schreiber said the memo outlining the possible criminal charges was sent to Enron executives. "It was probably seen by the general counsel and probably some of the Enron board members," Schreiber said.

Neil Egelston, a Washington attorney who represents several former board members, said the board was not shown the Oct. 30, 2000, memo.

"To the contrary, the board was informed by Enron management at several meetings that Enron's conduct in California was proper," Egelston said.

There's the real meat. What did the board know, and when did they know it? Were they complicit, or sufficiently removed from the action that they could be easily and badly duped? If they were dupes, why weren't they in a better position to know? Wasn't that their job to know? The same questions can be asked of bank officials, as Story Number Two notes.

Finally, we have this little tale of high-stakes financial crapshooting:

Enron made the hugely profitable bets -- including one that resulted in a $485 million gain on a single day in December 2000 -- at a time when federal and state investigators say the Houston company was conspiring with other energy trading companies to manipulate power and natural gas prices in the Western states.

Indeed, Enron's standing as the nation's biggest energy trader may have bolstered its ability to profit on bets on the direction of prices. While it is unclear whether Enron could singlehandedly move markets with its trades, several Enron trading officials said that to justify their risk-taking, they told the company's executives and directors that, like a casino, Enron had a "house advantage" in the energy markets.

The result of the speculation, the records show, was one of the most stunning runs ever for a corporate trading operation -- some $7 billion in net trading profits for Enron during a power crisis that wreaked havoc on consumers in 2000 and 2001 and forced rolling blackouts in some parts of California. That tally included days with immense trading losses, including a $550 million reversal just a week after the $485 million gain.

There's too much in this article to quote. Read it and weep.

What's for Christmas? More lawsuits!

Two more lawsuits have been filed on behalf of 43 people arrested in the K-Mart Kiddie Roundup. The suits seek "unspecified damages" and name the indicted Captain Mark Aguirre and Sergeant Ken Wenzel as well as the city of Houston as defendants.

This bit really intrigues me:

One [lawsuit] was filed on behalf of Harris County resident Roland T. Ross, his 10-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.

[...]

Ross states in his lawsuit that he and his children had driven to the Kmart to shop and were looking for a parking space when police approached.

"He and his children were stopped, detained and ultimately arrested," although they were lawfully on the property, the lawsuit alleges.

Okay, put aside the fact that the guy had his 10-year-old and 14-year-old out after midnight (the raid was conducted at around 12:30 AM, according to the original story). Maybe they caught a late movie. I don't know and it doesn't matter. What I want to know is, did the cops really bust those kids for trespass and/or curfew violations, even though they were with their father? I'm certainly not saying that kids that age can't be lawbreakers, but what are the odds in this case?

If an individual cop acting on his own did this, it would be plausible to think that he had valid cause for doing so. That may turn out to be false, but at least it's reasonable. Doing so in this context just shows what an amazingly dumb idea it was to arrest everyone and sort it out later. Aguirre is responsible for the arrest, and Chief C.O. "BAMF" Bradford is responsible for not having procedures in place to prevent harebrained schemes like this from being hatched in the first place. When the axe finally and inevitably falls on them, it will be good riddance for both.

Echoes of the past

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

That was Trent Lott in 2002.

"You know, if we had elected [Strom Thurmond] 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."

That was Trent Lott in 1980, at a campaign rally for Ronald Reagan in Jackson, MS, spoken after a speech by Thurmond.

As my high school band director used to say "Once is a mistake. Twice is a habit." Let us hear no more about poor word choices.

By the way, according to that NYT article President Bush has "confidence in [Lott] as the Republican leader, unquestionably." Just so you know.

NYT link via Josh Marshall.

Reinstatement possible for Pete Rose

Pete Rose has been negotiating with Bud Selig about getting his lifetime ban from the game lifted. The good news is that Selig has focused on the right thing:

Negotiations are still ongoing on the terms of exactly what Rose will be asked by Selig to admit to before he is reinstated. In order to satisfy constituents who are opposed to Rose's reinstatement, Selig is said to be firm in his conviction that Rose has to admit, in some form, that he bet on baseball.

I'm very much in that anti-Rose constituency. It's more than just outrage over the fact that he violated baseball's One True Rule, it's also that he has been consistently dishonest and disingenuous about his violation of this rule. He's obfuscated the facts and played the part of a victim despite the fact that he signed an agreement that reads in part:

4. Peter Edward Rose acknowledges that the Commissioner has a factual basis to impose the penalty provided herein, and hereby accepts the penalty imposed on him by the Commissioner, and agrees not to challenge that penalty in court or otherwise. He also agrees he will not institute any legal proceedings against the Commissioner or any of his representatives, either Major League, or any Major League club.

You can read the full report here. It's pretty damning. Or you can read this Derek Zumsteg article which deals with Bill James' objections to the Dowd Report. The only reason there is a controversy about Pete Rose is that he's conned many honest and decent people who truly want to believe him and argue on his behalf.

But I believe in forgiveness. I believe in redemption. I will remove all of my objections to Pete Rose and will support his reinstatement and eligibility for the Hall of Fame if and when he comes clean. What I want to hear is something like this:

"I, Pete Rose, broke baseball's most sacred rule by betting on baseball games, including on games involving my own team while I was manager. I was absolutely wrong to do so. I have no excuse for my behavior. I deserved the punishment I got and I am extremely grateful for the support I have received from fans and for the second chance I have been given by Commissioner Selig and Major League Baseball. I am truly sorry for my actions and the shame I brought on myself in doing so."

If we get that and not some weasel word Trent Lott "I'm sorry if you're offended by what I did" apology, then Pete Rose will be worthy of forgiveness. Until then, all he will get from me is pity and scorn.

Barlow returns

Ted Barlow is back. Woo hoo!

Lott update

So Trent Lott has offered an apology of sorts for his recent racist remarks:

"A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embraced the discarded policies of the past," Lott, R-Miss., said in a statement. "Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement.

Via Josh Marshall. Apparently, Trent Lott never learned the lesson that Fritz Schranck did about what an apology should be.

Meanwhile, Charles Dodgson wonders if Randy Andy Sullivan will give the NYT its due now that they have finally addressed the issue. Well, here's your answer. It's a good thing Andy exists, or we'd have to retire the concept of a "left-handed compliment".

Finally, regarding Lott and the Democrats' racial anachronism Robert Byrd, I agree with Virginia Postrel:

It's important to note the difference between Lott's comments and the typical insensitive politico's gaffe. Lott didn't use an epithet, however offensive. He made a statement about policy. Epithets indicate bad character; they may or may not indicate political goals. Lott's comments alluded to a philosophy of government, something usually missing from his public pronouncements. And, David Frum's generous sentiments to the contrary, he has given us no reason to think he didn't mean it.

[...]

The other important difference between Lott and, say, that repulsive old Klansman Robert Byrd is that Lott holds a position in his party congressional leadership—the top position. Nobody, as far as I know, is calling for Lott to resign from the Senate. If the people of Mississippi want him, they can keep him. But Republicans from the rest of the country don't have to retain him as their leader, and if they choose to do so they're sending a disconcerting message about what they stand for.

Exactly. I'm not calling any Republican besides Lott a racist (or any conservative, for that matter). I recognize that each party has members in it who range from useful idiots to crazy-aunt-in-the-attic types. Many non-political conservatives have done the right thing in denouncing Lott and in calling for him to step down from his leadership position. Will the Republican Party do the same?

It's still a tax on stupidity

The state Lottery Commission is considering changes to Lotto Texas, the state's main lottery, with the intent of providing bigger prizes but lower odds of winning, despite the fact that the same change made over two years ago did not have this effect.

Officials concede that sweeping changes adopted 2 1/2 years ago -- which included jacking up the odds -- have failed to revitalize the game, but they're considering trying their luck again.

"I'm concerned about the fact that it hasn't been as productive as I expected it to be when we made the last change," C. Thomas Clowe, chairman of the three-member Texas Lottery Commission, said in today's editions of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "The major reason is because the players have had such good luck. They hit those jackpots more than was anticipated."

Lotto is the game in which players choose six numbers from a pool of 54, hoping to match all six in the twice-weekly drawing to collect the jackpot that starts at $4 million and increases each time no one wins the top prize.

But despite the 25.8 million-to-1 odds against winning, Texas lottery officials are seeing too many jackpots being won at the relatively low levels of $4 million and $6 million that prevent the surge in ticket sales that the state counts on to help fill its coffers.

Officials thought they had solved the problem when they increased the numbers in play from 50 to 54 in July 2000, when the odds against winning the jackpot were only 15.8 million-to-1.

The current proposal would increase the odds to 45 million-to-1 under a variety of scenarios.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That may not apply just yet, but state lottery officials can consider themselves to be officially on notice.

One persistent lottery critic said state officials are running a risk of killing interest in Lotto Texas for the game's most loyal players.

"They are deliberately trying to design a game that people cannot win, and that's highway robbery," said Dawn Nettles, a Garland resident who publishes a newsletter for lotto players. "To say I'm against it would be putting it mildly."

In practical terms, there's not a whole lot of difference between odds of 16 million to one, 26 million to one, and 45 million to one, and anyone who bases the decision on whether or not to buy a lottery ticket on that difference really needs a course in remedial mathematics. It's okay to have "a dollar and a dream", as the New York Lottery slogan used to say, but please don't plan your retirement fund around it.

RIP, Bobby Joe Hill

Bobby Joe Hill, star guard of the 1966 Texas Western (now UTEP) team that beat Kentucky in the NCAA men's basketball championships, has died at the age of 59. Hill's team made history by starting five black players in te Finals, though coach Don Haskins wasn't attempting to make a political statement: he said he was simply starting his best players. Of course, when you get right down to it, that's exactly the right kind of statement.

It's easy nowadays to think that what Haskins and his players did was no big deal, but it was a very big deal. Pro sports had been slowly integrating for nearly 20 years by this point, but many universities were still lily white, on the playing field and off. Frankly, it wasn't until it became apparent to fat-cat alumni supporters that their beloved ESU was at a competitive disadvantage by not having black players that coaches started recruiting them. The Miners, led by Bobby Joe Hill, who knocked off a traditional powerhouse with an all-white starting lineup, helped to break down that barrier.

I should note that Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp has come away from that game with a reputation as being a racist. This page, which presents a lot of background and history of the game and the era, makes the case that Rupp has been unfairly labelled. Check it out and decide for yourself.

On gay marriage

Julian Sanchez has a thoughtful piece about gay marriage and why arguments against it fall by their own logic. Recommended reading. Via Jim Henley.

Next stop, Jerry Springer!

Today's fun headline: Stripper's dad accused of going on rampage at club:

WICHITA FALLS -- A man upset that his daughter was working at a strip club was arrested after allegedly going on a rampage in the building, destroying furniture and carrying what appeared to be a pipe bomb, authorities said.

Lee Wayne Lawrence, 41, was dressed in survival gear when he was taken into custody unharmed at Maximus after police persuaded him to surrender Saturday night, authorities said.

He was charged with aggravated assault and was being held Monday morning in Wichita County Jail on $500,000 bond, a jail spokesman said.

Lawrence damaged two 7-foot-tall bubble water lamps and a leopard skin chair and stabbed three tables tops with a knife, according to a police report. Authorities said they were analyzing whether another device he carried actually was a bomb

"And they water down the drinks, too!" he was not quoted as saying while being carted away.

Garfield v. Letterman

This is just strange: The city of Muncie, IN, dedicated an alley to David Letterman as a tongue-in-cheek honor. The event was picketed by two protesters who apparently thought that Garfield creator Jim Davis was a more appropriate honoree, since Davis was born in the county while Letterman merely attended college there. The protesters were dressed up as Garfield and Odie, presumably to lend a dignified air to the proceedings.

Well, I guess it's nice to know that dissent is still alive in America. (Whether it's "well" or not is still an open question.) Via Mark Evanier.

Who's overwhelmed?

A new study says that email overload is mostly a myth:

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that overwhelming levels of e-mail are quite atypical, an outcome that surprised even the researchers.

"All of the anecdotal evidence you hear from people out there is, `I'm so overwhelmed by the volume of e-mail,'" said Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at Pew. "The perception comes from the people who are talking most loudly about it, those few who are most overwhelmed."

In fact 60 percent of Americans who use e-mail at work receive 10 or fewer messages on an average day, the study released Sunday found. Only 6 percent receive more than 50.

And among those power users, only 11 percent say they feel overwhelmed by all the e-mail. Most have found tricks to keep e-mail manageable, such as using software to automatically sort e-mail into folders.

The results counter a myth that employees are inundated by e-mail as they are copied in on every response and are continually sent notes requesting something urgent, finding hours quickly disappearing just checking e-mail.

See? You don't have too much email after all. Now get back to work!

Our cookoffs are the chiliest

The Sunday Texas magazine in the Chron has an excellent story on the grandaddy of all chili cookoffs, in a little west Texas town called Terlingua. Jim Henley will no doubt be pleased to learn that the Terlingua tradition started because of beans:

In 1967 New York humorist H. Allen Smith published a piece in Holiday magazine titled "Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do." Smith put beans in his recipe. This chafed good Texans everywhere, especially a select group of gourmets from Dallas, who know that if you put beans in your chili, you don't know beans about chili.

As descendants of cowboys who had worked cattle drives, Texans also had a beef with anybody telling them how to cook beef. Chili, the humblest of grub, inflamed passions.

Dallas newspaperman Frank X. Tolbert challenged the Ignorant Yankee to a cook-off against Honorable Texan and fellow newspaperman Wick Fowler. A showdown was arranged in Terlingua, where Dallas chilihead Carroll Shelby owned half the desert and thought he'd show some property to anyone crazy enough to come down. Terlingua was also good and remote in case the boys got a little rowdy.

The notion of chili contests dates to the 1952 Texas State Fair, when Mrs. F.G. Ventura of Dallas beat the field to have her recipe declared the "official State Fair of Texas chili recipe."

"Just have a family that loves chili," she said to explain her success to the Dallas Times Herald.

The Terlingua contest, which resulted in a tie, was deemed successful, worthy of annual revisits. Soon the ghost town was calling itself the "Chili Capital of the World."

City slickers unleashed in the wild can be a frightening bunch. Among the cook-off's early characters was Wino Woody, who once set himself afire with vodka he put in his chili. Another cook was said to use tarantula venom. This was normal behavior. After all, the Chili Appreciation Society International (CASI) that the Dallas boys established had but three functions, says Tom Nall, former owner of the Conejos Ranch in Colorado: "Cook chili, drink good whiskey or cold beer, and tell lies."

Reading this article gives the sense that this is the chili enthusiast's version of Burning Man, with more beer and less nudity but the same eccentric characters. I should note that Wick Fowler cashed in on his cookoff fame by creating Wick Fowler's 2-Alarm Chili Mix, a package of which sits in our pantry and which mentions the famous 1967 event on its cover.

One thing I'll add to the pot is that various forms of game meat can be used to excellent effect in chili. My father-in-law has bagged a couple of caribou on hunting trips to Alaska, and I'm here to tell you that caribou meat makes some fine chili. We just finished off a batch of it, in fact.

Some chili cooks hide a dark secret when they're not at a competition:

[Carol] Straughan, recent winner of a CASI cook-off in El Paso, is getting psyched for Saturday's chili competition. Of her recipe, she says, "It's pretty basic. I use a very good blend of chiles, New Mexico hot. But every chili cook has his secret, so you don't know what else I put in it."

That extra secret is known in the trade as a kicker.

The goal, she says, is to awaken the taste buds with one spoonful. "You have to make it so that when the judge tastes that one bite they say, `This is the best chili I've ever tasted.' It has to be hot enough. It has to be spicy enough. It has to have the right consistency, a good pleasing color and aroma."

It's not the same chili she makes for herself. "At home you want to sit down and eat a bowl. The kind I make for competition, most anyone would have a hard time eating a bowl of it because of the spices. And at home I put in beans, just throw in whatever."

Oh, the horror. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, for the three of you that have probably never given any thought to chili cookoffs, here's the canonical humor piece about judging them.

Trent Lott Is A Racist

I don't toss words like "racist" around lightly. (Feel free to browse my archives if you don't believe me.) But even before Trent Lott's amazing statement about how things would be better if Strom Thurmond had been elected President in 1948, he had a long history of associating with racist groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens. He has never truly distanced himself from them, despite the fact that he has been harshly criticized before for his ties to them.

I've written before that having ties to bad people and good people who have done bad things doesn't make you a bad person. Indeed, I find assassination-by-association to be a generally repulsive tactic. However, while we may not be our brothers' keepers, we are all responsible to distinguish ourselves by our words and deeds from those whose own words and deeds are shameful. At some point, if one does not differentiate oneself, it's fair to conclude that no differences exist.

In that spirit, I bring you some history of Trent Lott's association with the Council of Conservative Citizens and the CCC's views on race. You can judge for yourself if the shoe fits.

Here's an overview of the CCC and its leader, Gordon Baum. Baum, it should be noted, is one of the people defending Lott for his remarks on Thurmond. And here is a chronology of the last time Lott's association with the CCC was in the news, written by an old college classmate of mine and linked by Atrios. I think the conclusion is inevitable. The only real question is whether or not there will be sufficient pressure on Lott this time to make him take action. I for one will not hold my breath in anticipation.

Enron! Enron! Read all about it!

I just know you're all on pins and needles at the news that there's gonna be a buttload of Enron-related books published in the next few months, to go along with the half-dozen or so titles already in print. What amuses me about the whole thing is the possibility that greed and overestimation of the anticipated demand for the product could result in big losses for those involved:

"It's fascinating. All these publishers rush in and buy their books," said Richard Pine, a literary agent who has represented authors of business books. "The danger that the (unreleased) books will all run is that in 2003 who is going to care about Enron? Will we all be glued to our TV sets, watching the war with Iraq?"

The first major book out, What Went Wrong at Enron: Everyone's Guide to the Largest Bankruptcy in U.S. History, has been the biggest success so far, making the New York Times business paperback best seller list for four months. But, generally, the books already out have been underperforming, said Rich Delahunty, national buyer of business books for the Borders chain.

"Sales of Enron-related titles have been disappointing," said Borders spokeswoman Jenie Carlen in an e-mail.

Hard to imagine a more fitting coda to this whole episode, isn't it? In case you're curious, by the way, here are the Amazon rankings of the Enron-related books that are currently in print.

Haircutgate scandal widens

Kevin Drum admits he lied about where he gets his hair cut. I demand a special prosecutor!

Barlow update

Went to Rudyard's last night to see the Asylum Street Spankers. As always, it was a great show, and it's nice to be able to see them do two full sets, something which they don't do at the Mucky Duck due to the Duck's two-show format on weekends. The price you pay for that is in cigarette smoke, since the Duck offers non-smoking shows. The smoke was so bad at Rudz that at the start of the second set the band (most of whom are smokers themselves) asked people to not light up for a little while so we could all breathe.

Anyway, Ted Barlow was one of the people who joined me for the show. We had a nice long chat before the Spankers took the stage. He and his fiancee Leslie are doing well. (In the odd-coincidences department, both Leslie and Tiffany were up in Chicago on business yesterday.) They've both been keeping busy - Leslie's had a lot of writing jobs come her way, and Ted's working on applying to business school. I think the world could use a few more MBAs like Ted.

I ribbed him about his "weeklong" hiatus and told him that people missed him. He told me he'd heard from a number of people over the past six weeks and was grateful for the kind words. He said it's awfully nice to know that people he's never met have thought about him.

He did read about being listed as an extremist by Steven den Beste, which amused him. He sent a note to SDB asking why he said that and got a somewhat wishy-washy reply saying that he didn't really mean it that way.

I prodded Ted a little about whether he would start blogging again. Just a little - after all, Ted's right when he says that for most of us, the rewards of blogging are emotional, and if it's not making you feel good you should be doing something else. He may and he may not. I don't know.

All in all, it was good company and great music. Between seeing Eric Bogle at the Duck on Thursday and the Austin Lounge Lizards at the Duck tonight, I'll have had quite a bit of both this week.

Style sheet fixed

To those of you who tuned in this evening, that was not an intentional site redesign. I was dinking around in my main index and managed to screw it up, thus causing the site to load with no style sheet. Didn't realize what I'd done till I returned home. It's fixed now. Sorry about that.

2 indicted in K-Mart Kiddie Roundup mess

HPD Captain Mark Aguirre and Sergeant Ken Wenzel have been indicted on charges of official oppression stemming from their role in the K-Mart Kiddie Roundup.

For the record, "official oppression", which sounds vaguely Orwellian to me, is a Class A misdemeanor, meaning punishment of a fine of up to $4000 and/or imprisonment for up to one year. The definition of official oppression in the state penal code is here.

As noted before, there's much trash talking and a vow to take this case to trial by Aguirre's lawyer. The local TV newsies are probably wetting their pants over this.

It should be noted that whatever cheap entertainment we may get out of this, there is one undeniably Good Thing that has resulted from this snafu:

Acting Police Chief Tim Oettmeier told Houston City Council in September that any future operations on the scale of the controversial Kmart raid will have to be approved by the police chief in writing.

"Large-scale, multidivisional operations ... will not take place without a proper review and written approval of the chief of police," he said.

"All future operations of this magnitude will be monitored as they are executed and reviewed in a timely manner to ensure proper accountability has been maintained."

Amen.

Beer killing gets life term

From today's Chron:

BANDERA -- A jury Thursday handed a life sentence to a man who shot and killed a longtime friend he accused of drinking the last beer in his refrigerator.

Jurors deliberated for less than two hours before passing the sentence on Steven Brasher, 42, for the murder of Willie Lawson, 39, on Nov. 5, 2001.

"There was only two beers left, so I took one, and I told Willie not to take my last beer," Brasher said in a taped statement that was played during the trial.

Testimony showed Brasher shot Lawson in the head with a pistol after the two began arguing over the missing beer. Brasher maintained the shooting was an accident

The real tragedy here is that he probably killed the dude over a Coors Lite or something like that. Nobody has any standards any more, I suppose.

UPDATE: Naturally, Larry spotted this one, too.

More fun in Montgomery County

What could be sillier than affixing a fig leaf to Michaelangelo's David and removing paintings from a men's restroom in a restaurant because they have nekkid people in them? Why, getting into a lather over the slogan on a high school senior class T-shirt, that's what. Only in Montgomery County.

Each year, the seniors decide on a T-shirt design for the class and sell them for $10 each to raise funds for the graduation party. This year, parents Debbie Cope and Leslie McManus say parents routinely went through a national catalog and selected shirts with the phrase "Kiss My Class Goodbye!!! 2003."

Cope told local reporters that to avoid any problems with misconstrued meanings, the parents put in the order for the slogan to appear on the front -- rather than the back -- of the shirts.

The design was approved, but after the shirts arrived, Principal Bobby Morris banned them from campus as a violation of the district's dress code.

Morris told the Conroe Courier that the language is "suggestive of vulgarity not appropriate for school" and claimed he had never approved the message. Angry parents have held several meetings with Morris and Superintendent Bob Smith.

Boy, there's a surefire threat to the American family. Next thing you know, seniors might organize a skip day and hang out at the mall playing violent video games or something. Good thing Principal Morris took a courageous stand against all that.

RIP, Roone Arledge

Roone Arledge, one of the great innovators in sports television, has died at the age of 71 from cancer. Arledge gave us instant replay, slow motion, personal profiles of athletes (don't thank him too much for that when you watch the next Olympics), Monday Night Football, and ABC's Wide World of Sports.

(By the way, the skier who epitomized "the agony of defeat" is named Vinko Bogataj. He's alive and well and living in his native Slovenia. He got a concussion from that nasty fall, but continued to ski competitively and does some coaching today. Here's a list of highlights from the Wide World of Sports in the 1970s, which includes Vinko's swan dive.)

ESPN has a great obit on Arledge which gives some interesting details about MNF and Wide World (the slogan, "Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport: The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition. This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!" was written on the back of an airplane ticket by Arledge).

It's a Mad^4 World

Mark Evanier, probably the world's biggest fan of the classic comedy It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, recently attended a screening of the movie that commemorated its 39th anniversary. Several stars, stunt people, and the widow of the director were all there. Go read his report about the evening.

33K for Disco E

The glittering "Disco E" was the highlight of Day 2 of the current Enron auction:

The glitziest of Enron's signs, the "disco E," was sold for $33,000 at auction Wednesday to a man who declined to give his name and immediately drove off in a Ferrari.

"It's a Christmas present for the person who has everything," he told reporters while hurrying through the Hotel Inter-Continental lobby to the sleek gray car.

The Ferrari's Texas license plate number, F57CRG, is registered to a Richard Bowman. He could not be located for comment.

An online library search found that a man named Richard Bowman used to be chief executive officer of Tri-Union Development in Friendswood. Tri-Union Vice President Jeffrey Janik said the company's ex-CEO drove a Ferrari and lived in Tanglewood.

Those last two paragraphs represent more investigative reporting by the Chron on Enron-related matters than they did in all of 2001.

Today is the last day of this auction. If you're going to buy anything, don't make this mistake:

At a September auction, Microcache Computers paid $44,000 for a lighted E. It is now in a shrine-like setting in Microcache's Gulf Freeway store.

Fred Massey bought an identical E Tuesday for $10,500. He said he intended to turn it into a glass-covered coffee table and give it to his wife as a Christmas present.

Massey tried to keep his purchase secret by identifying himself with the name of one of his friends. The effort blew up when the friend called the Chronicle to say that he wasn't the buyer. Massey then gave his real name to reporters.

For all his trouble, Massey no longer wants his vowel. His wife, it turns out, doesn't want the E -- she told him it would be too big for the living room.

Is there a married man who doesn't feel this guy's pain? Doesn't he know that Rule Number One for Christmas shopping is "Always Get An Itemized List Of Exactly What She Wants From Your Wife"? What an amateur.

Strange bedfellows

Probably the most curious thing about Dahlia Lithwick's overview of Scheidler v. NOW is seeing who's on what side.

The case involves the use of RICO statutes against anti-abortion activists who engage in violent protest. NOW originally sued the Pro-Life Action Network (PLAN) in 1986 under RICO and eventually won in the Supreme Court in 1994 when SCOTUS ruled that "extortion" did not have to mean financial gain for the alleged racketeers. The case was remanded back to the lower courts, and here we are again after the inevitable appeals.

The first oddity is Solicitor General Ted Olsen filing a brief in support of NOW:

Solicitor General Ted Olson, who filed a brief that supports NOW's position only somewhat more than PLAN's, has 10 minutes to argue in favor of stretching the racketeering statutes past any plausible meaning. This is perhaps no surprise since his bosses would like nothing better than to use RICO (and FISA, and Bahamian maritime law) to prosecute any suspect in the war on terror who can't be prosecuted under normal criminal statutes.

Yeesh. Much as I want to see the likes of Joe Scheidler and Randolph Terry punished for their criminal behavior, this is very bad.

PLAN also has some unaccustomed allies:

Justice Anthony Kennedy wonders whether any time any protester trespasses for any reason, he's committed a Hobbs Act violation. Olson responds that if the aim is to shut down a clinic, then the protester has "obtained control" of that property.

Justice Antonin Scalia wonders whether this construction of the word "obtained" doesn't "sail too close to the wind of First Amendment rights." And Olson, sailing too close to the wind of Scalia, tries to argue that even in civil rights cases, if the aim was to shut down a business through protest, then yes, there was extortion. This response gives at least an inkling of why organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have sided with the Operation Rescue crowd in this case. If you can't throw a little blood or toss a few pointy sledge hammers, what good is a protest anyhow?

Of course, as the far left and far right have more in common with each other than they do with their more conventional neighbors on the ideological spectrum, this is not that big a surprise. Wish I could be a fly on the wall at a strategy session that includes top dogs from PLAN and PETA, though. Can they even agree on who caters lunch?

Lithwick's right about the fact that this case really doesn't have anything to do with the state of abortion and laws that regulate it. In a way, each side is probably better off if they lose, as winning won't change their daily lives much but losing will give them plenty of tinder to stoke their fundraising fires.

Engine tax proposed

State Rep Warren Chisum, better known for his crusade against gay marriage, has what I think is a pretty good proposal in the works regarding issues of the environment and the budget: Charge a fee for bigger engines.

Cars, off-road equipment and many motorboats and motorcycles would carry a $5 to $7 annual fee to raise money for air pollution-control programs under a proposal today by a Republican lawmaker.

Rep. Warren Chisum, the House Environmental Regulation Committee chairman, said he will file legislation that would require an environmental impact permit sticker on vehicles with a 50-horsepower engine or larger.

"What we are saying is if you have an impact on the environment, that you are going to pay an impact (fee)," Chisum, of Pampa, said after presenting the idea at a clean energy policy forum. "Granted some of you have a greater impact than others, but still everybody has an impact."

He said the fee would raise about $188 million annually through 2007. Lawmakers are under pressure to come up with the funding, which is needed to help bring the Houston and Dallas regions into compliance with federal clean air laws.

Seems eminently reasonable to me. It puts the burden on those who impose a greater cost on the environment. Lord knows, most of the people out there driving F-350s to work have no real need for them. Making them pay a fairer share of the cleanup bill makes all kinds of sense.

As with many things, sometimes the smallest detail is the key:

Chisum's plan could meet some criticism but state money is tight. Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander has projected the state could face a $5 billion shortfall.

Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov.-elect David Dewhurst and Rep. Tom Craddick, the presumptive speaker of the Texas House, have said they believe they can balance the budget without raising taxes.

"This is not a new tax," Chisum said. "It's a different mechanism for funding the same issue."

Oh, for crying out loud. Call this a "fee" if you must to satisfy Governor Goodhair's promise to never ever ever invoke the T-word. Unless he wants to start holding bake sales, the money has got to come from somewhere. Let's please not get tripped up on semantics.

Sunnydale ecology

Ever wonder if the human population of Sunnydale is big enough to sustain its vampire population? Well, fear not, for an actual ecologist has done the math for you. Check it out.

Newman v. Heldman

Nathan Newman and Sam Heldman have a good debate going about whether or not the Supreme Court's review of the Texas sodomy law is a boon or a curse for progressives. Start with Nathan's opening statement that progressives are better off if the Supremes refuse to overturn Bowers v. Hardwick, then read Sam's reply and Nathan's reprise.

The one point I wish to address is Sam's third item:

It will be a long long time before gay rights take hold, legislatively, in a place like Alabama. And telling a potential litigant there that he should forego filing a cert petition to establish a simple and basic right because it might, if successful, have an indirect negative impact on the ability of other folks in other states to get even further rights -- that's a hard sell to the guy in Alabama.

To which Nathan responds:

It's worth noting that even in Texas, gay rights activists are winning. Check out this legislative page from OutTexas, which details victories on hate crimes and strong movement on ending educational discrimination against gays and, notably, in moving to repeal the Texas sodomy law.

Nathan is misreading the legislative page he cites. It speaks of successfully bottling up Rep. Warren Chisum's anti-gay-marriage legislation in past years, but as I've noted before, the odds are excellent that Chisum's bill will pass this time around, as the Democrats no longer control the state Senate and thus can't block this bill as they have before. It really is the case that for some people, you're only an equal in some states and not in others.

That's not to say that Nathan's larger point isn't valid. It is:

Progressives need to regain the majoritarian voice they once had in mobilizing for justice as a matter of popular will. The rhetoric of rights and judicial process is a crabbed, elitist turn for progressive thought in the last generation that is not only antidemocratic but ultimately wrongheaded and ineffective.

In the long run and even the middle run, any victories not won based on majority power are useless and likely to be short-lived. So forget judicial activism or putting ones hopes in the Rehnquist Court as a savior.

While I don't fully agree with Nathan's pessimism regarding the judiciary, I do agree that battles like this are ultimately won and lost in public, not in the courthouse.

Sparse attendance at Enron auction

No big crowds this time at Round Two of the Enron auction. One of the marquee crooked E's went for a mere ten large to a guy whose wife wants to use it as a coffee table. Is there any dignity in that? Sheesh.

Still plenty of stuff available for your Christmas shopping needs. Mayeb you can get that Aeron chair this time, Scott.

I sure hope this doesn't become a Sopranos subplot

Headline in the Chron: Mobster indicted in prison sperm-smuggling case:

WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. -- One of five New York mobsters believed to have smuggled their sperm out of a Pennsylvania prison to impregnate their wives has been indicted, along with his wife, on a charge of criminal conspiracy.

Kevin Granato, a convicted hit man for the Colombo crime family, came under suspicion four years ago after he was seen in the visitation room at the Allenwood Federal Prison showing off a toddler he called his child, even though he had been in jail since 1988.

Last week, a federal grand jury indicted Granato, 42, and his wife, Regina Granato, on two counts of criminal conspiracy. Regina Granato, who lives in New York, is also charged with one count of providing a prohibited object -- a cryogenic sperm kit -- to an inmate.

The indictments are the 13th and 14th since October 2000 related to alleged smuggling schemes at the prison. Among those indicted were four guards who pleaded guilty; two were accused of accepting bribes to smuggle the sperm kits.

That last paragraph sure puts a new twist on the word "bagman", doesn't it?

New frontiers in art and literature

First, there was cow poetry:

[Nathan] Banks, a 22-year-old student at Purchase College, painted single words (from "a" to "existential") on the flanks of about 60 cows near his upstate New York home, then let them wander around to see if they could compose poetry.

So Holsteins and Jerseys named Elsie and Maggie came up with phrases like "eccentric art," "performance as cow environment" and Banks' own favorite, "organic conceptual art as poetry."

Too bad there are only a finite number of cows available for this project, or we could have finally tested that hypothesis about eventually writing all the works of Shakespeare. Maybe next time.

So what's the point of this, then? Fortunately, as with the poetry itself, the cows provided the answer:

"There was a big concern that the cows would be stressed and give less milk," Banks said. [Cow owner] Gerry Ruestow said milk production actually went up a bit, "probably because the cows were a bit more active. The cows were as interested in the observers as the observers were in the cows."

Take that, PETA!

Once you have cow poetry, the next logical step is - you guessed it - sheep poetry. The benefit here is a bit more abstract and metaphysical:

[Artist Valerie] Laws, 48, said: "I like the idea of using living sheep to create a living poem, and creating new work as they move around.

"Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics which a lot of people find hard to understand, as it seems to go against common sense.

"Randomness and uncertainty is at the centre of how the universe is put together, and is quite difficult for us as humans who rely on order.

"So I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep."

You know, I just don't think I can add anything to that. I tried to come up with a witty Heisenberg joke, but failed miserably. If any of my readers who are more hip to quantum mechanics want to take a shot at it, the comments await you.

Thanks to Lesley for finding both of these stories.

Goodhair says sodomy law "appropriate"

Governor Rick Perry has officially forfeited the ability to call himself a proponent of limited government after publicly pronouncing the state's odious sodomy law "appropriate". He declined to state what other things that he personally thinks are icky that he'd like to see banned, but rest assured fellow Texans, he's got a staffer looking into it.

No sugar tonight in my coffee

The Imperial Sugar refinery, from which the Houston suburb of Sugar Land gets its name, is closing its doors, a victim of high costs and slim profit margins. Company headquarters will still be there, but over 300 people are out of work. Imperial has operated a plant there for over 150 years, so this is very much the end of an era.

The allure of blaming the victim

This post discusses the most recent episode of The Sopranos, the penultimate episode of Season Four. This blog is a spoiler-free zone, so the rest of this post will be underneath the More link.

As soon as Min Mitrone caught Paulie trying to steal her money stash under her bed, I was certain she was going to end up dead. Not because I thought Paulie would want to kill her, despite their mutual antagonism, but because I was pretty confident she was going to put him in a position where he felt he had to kill her.

Sure enough, that's how it played out. Paulie, having forced her deadbolt and been confronted while searching under her mattress, tries the I-just-dropped-in-for-a-visit gambit. Min, who's known that Paulie was a bad boy since he was a boy, has none of it and after an aborted attempt to call Mrs. Galtieri (who doubtless would have been too disconcerted to have understood a word of what was being said to her, not that Paulie was taking any chances) starts screaming for help. They struggle, and Paulie eventually smothers her with a pillow.

What actually disturbed me about this sequence was that the whole time I was practically yelling at Min to stop acting so stupidly. All she had to do, I knew, was to play along with Paulie's dumb story, brew a pot of tea, and she'd survive to get her lock fixed. But no, she had to call his pathetic bluff and got herself killed for her trouble. How could she be so dumb?

How could I be so harsh on a little old lady who's been brutally murdered in her own home?

It's hard, I think, to watch that scene and not blame the victim at least a little bit. How could she not realize that once he was discovered, all Paulie wanted to do was get out of there? Did she really think that she could call the cops or hit her I've-Fallen-And-I-Can't-Get-Up button or attract a neighbor's attention without being attacked? Why didn't she just tell him to get lost?

I never know how to deal with a situation like this. No one deserves to be killed like that, yet you can't escape the feeling that she had some measure of control over her fate and she botched it. If only, if only, if only. I come away wanting to avenge her and berate her at the same time.

There's another issue in this episode, which is that by all rights Paulie should be arrested for this crime within a couple of days. Little old ladies getting killed in their homes by strangers is the sort of high-profile crime that should light a fire under the collective butts of the local gendarmes. All they have to do is dust for prints, then ask themselves what a known do-badder like Paulie Walnuts is doing in the victim's house. A five-minute chat with Min's friend Cookie Cirillo and they'd discover that Paulie disliked Min and knew about her stash. Once they note that the stash is missing, they should have enough evidence to take Paulie downtown for a nice long conversation. Heck, the Feds would probably step in at this point and make their dealings with Adriana look cordial. The ease with which these guys get away with no-brainer crimes like this sometimes gives me a pain in my suspension-of-disbelief mechanism.

Welcome back

In case you hadn't noticed, Alex is back in the swing of things after successful completion of his NaNoWriMo mission. Diane is also back, and she seems to like the color pink. Taunt her about it at your peril.

That's good news. Now, if we could only convince Ted to end the world's longest "about a week" hiatus, life would truly be beautiful.

Goring Kerry

Kevin Raybould has a sharp rebuke to Mickey Kaus for the reasons Kaus gives for disliking John Kerry. The "nut graf", as the insiders say:

This whole post is Gore II. Gore was a bad man because of his appearance ("earth tones"), Kerry is a bad man because of his appearance ("furrowed brow"). Gore was unprincipled ("farm chores"), Kerry is unprincipled(he "apparently" changed a position to appease a core constituency). Gore was boring and not one of us ("wooden"), Kerry is boring and not one of us("animatronic Lincoln"). As with Gore, there is not one mention of Kerry's positions, and the attacks are backed up weakly, if at all.

That's pretty much it. Look, like Kerry and Gore or don't, but for Pete's sake can we at least occasionally talk about what they actually say and do as opposed to their facial hair? It's the same thing with Bush. I don't really care whether or not he's a "moron" (for the record, I think he's of normal intelligence, has excellent people skills, and lacks in intellectual curiosity), but all the talk about it just distracts from what's really going on.

This is the main failing, and the main bias, of the press these days. They give us a story line and they stick to it regardless of any inconvenient facts. What really blows me away is how easily a guy like Kaus, who's supposed to be one of those guys who Sees Through The Hype and Deconstructs The Spin in order to Bring You The Real Story, falls in lockstep with the conventional wisdom. If he'd tried to take even the tiniest peek behind the curtain to see if any of this crap has a grain of truth to it (as Matt Yglesias commendably did), I'd give him credit for it. Instead, he's eliciting reader feedback on Why Everyone Hates Kerry, presumably so he can crib someone else's pithy zinger for future use. Truly pathetic.

Enron auction begins today

Just a reminder that another Enron auction begins today. Go here for the webcast. Aeron chairs, Enron socks, and a seven-foot lighted, twirling "disco E" are among the items available.

Fire damages Fastow mansion

Missed this one yesterday, but apparently some yutz tried to burn down the mansion that was once owned by Andrew Fastow. Doesn't look like there's any connection to Enron, but feel free to put on those tinfoil hats and spin some conspiracy theories (remember, the lack of evidence of a conspiracy is itself evidence of a conspiracy).

SCOTUS to review sodomy case

The Supremes are set to hear a case that originated in Houston concerning Texas' sodomy law:

The justices will review the prosecution of two men under a 28-year-old Texas law making it a crime to engage in same-sex intercourse.

The Supreme Court has struggled with how much protection the Constitution offers in the bedroom. The court ruled 5-4 in 1986 that consenting adults have no constitutional right to private homosexual sex, upholding laws that ban sodomy.

"Gay men and lesbians have been waiting for the opportunity to convince the court it should take a different view of their constitutional rights," Ruth E. Harlow, legal director of the New York-based Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, said Monday.

The court faces several questions in the latest case. Among them: Is it an unconstitutional invasion of privacy for couples to be prosecuted for what they do in their own homes? Is it unconstitutional for states to treat gays and lesbians differently by punishing them for having sex while allowing heterosexual couples to engage in the same acts without penalties?

Some people will argue, as this assistant DA has argued, that this should be a legislative matter rather than a judicial one:

William Delmore III, an assistant district attorney in Texas, said people who don't like the law should take it up with the Texas Legislature, not courts.

He said homosexual sodomy has been considered criminal behavior for centuries. The conduct "could not conceivably have achieved the status of a fundamental right in the brief period of 16 years" since the Supreme Court last reviewed it, Delmore wrote in the state's court papers.

In a sense, I agree with him. This issue should be addressed by the legislature. Unfortunately, our Lege is notoriously uninterested in such matters. It doesn't bother them that a large group of citizens is denied a right that the rest of us take for granted, namely the right to have sex with another consenting adult. Really, this issue should be addressed at the federal level, just as civil rights laws had to be enacted at the federal level in the 1960s to ensure that blacks enjoyed the same Constitutional rights regardless of which state they happened to live in.

Given that the federal government is unlikely to do anything about this any time soon, I see no choice but for the court to step in and rule that the state of Texas and others with similar laws have overstepped their bounds. I don't know if they will - the 1986 case is staring them in the face - but they should. And if rooting for the court to throw out this odious infringement on civil rights makes me an advocate of "judicial activism", then so be it. But know this: Anyone who thinks that this law should be kept on the books is not allowed to call himself or herself a proponent of less government.

I think Jesse gets this exactly right:

Sodomy laws should simply not exist, because "sodomy" itself offends no statutory principle of conduct. There is nothing about a man and another man, or a woman and another woman engaging in sexual conduct that defies the sense of statutory law in place on every other law of sexual conduct. It's creating a new basis of law that's little more than "I don't wanna see that". I mean, if that's a basis of law from now on, can I have anti-Public Displays of Affection statutes put in place? It's one of those edicts of common sense that more people should follow - if you don't like it, don't watch it/get involved in it. It's not hurting you, and more importantly it's not depriving anyone of their rights.

Some background on the case from when it was still in the Texas legal system can be found here. Sam Heldman gives his opinion here. Glenn Reynolds, who is rooting for the court to strike this law down, has written at great length about this sort of thing.

Bullet successfully dodged

Spent the afternoon at the Civil Court building downtown thanks to a jury summons. The real secret to not getting empanelled in Harris County is to draw a high number when you're sent off to a courtroom for voir dire. I was #29 of 36 this time (last time I was in row three of four), and all 12 people chosen had lower numbers than me (last time only two higher numbers were picked). They obviously start the selection process with juror #1 and go till they have 12 selections.

Not that I have a method for ensuring a high number, mind you. But hey, it's worked so far.

Slugs and body snatchers

Fascinating story in today's Chron about the practice of impromptu carpooling. People driving to work from the outlying areas will cruise through some of the larger Metro bus stop areas looking for people to share a ride into downtown. By picking up one or two passengers, they get to take the HOV lanes, which can cut their commute time by more than half. The riders, naturally, save the cost of an express bus, which is $3.

The nation's first HOV lane was built in 1973 in northern Virginia. It was on those same congested arteries around the nation's capital that instant car pooling took off in the 1980s. Today, it's a mini-industry. There are two Web sites, newsletters, an etiquette list and even a book on the topic. It also has its own weird-sounding name: "slugging."

At the three dozen listed pick-up and drop-off points around Washington, D.C., riders are called "slugs" and drivers "body snatchers." The terms are said to have originated as derogatory descriptions assigned by bus drivers, who likened the riders to counterfeit coins, or slugs, used to gain a free trip. As for the drivers' moniker, well, that's obvious: They're looking for warm bodies to meet the HOV requirement.

The San Francisco area also is known for slugging, but the practice apparently is rare elsewhere.

I'm moderately surprised that more of these people haven't tried to find a regular carpool among their neighbors and coworkers. Tiffany belongs to a vanpool, with a van provided by Metro and subsidized by her company, along with about a dozen other coworkers who live nearby. It's made her 30-mile commute a lot easier and cheaper.

But that's a nitpick. This is a pretty cool example of finding a creative solution to a nagging problem. The only unfortunate thing is that some people don't quite understand the big picture:

While some love the camaraderie, others long to be on their own again. Anil Pande, who drives to the Addicks lot from Katy to get a ride to his job at 4 Houston Center, said he can't wait until the freeway is widened.

"If the road were better, then I'd much rather drive," he said. "But I-10 being what it is, everyone is forced into this. There's not a lot of choice. You find people who have been stuck in the freeway hours a day for months who then decide, 'I might as well switch to this.' "

And if all those people who have been forced into instant carpooling start driving themselves into work when I-10 is widened, traffic will begin to suck as it does now, just as all of the opponents of widening predict and for exactly the reasons they give. Why do you think one-passenger-per-vehicle is discouraged?

My Hall of Fame ballot

If I had a ballot in the Hall of Fame voting, I'd cast it for Bert Blyleven, Gary Carter, Rich Gossage, Eddie Murray, and Tommy John. Frankly, it's a crime that Blyleven, Carter, and the Goose aren't already enshrined, and I'll keep plugging them until they're in or they're no longer eligible.

Eddie Murray is the only sure thing among the newly eligible. I'll probably vote for Ryne Sandberg next year, but I want to take some more time to look at his record first. He's not going anywhere. Alan Trammell is more of a borderline case, and he's probably hurt by the fact that doubleplay-mate Lou Whitaker is off the list after mysteriously failing to garner 5% of the vote last year.

As for Lee Smith, he's the poster boy for Why The Save Is A Vastly Overrated Stat. If Smith gets in before Gossage, I'm leading a pitchfork-and-torch charge on Cooperstown.

If you're a fan of Jim Kaat, Dave Parker, Don Mattingly, Andre Dawson, Jack Morris, Steve Garvey, or Jim Rice, I feel your pain but your guy doesn't make the cut. Sorry. And guys like Vince Coleman and Mark Davis are on the ballot as a test - anyone who actually votes for either of them should be excluded from voting for anything related to baseball ever again.

On the dial

Where on the dial will you find starlet-filled Jacuzzis and news reporters who strip?

Jerry Springer? The latest Fox reality show?

Nope. Univision and Telemundo, according to Chron Latin TV writer Magaly Morales, who works up a pretty good froth over it:

Though both networks are equally guilty, Univisión -- nicknamed "bimbovision" on Internet message boards -- is perhaps the biggest culprit. It seems nearly every Univisión program except newscasts is packed with an army of bodacious, dressed-for-ratings bimbettes.

El Gordo y la Flaca (The Fat Man and the Skinny Woman), a weekday show at 3 p.m. on Channel 45 that is supposed to dish showbiz gossip, included a Jacuzzi in which TV starlets and models frolic -- in almost nothing -- with the show's 300-pound host. El Gordo's team also produces a prime-time weekly special, Pica y Se Extiende, where the sexual innuendo gets even more out of hand.

[...]

Telemundo seems a little more tame when it comes to unnecessary raunchiness, but it is not guiltless.

The network's noon gossip show Cotorreando, a program with too many hosts already (there are five on the set, speaking all at once), recently introduced a new character they call "sexy professor" who strips down to a bikini as she presents a news segment.

I'm not making this up.

Morales has apparently been taking lessons in Blue Nose from senior TV writer Ann Hodges, who has been known to actually get the vapors while writing about certain topics.

Makes you wonder, though: There's a Spanish language option on most TVs nowadays for the English language channels. When will they come out with an English language option for Univision and Telemundo? I mean, if they're looking to expand their audience...

Where local music rules

Here's a story about North Carolina radio station WBZB-1090 AM, which plays only local music. They don't have much signal, but you can hear them over the web. Some snotnosed industry consultant gives them a "one in a billion" chance of survival, but I'm sure rooting for them. Anyone who can deliver a blow to the hegemony of the Evil Empire of Clear Channel is worthy of our support. Go get 'em, guys.

The mayoral race

Oh, God, they're already predicting a long and expensive campaign for mayor in 2003. Someone shoot me, please.

There are already five presumed candidates, with the possibility of others. Right now, my preferences would be as follows, in reverse order of desireability:

Orlando "Empty Suit" Sanchez
Michael "Boy Wonder" Berry
Sylvester "Wayne's World" Turner
Anybody else

If she hadn't acted like a jackass in the last election, I'd love to see Debra Danburg throw her hat into the ring. Heck, I'd still like to see it. Maybe when I learn more about Bill White and Ed Wulfe I'll feel differently, but right now I'm envisioning a Sanchez-Turner runoff, and the thought of it makes me ill.

Piiiiiiigs...Innnnnnnn...Suburbs!

The town of Anahuac, in nearby Chambers County, is overrun with wild pigs whose elusiveness, appetite, and sheer numbers are causing havoc for all.

By day, these hogs usually keep out of sight in the Houston area's backwoods and bayous. But later, using the cover of darkness, herds of them make regular raids into populated areas where they cause mayhem and destruction, authorities say.

Homeowners, such as those in Chambers County, have awakened many mornings to find their neatly manicured yards and gardens looking more like minefields after an army of hogs has foraged there.

These marauding packs use their long snouts to uproot or plow the ground in their food quest. Hogs are omnivores that eat just about anything -- although they are partial to acorns, roots and grub worms.

Where'd all these pigs come from, anyway?

Since European explorers first brought hogs to Texas in the 1600s and gave them free range, the number of hogs existing in the wild has grown while their habitat has shrunk. Some of these hogs are descendants of escapees from the early settlers. Others were turned loose by farmers in later years when pork prices sunk too low to make a profit, say many extension agents, who specialize in agricultural issues.

The problem is worse today than it has ever been, they add, as hogs have started turning up in places where no hogs have gone before.

"I'm getting calls about them all the time. Not just in rural areas, but in suburban areas and even within the city limits of Houston and other towns," said David Veale, an urban wildlife biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Yes, they are boldly going where no hogs have gone before. They'd best evade capture, for the fate of a trapped hog is not as nice as the fate of a captured prairie dog:

[Hog trapper Jay] Parker plans to butcher some of the 45 hogs that he already has captured and smoke the sausage in his own smokehouse: "I hardly ever eat meat from a store."

The rest will be sold, he said.

"They're good to eat," agreed [Bruce] Corner, the Anahuac mayor who along with Parker enjoys hunting hogs for which the only requirement is a hunting license.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm glad I live in the city, where the only wildlife walks on two legs.

The Prairie Dog Lady

I've written about Lubbock and its prairie dog issues before (here, here, and here). The Texas Magazine in Sunday's Chron gives a nice profile of Lynda Watson, the "Prairie Dog Lady", considered the best in the world at catching the little rodents barehanded.

Why is that important? Well, the original way of catching prairie dogs was via a vacuum cleaner. That had its problems:

Prairie dogs are caught in two ways. The first and most efficient is by literally vacuuming them out of their holes. An adult prairie dog can weigh 2 to 5 pounds and stands 12 inches to 14 inches upright (a favorite position). His circumference is only a few inches, however, and he can easily fit through a 6-inch-diameter hose. Powerful vacuums pulled by tractors can suck up hundreds of prairie dogs in several hours, drawing them rapidly into large, mobile tanks.

Animal-rights activists, however, say many prairie dogs are killed in the process, beaten to death against the tank walls or smothered. Dealers say the pups that live suffer lung damage from the mass of dust that accompanies them in the tank and die at an early age.

Watson's method is more humane, more tedious and more hazardous for the trapper. It requires two people: Watson's eyesight prevents her from operating anything larger than a four-wheeler, so she rides in the passenger seat while someone drives a pickup with a water tank on a trailer behind.

Once Watson spots a family she watches to mark the hole they run to. The driver then pulls slowly over the burrow and stops just as the tank passes the opening.

Watson jumps from the truck before it stops ("I can't count my sprained ankles") and moves quickly and quietly to the opening. Holding a hose, she aims a slow stream of water down the hole. When she sees or hears the first evidence of a prairie dog emerging, she thrusts her arm into the opening, down the blind chasm, and grabs him.

With good luck she may retrieve several adults and a half-dozen pups, catching as many as 150 on a good day. On a bad one she may be bitten by the first one or encounter one of the black widows that like to live just below the rim of prairie-dog holes.

"I've been bitten by spiders a couple of times," she says. "Obviously, it didn't kill me, but it forms a hole, and the flesh just rots out of it."

Usually, however, Watson pulls a series of wet, squirming rodents from their lair and tosses them with practiced ease into a trash can. The animals are then sprayed for fleas and placed in cages to be taken to Watson's home. The younger animals can be domesticated and sold. The adults are relocated.

Being caught by the great Lynda Watson confers some advantages to a prairie dog:

Adults caught in the wild remain feral animals. Only pups are suitable for domestication, and only those born in captivity or caught by hand can be guaranteed to be healthy. As a result, a sort of cult grew up around Watson in Japan, where pet prairie dogs have become a fad among children.

Brokers estimate that around 12,000 prairie-dog pups are exported from the United States yearly, and a large percentage of those go to Japan.

"Japan is a very small country with very small houses and many apartments," says Kaye Takahashi, owner of Cynomys, a prairie-dog retail outlet in Tokyo. "Many apartment owners do not allow big pets, dogs, cats.

"Prairie dogs are not too loud and don't smell too bad, so they are very popular. Prairie dogs from Lynda Watson are most popular. We sell them with a certificate (from Watson), and we put in a microchip in the neck so the prairie dog can always be identified."

In Tokyo, where inflated prices for almost everything are the norm, an albino prairie dog from Watson is sure to bring $3,000. A palomino sells for $1,000, and the average brown and gray sells for $300.

Watson herself doesn't see much of that money, but she doesn't mind. She's doing what she wants to do.