Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was looking over the various blogs he likes to read regularly and found a link to a Geek test on TexasBestGrok. Well, your Maximum Leader has thought himself a geek; but according to his score of 75 he is, in fact, not a geek.
But perhaps, if given a chance, he might want to be a geek.
Carry on.
Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is tired. Very very tired. And he blames baseball. Yes, baseball my minions. He has watched lots and lots of baseball. All these 6 hour long Red Sox/Yankees games are making your Maximum Leader tired, cranky, and in a mood not fit for blogging.
But here he is anyway answering the call of his readership.
First to the easy stuff…
Huzzah for the Packers! Your Maximum Leader didn’t think you would be able to pull it off against the somehow resurgent Lions. That said, the Packers are still playing without a secondary. That does not bode well for their long-term prospects.
You know something though. Your Maximum Leader is happy for the Detroit Lions. He thinks Steve Mariucci is a great coach. He was treated badly by the 49ers. It is good to see him turning around a team with som talent. (Also, your Maximum Leader is enjoying seeing the 49ers languish.)
Huzzah for the Redskins! They didn’t look very good playing against the Bears. But the odds were on someone winning. (Your Maximum Leader knows they could have tied, but the ODDS were on one team winning.) The Skins still don’t have an offensive line that can block. Brunnell doesn’t look very sharp. And Clinton Portis is looking more and more like a product of a great system (in Denver). That said, your Maximum Leader is well aware that Portis rushed for over 100 yards. That is good, but it speaks more to the inability of the Bears to stop the run than the Redskins’ ability to run. Washington’s defence looks very good.
By the way. Read Gregg Easterbrook’s TMQ column on NFL.com for the best football commentary around.
On to baseball…
Well, lets make one little pit stop to say… Hockey still locked out. Your Maximum Leader has yet to care. Perhaps he’ll start to miss it after the Superbowl in January? Who knows.
Now baseball.
Is your Maximum Leader the only one who wonders why someone would pay over $100,000 for Barry Bond’s 700th Home Run ball? In your Maximum Leader’s mind, the only ball that Barry will hit that is worth that money (barring he breaks the single season record again) will be number 756. That, dear minions, is the ball worth the money. That ball will be the historic one.
Surely both the National and American League Championship Series are doing their best to provide great baseball on a whole bunch of different levels.
Level 1: Great baseball rivalry resulting in great baseball. (At least in the AL.) If you like baseball it doesn’t get much more gripping than it has over the past few days. Everything people around the world love about baseball has been on display. Pressure. Clutch performances. Men-in-scoring-position-with-2-outs-and-a-slugger-at-bat. It is just awesome.
Level 2: Players stepping up and performing. Curt Schilling playing hurt. David Ortiz’s many clutch hits. And Hideki Matsui is a beast! Jeff Kent’s walk-off homer. Carlos Beltran becoming an offensive giant.
Level 3: Time, time, time. This is a bad level. Damn all these games for pushing the endurance of fans and players alike. Your Maximum Leader needs his sleep! Of course, this is mostly the fault of the ALCS. But really, AL games always take longer than NL games. Who knew that in the championship that would be magnified by a factor of two or three? At this point the players on the Boston and New York teams must be punch drunk from all the play they’ve put in already.
Level 4: These great games still show how screwed up MLB can be. Scheduling games at the same time? And only letting one “network” broadcast the game? What the hell is up with that?
Now let the prognosticating and ranting begin!
First off, if the Boston/New York game is rained out tonight, your Maximum Leader predicts that the Yankees will win when they play on Wednesday. Right now your Maximum Leader believes the series will go to the Yankees, but he recognizes that the Red Sox have momentum. These players are, as stated before, punch drunk. But Boston has been landing the last punches. And that counts for something. If they get a night off to rest and recouperate, that momentum goes away. If they play tonight, it is hard to predict what will happen. (Although we can predict that it will take a very long time to happen.) But give the Yankees some rest, and they win the next game. If they play tonight, the Sox might push it to game 7. And then it is anyone’s guess how it will turn out. Your Maximum Leader hopes the Sox can do it.
And how about the Houston/St. Louis series? Your Maximum Leader can hear one loyal minion (at least) cheering from here. Honestly, your Maximum Leader thought that the Cards were going to clean up against the Astros. he Cards, while not quite annointed, were certainly playing like they had a mission. Now their confidence appears to be a little shaken. The day off and the move back to St. Louis doesn’t really affect either team that much. Busch Stadium fans create lots of energy for their team. The Astros are probably feeling like they can take the Cards. The Cards may be wondering what happened. If that is the case, it can only help the Astros. Both of these teams are fighters. And they, unfortunately, are getting shafted by MLB.
Shafted by MLB you say? Yes. Shafted. Not quite to the stage of being cutlered. But shafted nonetheless. You see, the idiots in charge of the big leagues (yes that means you Bud!) awarded the TV contract to Fox. That is not the problem in and of itself. What is the problem is now you have games played at the same time on the same day. And if you don’t have cable, you’re screwed. You get what Fox dishes out. Most of the time that means Red Sox/Yankees. If you have cable or satellite you either flip back and forth, or you do the whole split screen thingie. (Split screen is the way your Maximum Leader was watching.) But it just isn’t right.
The league needs to think about a whole bunch of solutions. Your Maximum Leader will suggest a few: cut a few games off the regular season (like all those inter-league abominations) and start the playoffs earlier so that you don’t have games competing at the same time, go back to two divisions per league; and remove the wild card round; and spread out the games, or (your Maximum Leader’s personal favourite) real day games. (Start some games at 1pm people would dig it. Really! They would. Your Maximum Leader knows “the people.”)
Anyho…
Your Maximum Leader now grows tired. And must think of other posts.
Or watch some baseball.
Carry on.
UPDATE: Great post on the Sox/Yankees from Enoch Soames, Esq.
The BigHo writes about the Catholic Kerry’s internal conflict with the American secularist Kerry.
He defends the dissonance between Kerry’s private and public lives:
I admire the fact that Kerry is taking a principled stand. Maybe some will disagree: “By publicly affirming and privately denying a woman’s right to choose, Kerry merely confirms that he’s a flip-flopper,” they’ll say. But I’m not sure what else Kerry can do. Something has to give. The question is whether Rome will indeed push ahead with excommunication. I’d be interested to see how Kerry would react to that.
Kerry may be Catholic, but he’s acting according to his conscience– something we Protestants can appreciate, given the crucial role we ascribe to conscience regarding matters of faith.
I strongly suspect that Kerry’s stand is anything but principled. I would even posit that it cannot be principled. As I have argued previously, if one believes that life begins at conception, one is morally mandated to oppose abortion. Genuflecting before America’s public secularity isn’t principled: it is calculated.
In 1855, many Northern Protestants had reached the conclusion that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. Even though their agitation to end the peculiar institution was religiously based, it would have been immoral of them to say: “Well, my reading of the Bible leads me to believe that slavery is wrong, but since America is publicly secular, I won’t try to impose my religious beliefs on other people.”
It would be wrong for Christians to try to force Muslims to say a Christian prayer in schools. It would be wrong for Christians to mandate public schools teach the doctrine of Creation (Anything but) Science. Those are issues of faith. But if one believes that murder is occurring, one is morally bound to oppose it, with NO exceptions (er - only one exception - the Maximum Leader has made a good case for situations in which the life of the mother is endangered).
Bill writes about the assumption that Christian belief lead to conservative politics here.
I have often been shocked at what I see as the disconnect between some conservative values and the teachings of Jesus.
Conservative Christians are generally hostile to welfare, seemingly adopting the Russell H. Conwell doctrine, developed as a justification for the wealth gap created by the industrialization of America post 1865:
“I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich… because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel!”
– Acres of Diamonds
I’m no biblical scholar, but I think Jesus is on record as being critical of wealth accumulation. I could be wrong. Perhaps one of our alert readers will send me scriptural quotations in which Jesus damns the poor for the lazy, shiftless ways and praises the rectitude of money changers and rich men.
Apostate that I am, I always thought Jesus wanted us to use whatever goods we have to help the less fortunate - “whatever you do unto these you also do unto me” and all that. If helping the downtrodden is a mandate, you would think that Christians would want to, you know, help the downtrodden.
Reasonable people can disagree about how best to help the downtrodden. I am no fan of the current welfare system and would like to see major changes. But if government is able to help the poor improve their lives, I am willing to pay taxes to achieve that goal. Many conservative Christians challenge welfare and demand that private charity alone should be used to ameliorate the conditions of poverty. But if private charity is clearly unequal to the task (and one can argue that it is - see Hoover, Herbert), than one should be arguing about how BEST to use government to address social ills.
Perhaps the same thing could be said for other issues like education and health care; the issue shouldn’t be minimizing government involvement. It perhaps should be about how BEST to accomplish the goals a Christian society ought to have.
Stepping aside from policy, I wonder if Christians who want to use the government to push Christianity have tought the matter through.
America is the most Christian nation in the world, when measured by church attendance (Oh shut up, Mike, of course I left out Vatican city!). We are also the Western nation with a very strong separation of church and state. Perhaps the removal of our politicians from our pulpits has actually allowed Christianity to flourish. In nations with official religions, people have become cynical about the political underpinnings of their church.
The good Analphilosopher gives a quick, pithy lesson on the use of commas; I wish he would write a similar post on semi-colons for people who overuse and abouse the semi-colon to introduce parenthetical ideas; not that I know anyone who would be so illiterate as to misuse that wonderful bit of punctuation; I mean, how could anyone not know the proper way to use semi-colons?
In today’s post, Richard Cohen writes about the Mary Cheney flap and seems to address the Maximum Leader directly:
…ever since that day I have believed that there is a biological basis
to homosexuality, just as there is to heterosexuality. (I don’t remember
choosing to be straight.) It’s a belief that has become a conviction as
scientific study after scientific study confirmed that we do not choose our
sexual orientation…
…let’s turn our attention to what President Bush said on the same
topic. He was asked by Bob Schieffer whether he thought “homosexuality is a
choice.” This is what Bush said: “You know, Bob, I don’t know. I just don’t
know.”
In the best of all possible worlds, Schieffer would have asked, “Why
not? How could you not know? Don’t you know any gay people, Mr. President? Have
you ever asked them? Don’t you know any parents of gay children and have you
asked them about their kids and when they knew, sometimes at a very young age,
that their son or daughter was homosexual? In all those private lunches with
Cheney, all the time you two have spent together, didn’t you once have the
intellectual curiosity to ask your vice president about his daughter?” After
all, Bush was making policy in this area — trying to bar gays from ever
marrying in these United States…
…Homosexuality may not be a matter of choice — but willful ignorance
sure is.
Cohen also predicts:
Deep in his heart — which too often functions as his brain — Bush knows he has pandered to ignorance and homophobia. The effort to ban gay marriage by constitutional amendment is so patently not needed — states can do what they want in this area — that it is nothing but a statement of theological or cultural conviction. It does not belong in the Constitution, and Bush, I promise you, will instantly neglect the matter if he wins a second term.
So if one believes in equality, should one be less concerned about Bush’s pandering to bigotry because it is insincere and he won’t follow through? Or should we be more angry at a cyncial ploy to arouse the bigotry of people unlikely to drop the issue post-November?
More and more people (including our own Foreign Minister) seem to be subscribing to a new doctrine: Presidential Infalibility.
David Ignatius takes on this doctrine in today’s Washington Post. The Maximum Leader will certainly like the Winston Churchill reference:
The British historian Christopher Andrew has argued that one of the
decisive strengths of Winston Churchill, generally reckoned the greatest modern
war leader, was that he learned from his mistakes. He bungled badly during World
War I, championing the disastrous assault on Gallipoli in 1915 that was made
with too few troops and too little strategic planning. He made other errors in
his early career, from economic policy to diplomacy, but he learned from them
and became a better leader. He never stopped growing.
Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, just this once, wishes he watched Crossfire with some regularity. That said, he only wishes that because of the recent kerfuffle caused by an appearance by Jon Stewart. The Minister of Agriculture mentioned this yesterday. And your Maximum Leader brings it up again because he finds it ironic (or to paraphrase the president, ironical) that a fake news show is AP news wire news.
Carry on.
Primarily, I haven’t been posting lately because I’ve been so busy with work (sure, I enjoy my unemployment benefits as much as the next lazy liberal, but it’s not enough to pay all my bills). I have, however, been following the blog posts semi-regularly, and I’ve appreciated the occasional shout-out in my direction (how nice to be lost but not forgotten).
Sadly (for me anyway), the pre-election debate at this site must continue on without my input. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be doing full-time advance work for John Kerry’s national campaign. I don’t know exactly where I’ll be or the state of my internet access, but I suspect these opportunities will keep me busy right up until the election.
For the record, however, I’ve long maintained that John Kerry could beat George Bush. Nothing in the last month has changed my opinion of the state of the race. As it stands now, while the polls may be ambiguous, I believe Kerry is on track to snatch victory away from the Republicans (even Virginia is polling within the margin of error, Mr. Smallholder). A major event, of course, will be a challenge to both campaigns and would mean that all bets are off. But whatever your position on the issues, Republicans who think Bush has the election locked up are in for a rude awakening this November.
Good night, good debating and God bless (I’m just kidding about the ‘God bless’, although even us liberal atheists respect your right to worship as you choose).
Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has decided to do a little link dumping. Please forgive him as he is phoning this one in.
He was reading over the Cranky Neocon’s website and noticed this post: Revenge Of The Stupid Lyrics V. Your Maximum Leader wonders how he could have missed volumes I-IV! Must agree, carrots in cake is an abomination against all humanity. Must disagree on Carmen - horny soliders are important lession for kids to learn.
Kilgore gives us warnings on how to name the new Washington baseball franchise. our Maximum Leader thinks the name should be Senators or Grays. But the name will likely be something stupid and silly, like the Foggy Bottom Boys.
The Big Ho… Next Exorcist. One day, one day soon, the power of Christ will compell him to prance naked through the halls of his school. Naked. Save for an ill-fitting lab coat.
Annika gone? Bad. Sad. Makes your Maximum Leader wonder…
Like a New Jersey deubtante with an “undiscovered gift” from the Mexican gardner who does her neighbour’s lawn, is Anna attempting to smother her baby blog again? Anna… Your Maximum Leader needs a fix. You are worse than crack woman! Start pushing again!
While talking about his favourite bad habits of the blogosphere… Sexy Sadie Mirth needs a man. Or two men. Or a man and a woman. For some reason, your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that two men and a woman would be enough.
The Acidman… Dancing… Heh. He still is better than your Maximum Leader.
Villainy indeed! BRD and Dr. Rusty teaming up? Yet another insidious plot by the good Doktor to get more site traffic. Here is a tip from your Maximum Leader to Rusty. Want more traffic. Post photos of Mrs. Shakelford’s fine can.
Aircraft cheesecake photos by JohnL. Beauty, eh?
Ally… You had me at High Calibre. Then your Maximum Leader read your post and lamented that you weren’t talking about guns… That is okay however. Your Maximum Leader hopes we all continue to deserve your readership.
Alas… This post isn’t helping keep anyone reading. It is definately not Scottish… Blame it on baseball…
Carry on.
Jon Stewart schools Tuckler Carlson:
I wish I had seen this episode.
The Big Hominid has a link to the video here for those of you with fast connections.
Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is tired, very tired. (More on that later perhaps.) But he did see this: Scholars Grapple With Godzilla Legacy on the newswire and felt he had to comment.
There is a huge legacy to grapple with when discussing Godzilla… How many times did he sack Tokyo? More times than the US Army Air Force by your Maximum Leader’s reckoning. And it was amazing how quickly they would rebuild that city… And your Maximum Leader knows that the Japanese have thought of their nation as the “land of the Gods.” Well, it also seems to be home to fire-breathing lizards, giant moths, and massive mechanical dinosaurs bent on destruction. One wonders how Japan’s economic development was hampered by all those monster attacks. Perhaps the reason that the Japanese economy has been on the ropes the past few years is because monster attacks have been on the decline.
At any rate, you can tell there is a lot to talk about in Lawrence, Kansas over the 3 days of the conference. Let’s hope the outcome of their grappling is a comprehensive anti-monster plan for the US and the world. Because frankly, if one of those monsters decided to align themselves with Al-Quaida… Well, it is best not to imagine it…
Carry on.
I have two links to one of the Maximum Leader’s favorite conservative pundits.
The first is for the Foreign Minister - A consumer dissatisfication rant on par with Greg’s Popeyes diatribe.
And a discussion of why a conservative will vote against Bush. Read the comments thread - there is a good deal of reasoned, civil, give-and-take exchange going on. I wish all political discussion could be as noble.
Some selected excerpts for you non-clicking-throughasaurouses:
If the Senator from Massachusetts thinks that improved style, greater diplomatic
efforts, concerted multilateral coordination, and even copious amounts of
American aid can get India and Pakistan to sign on to the Non-Proliferation
Treaty or create a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace, then, well, he’s drunk
too much of the multilateral Kool-Aid. Bill Clinton — who epitomizes the kind
of diplomatic style Kerry could only hope to achieve — invested a fair amount
of diplomatic capital on both of these flash points, during a time when
America’s global prestige was greater than today — and in the end achieved very
little of consequence. There are international problems where the conflict of
interests are so sharp and the stakes are so high for the affected parties that
all the outside diplomacy in the world won’t achieve anything. And I can’t help
but wonder if Kerry believes he can somehow talk radical Islamists into
submission.
So I’m troubled by this — but at this point I’m more troubled
by the Bush administration. Robert A.
George has a New Republic column that encapsulates a lot of my difficulties
voting for the GOP ticket this year. Here’s the part that hit home for me:
President Bush has failed to live up to the second key tenet of conservative
government: accountability.
Take, for example, the Pentagon’s disastrous
planning for postwar Iraq. The lack of troops for the post-invasion period
enabled the insurgency to bloom and put American soldiers at risk. Worse, while
memos from Ashcroft’s Justice Department seemingly provided legal cover for the
abuse at Abu Ghraib, the material causes could be found, again, in the
underdeployment of troops: “What went wrong at Abu Ghraib prison?” asked The New
York Post’s Ralph Peters, one of the more earnest supporters of invading Iraq.
Pointing to the two independent reports examining the scandal, he concludes:
“Woefully deficient planning for post-war Iraq, too few troops and inadequate
leadership at the top.” Peters is among the conservatives who believe the Abu
Ghraib fiasco should have been the final straw for Rumsfeld.
But it didn’t
happen. And it won’t happen, because accountability is a foreign word in this
administration. To demonstrate how little he has learned, Rumsfeld observed,
“Does [the abuse] rank up there with chopping off someone’s head on television?
It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Was it done as a matter of policy? No.” Forget that the
abuse was far more pervasive than just the handful of servicemen that first
popped up in photographs; when the secretary of defense basically says, “Hey,
what the terrorists do is much worse,” the moral foundation upon which America
stands begins to crumble. The president’s stated goal was to try to bring
democracy to the Middle East–not to allow us to become tainted by the barbarism
so prevalent in the region we are attempting to liberate. So Rumsfeld stays
on–even as the situation rapidly deteriorates.
Then again, this shouldn’t
come as a surprise: George Tenet remained in his position following the worst
intelligence failure in U.S. history, enabling him to tell the president later
that evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” The
first failure helped lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans; the second
failure led us into a conflict from which there exists no clear exit strategy
and that has rendered the word of the United States suspect. Yet Tenet stayed
on, too.
And no wonder. As Bob Woodward writes in Plan of Attack, “[S]everal
things were clear from the president’s demeanor, his style and all that [Colin]
Powell had learned about Bush. The president was not going to toss anyone over
the side…. The president also made it clear that no one was to jump ship….
They were a team. The larger message was clear: Circle the wagons.” The larger
message is that loyalty is prized above all, regardless of the results and
regardless of the effect on U.S. standing in the world….
No, a Kerry
administration would not be any conservative’s ideal. But, on limited
government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a Republican Congress
to act like a Republican Congress. The last such combination produced some form
of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to accountabilit, one could hardly do
worse. Of course, a conservative can still cast a libertarian vote on principle.
At crucial points before and after the Iraq war, Bush’s middle managers have
failed him, and the “brand” called America has suffered in the world market. In
any other corporate structure plagued by this level of incompetence, the CEO
would have a choice: Fire his middle managers or be held personally accountable
by his shareholders. Because of his own misguided sense of “loyalty,” Bush won’t
dismiss anyone. That leaves the country’s shareholders little choice.Given the foreign policy stakes in this election, I prefer a leader who has a good decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I don’t like, over a leader who has a bad decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I do like.
Annika has been MIA for a while now. I was hoping the blank home page was some kind of tech problem that would be repaired shortly. Alas, the lovely Annika has not returned to us.
