Well, at least Rudy Giuliani behaved consistently both before and after becoming Mayor of New York City (Reason’s David Weigel also provides this interesting Giuliani piece along the same lines).
Having said that, I don’t think that’s the type of consistency that most reasoned folks want in a U.S. President.
Now that the long college football season has finally ended, the more avid fans turn to the annual period of speculation (see previous posts here and here) as to where the top high school football players will end up playing college football. Along those lines, the Sunday Morning Quarterback blog provides this interesting post that attempts to correlate the top big-time college football programs’ performance relative to the rating of their recruiting classes over the past several years.
The entire SMQB blog post is well worth reading and I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that Texas A&M appears to have made the right decision after last season.
Certain areas of Islamic law remain archaic. However, it appears that at least technological progress is being made in the area of Islamic divorce law.
Perhaps coincidentally, I came across the following two news reports consecutively yesterday morning. First from this BBC article:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has threatened to nationalise farms, in an effort to tackle food shortages.
Government controls keep food prices low in shops to help even the poorest Venezuelans feed themselves.
But some farmers prefer to sell their produce in neighbouring countries where prices are higher, leading to shortages of bread, milk, eggs and meat.
In his weekly television show, Mr Chavez said farmers doing this should have their farms “expropriated”. [. . .]
On Saturday, Mr Chavez threatened to nationalise banks which did not give enough low-interest loans to farmers.
Banks are not allowed to charge farmers interest higher than 15% – even though inflation last year ran at 22.5%.
“The bank that fails to comply must be sanctioned, and I am not talking about a little fine,” he said. “The bank that does not comply must be seized.” [. . .]
Critics say complying with government policy could drive some businesses into bankruptcy.
Then, a little closer to home, came this NY Times article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s views on government control of the economy:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.
. . . Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.
She said that economic excesses ó including executive-pay packages she characterized as often ìoffensiveî and ìwrongî and a tax code that had become ìso far out of whackî in favoring the wealthy ó were holding down middle-class living standards. [. . .]
ìIf you go back and look at our history, we were most successful when we had that balance between an effective, vigorous government and a dynamic, appropriately regulated market,î Mrs. Clinton said. ìAnd we have systematically diminished the role and the responsibility of our government, and we have watched our market become imbalanced.î
She added: ìI want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.î [. . .]
ìWeíve done it in previous generations,î she said, alluding to large-scale public projects like the interstate highway system and the space program. ìBut weíve got to have a plan.î [. . .]
ìInequality is growing,î Mrs. Clinton said. ìThe middle class is stalled. The American dream is premised on a growing economy where people are in a meritocracy and, if theyíre willing to work hard, they will realize the fruits of their labor.î
So, on one hand, Chavez is demonstrating that, even with the economic benefit of having high-priced oil to export, a government can still lower the living standards of its citizens if it tries hard enough.
On the other hand, Hillary does not appear to recognize that her proposals are quite capable of accomplishing the same thing within the world’s most dynamic economy.
I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it cannot be a good thing for the PGA Tour that the biggest news so far in the pre-Tiger Woods part of the season is the controversy over Golf Channel host Kelly Tilghman’s poor attempt at humor a couple of weeks ago.
It’s fair to say that Tilghman’s comments were blown completely out of proportion. Tilghman by all accounts is a charming person and a good reporter, but she is placed in a position by the Golf Channel where she has to fill up hours of time over many weekends by making idle banter with her co-host, Nick Faldo. Few people this side of Letterman or Leno have the ability to make witty comments over such prolonged periods. If you don’t believe it, then just listen to your local news anchor’s banter with the weatherperson and sports anchor on the evening news. Consequently, it’s hardly surprising that Tilghman made a mistake in judgment under the circumstances.
At any rate, the completely humiliated Tilghman apologized quickly and earnestly to Woods, who graciously accepted her apology and tried to play down the whole matter. Meanwhile, under pressure from the Al Sharpton’s of the world, the Golf Channel probably overreacted a bit by suspending Tilghman from her Golf Channel duties for two weeks. But at least that seemed to be the end of the entire affair.
But not so fast. In a truly remarkable display of bad judgment, GolfWeek magazine ran a cover story about the Tilghman affair in last week’s issue that contained a cover photograph of a hangman’s noose. Amidst an immediate public outcry, the PGA Tour and several advertisers threatened to pull their accounts with Golfweek, prompting the magazine to fire its longtime editor and vice president, Dave Seanor. Ay, yi yi, yi, yi!
So, as all that dust settled, longtime PGA Tour and Senior PGA Tour member Jim Thorpe cut Tilghman some slack, but blasted Golfweek over this past weekend:
“We know there was no racist intent. It was just a bad choice of words,” he said [with regard to Tilghman]. “But the guy from Golfweek? Let him get barbecued. That’s just a major mistake on his part.”
Which leads us to the recommendation of the day from golf writer and blogger, Geoff Shackelford:
“Just a suggestion to the Golfweek staff: I would not put an image of Jim Thorpe barbecuing Dave Seanor on this week’s cover.”
Last week, Ironman over at Political Calculations reviewed the Giuliani income tax simplification plan. This week, he tackles the even more impressively simple tax simplification plan advocated by GOP Presidential candidate, Fred Thompson.
Of course, as if on cue, Thompson dropped out of the GOP race today.
And to The Ashokan Farewell, no less!
On Dwight Silverman‘s recommendation, I’ve been checking out Twitter over the past couple of weeks and am impressed with it. Although people use it in different ways, Twitter is essentially a social networking and instant communication network. This interesting site called Twittervision provides a quick visual of Twitter’s power and potential. Check out Twittervision and give Twitter a try.
As I noted earlier in this blog, the Mitchell Commission Report is a sloppy hatchet job. However, the report has had the beneficial impact of prompting more reasoned voices to emerge regarding the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in professional baseball to offset the mainstream’s media’s typical demonization of the players. Here are a few examples:
Eric Walker’s new website Steroids and Baseball is worth a look. Walker provides an interesting analysis of power hitting performance over the modern eras using a time series of power factor statistics. Based on putting the time series together at critical points where there is a change in the baseball or an interruption in personnel from a war, Walker shows that you get a series that does not show any meaningful increase in power hitting as measured by the power factor. Indeed, the power factor in the so-called steroid era is no higher than in other eras after subtracting the cumulative effects of changes in the baseball in preceding eras from the time series. In addition, Walker surveys research on the benefits and costs of steroids on athletic performance and health, and again concludes that the results are not all that clear.
Meanwhile, Radley Balko links to an article by sportswriter Dan Le Batard noting a point that I’ve frequently made in my prior posts on PED use in baseball — the motivation behind the use was to improve the capacity of the user’s body to hold up under the physically brutal and pathologically competitive nature of MLB. Balko concludes with the following wise advice:
At some point, athletes, rules makers, fans, and ethicists are going to have to drop the hysterics, and begin a serious conversation about all of this. Shaming, prison, and witch hunts aren’t going to make these issues go away.
Following up on Balko’s thoughts, this Shawn Macomber/American Spectator article reports on a recent panel discussion over PED use in which Balko participated. Another participant in that panel discussion was Norman Fost, professor of pediatric medicine and director of the Program in Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, who is the subject of this Chicago Tribune profile. Fost believes that steroids should be available, under a doctor’s supervision, to any pro or amateur adult athlete who wants them:
In all the health and morality questions about steroids, Fost said:
“It’s as though the drug hysteria serves as a distraction from more serious issues. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single death associated with steroid use, yet the TV cameras keep showing [Red Sox manager] Terry Francona drooling disgusting spit from something [chewing tobacco] that has a very high cancer rate associated with it.
“You have 400,000 deaths a year due to tobacco and tens of thousands of alcohol-related deaths, a substance heavily promoted by Major League Baseball, yet the president and Congress and the press have virtually nothing to say about tobacco and alcohol in athletics, but lots to say about steroids. A football player spending more than three years in the NFL has an 80 to 90 percent chance, according to one study, of some permanent disability, but the NFL produces films focusing on the most vicious hits. The dangers to health in sports today come not from enhancement but the sport itself.”
Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell builds on his earlier posts on the issue of PED’s in baseball with two more posts (here and here) in which he notes the following:
It is perfectly legal for an athlete to undergo “performance enhancing” eye surgery, that moves him from, say, the 50th to the 95th percentile in sight. It is not legal for that same athlete to take “performance enhancing” hormones that move his testosterone from the 50th to the 95th percentile–even thought the additional advantage of the eye surgery may be greater than the additional advantage conferred by the exogenous testosterone. Now, there may be a perfectly valid distinction between those two interventions. But what is it? Shouldn’t it be spelled out before we drum Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame?
Similarly, it is perfectly legal for an athlete to get painkillers after an injury, so he can continue playing (and, I would point out, risk further injury.) It is not legal for that athlete to take Human Growth Hormone, in order to speed his recovery from that same injury. Again, why? What is the distinction? Why is it okay to play hurt but not okay to try and not play hurt? There may be a perfectly valid reason here as well. But don’t we need to spell out what it is?
I realize that the people running major league baseball and the NFL are not philosophers. But the intellectual sloppiness with which this current crusade has been conducted is appalling.
Indeed, last week’s Congressional hearing over the Mitchell Report included an exchange toward the end that highlighted MLB’s long tradition of indulging use of another type of PED — amphetamines.
Moving on to the legal front, this Maury Brown blog post notes that Rusty Hardin — whose strategy of defending Roger Clemens has been a head-scratcher from the beginning — probably ought to quit giving interviews:
T.J. Quinn: Well, when someone sat and looked at just the numbers for Rogerís career, what conclusions do you think they drew?
Rusty Hardin: Oh, I think, I think they drew incredibly stupid inclusions, uh, conclusions, if they concluded that somehow you can look at his performance and it fits in. For instance, everybody talks about his, uh, doing it in order to extend his career. Think about it, T.J. The guy is supposed to have taken steroids in ë98. In ë97 he won the Cy Young. ë98 he won the Cy Young.
T.J. Quinn: Brain McNamee’s, you know, his story was that Roger had already been taking steroids when he approached him in 1998, which would suggest?
Rusty Hardin: I didn’t remember that. You may, if you’re right about that, I didn’t know that.
T.J. Quinn: Thatís what he said. That was in the Mitchell report and I think his lawyers addressed that as well, that Brian McNamee said, ìI never suggested that Roger take them. He was taking them.So that wouldn’t that explain?
Rusty Hardin: [OVERLAPPING] I never read that. Are you real sure of that?
T.J. Quinn: Quite.
And while many commentators are suggesting that Clemens’ alleged PED use is unprovable beyond a reasonable doubt because it boils down to a swearing match between Clemens and his chief accuser, that is not a prudent bet to make. My experience is that lawsuits and investigations have a funny way of discovering people who have knowledge about swearing matches.
Finally, does anyone else get the impression that Houstonian Chuck Knoblauch may need the same type of mental block that he had while throwing a baseball from second to first base in regard to his upcoming Congressional testimony?
