Duck Season

link.

I may not have voted for the guy, but damn that's a clever joke.

Not the usual chowder and bagels:

"I made a bet with George Pataki on the outcome, and the winner gets Connecticut." - Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

(Via Ben Domenech)

The power is back on in Iraq.

Opinion Journal has some interesting thoughts on the Nobel Peace Prize:

Pope John Paul II, teaching us as much about life as he approaches the twilight of his own as he did throughout his 25-year ministry, would be an excellent choice. In any other year, he of course would stand as poor a chance as Mr. Payá, for similar reasons. He is a religious leader, which means he runs around doing all that uncool moralizing.

But this year no less a figure than Stein Toennesson, director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, who watches the Norwegian Nobel Committee very closely, told the Associated Press that he would give the prize to the pontiff: "The main reason is his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq." This, supposedly, rests on the reading that a continuation of Saddam Hussein's rule would amount to peace for Iraqis.

Mr. Toennesson is not officially connected with the committee that awards the prize, but his thinking gives you a taste of the morals that prevail in these Oslo circles. Twenty-five years of fighting communism, materialism and any other ism that subjugates the human spirit wouldn't deserve the prize, but opposing a U.S. war to liberate Iraqis would. For all the wrong reasons, then, the pope may get the prize in perhaps the last year of his life.

UPDATE: CNN has the the name of the Peace Prize winner. Looks like they chose a good one.

Roger L. Simon thinks the recall is the beginning of a movement:

What we are witnessing is the beginning—the early movement--in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar's. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going on—as they should be.

Armed Liberal agrees, and so does Michael Totten:

The pragmatic center is surely where I belong right now. And this is increasingly true for most of my 30-something friends, whether they started out as liberals (as is usually the case) or as conservatives.

***

The two-party system worked nicely during what futurist Alvin Toffler calls “Second Wave” or Industrial civilization. But the “Third Wave” post-industrial high-tech information civilization is a world apart. Now is not the time of mass movements and conformity. This is an era of diversity and specialization, of individualism and niche groups. The world is becoming increasingly complex, and it is just not possible to reduce everything to an ideologically binary system.

I don't know, it all sounds nice, but it's just not going to happen. First of all, Arnold won as a Republican. If he had run as an independent he probably would not have won. And even if he had, it's not something that would carry over to other elections.

I think Roger and others underestimate the vital role that political parties play in electing candidates. Even though Arnold won the recall, it's debatable whether he would have been able to beat McClintock in a primary. In a political system featuring primaries as a way to narrow choices down to two candidates, the two are likely to be politically in the middle of their parties, not in the middle of the American electorate. That's why even though Lieberman and Edwards might be more electable, Dean is ahead of everybody, or at least was before Clark enter the race (and the incompetency of the Clark campaign don't give me any hope that he can stay even with Dean either).

In any race, the candidates from the two major parties have a huge advantage over the others because of money and organization. It's only in exceptional cases like Arnold or Ventura that they can win without party organization. And let's face it, they didn't win because they have the best articulated positions. Most moderates running as independents won't be able to get enough media attention to raise enough money to finance a campaign. And since it'd be hard for them to win the nomination in one of the major parties, if there is going to be a moderate revolution, they'd need to start their own party.

This, of course, comes with its own problems. Like all other new political parties, they'll have problems getting people to vote for them, even if their candidates are the most palatable to an individual voter. The Greens and the Libertarians have been around for years, and they still struggle to maintain ballot status in most states every election. Most people see voting for one of these parties as throwing their votes away. I'm pretty sure that Ralph Nader or whoever the Green candidate is this election won't be getting as many votes as the last time if the election is close.

But there are more moderates in this country that Greens and Libertarians, you say, as many as there are Democrats and Republicans? This brings me to the other problem with a political party based on moderates. What exactly defines a moderate? Most people who consider themselves moderate don't have middling positions on most political issues; instead they have liberal positions on some issues and conservative ones in others. A pro-choice, tax-cutting atheist is a moderate, and so is a pro-life Evangelical who believes the government should actively help the poor. How is the moderate party going to get them to agree on a candidate? The answer is, they won't. They might vote for Democrats in one election and Republicans in another, but they're not going to vote for a candidate from a moderate party that is just as likely to disagree with them on major issues as the candidates from the two major parties.

If moderates want more moderates to be elected, what they need to do is register in one of the parties and vote in every primary. Otherwise it'll be more Davis vs. Simon or Bush vs. Dean and not many Arnolds.

See Gallup poll showing Americans believe in liberal media bias. See Gallup trying to spin its own poll:

It's true that substantially more Americans say that the news media are too liberal than say they are too conservative. At the same time, a majority says that the news media are either too conservative, or just about right.

Just like the USA Today story on civil unions, it's like saying that Hank Aaron and I combine for 755 home runs.

It is clear that the underlying dynamic behind the finding that the news media are too liberal is the widespread belief among conservatives that the news media are too liberal, contrasted with the far less prevalent view among liberals that the news media are too conservative.

Uh, no. It's because 40% of moderates say the media is too liberal while only 15% say it is too conservative.

I'm quickly becoming unpopular at school. You may remember my diatribe in the school newspaper. This weeks newspaper has a rebuttal.

OMG they accused me of being too wordy!

UPDATE: More on this UMass nonsense - You can find a first draft of my reply to The Mass Media's News Editor Carl Brooks here.

This week there's an interview with Mass. State Representative James Fagan (contact him here), sponsor of HB 2400. After comparing MassPIRG's credibility to the "bacteria that lives in the feces of a rabid dog" here is how he answers the "student's rights" issue:

MM: So you believe that the students' rights [argument] is a false one?

F: ...I fully believe that in a democratic society every organization or point of view should be given the opportunity to express itself, particularly in higher education, where people are supposed to develop and expose themselves to different types of philosophies and ideas and thoughts. I think it's particularly important that everyone be given an equal place on the table. I think that MassPIRG has a very incestuous and therefore unfair position that they simply wish to protect.

I think that what happens now is that students, when they're filling out their forms and doing all the rest of those things, they're so busy with so many things they're involved in, your college applications and enrollment, that it's very easy to overlook the fact that MassPIRG, for no good reason, takes five dollars of your money every semester unless you choose to say, "No, I don't choose to give." I think the reverse would be much fairer. That if it's gonna be on there at all, it should be a check-off that says, "I choose to pay an additional five-dollar fee to support MassPIRG."

I think MassPIRG is the first to recognize that the likelihood of many students doing that on their own is significantly less than the situation they find themselves in now. And that's why they're fighting so vehemently against it.

Also in this weeks paper: A student senator weighs in against HB 2400 because MassPIRG is such a good organization for students.

The only truely important issue these days: Joe Lieberman - Yankees Fan.

UPDATE: Joe Lieberman, out meaned by the campaign canine mascot Fenway Timbers: "Joe can woof all he wants," Fenway shot back, "but I know a dog when I see one, and the Yankees are going down."

That's one smart dog.

First an editorial from today's New York Times:

California's system is actually the worst of all evils. The voters micromanage the state budget through one referendum after another. But they are generally deprived of real choice in picking state officials. Right-wing Republicans have been able to control their party's nominating process, forcing a moderate-to-liberal populace to accept whatever slate the Democrats deign to offer. Mr. Schwarzenegger, a moderate-to-liberal Republican, would have had a much tougher time in a primary than he did in this race, where he was able to insert himself onto the ballot without the party's screening.

(Emphasis added)

And now an e-mail, dated today, from Michael Moore:

In the meantime, don't be depressed about Arnold. The people are pissed off and they have every right to be. They are in a "removal" mood. That is a good thing. As soon as we do our work to inform our friends and neighbors how Bush has wrecked the country, the economy and our standing in the world, they will be more than ready for "Terminator IV: Hasta La Vista Bush." And, please, let this be the end of wimpy, wishy-washy Democrats like Gray Davis who are really Republicans. The American public hates b.s. and hates fakes.

(Ditto)

So let me get this straight. California Republicans have purposefully running unelectable candidates as part of some nefarious scheme to get mediocre Democratic politicians put in office? And then the Democrats are going to build on the populist upheaval in California (which the Times denounced) in order to remove another (in their eyes) unelectable Republican candidate in the person of George W. Bush?

Eric Lindholm points to this Washington Post story on John Kerry's campaign struggles and quotes this passage:

Kerry, for example, is advised by two pollsters, two media and advertising experts, and two speechwriting consultants. He also has two inner circles: one composed of hired hands in Washington; the other of old friends, family members and longtime loyalists in Boston.

This has made Kerry's operation the punch line of a joke in political circles: How is John Kerry's campaign like Noah's Ark? Both have two of everything.

What a coincidence, because he also has two Democrats in the primary cleaning his clock.

Robert Musil takes on the new Democratic meme that the recall win by Arnold is a manifestation of anti-incumbent fever that will bring down George Bush in 2004. He asks, "[a]ssuming the 'anti-incumbency' theme is correct, who is most at risk?", and answers that it is the Democratic California legislature. But I think that this meme is meant to describe voters nationally, not only in California, since Bush wouldn't suffer from anti-incumbent feeling in California because he didn't carry the state in 2000 anyway. So if national voters want to kick the bums out, who might they boot besides Bush? We know that the House seats are gerrymandered so much that even if this meme were true almost all of the incumbents would be safe. But what about the Senate? There are 19 Democrats and 14 Republicans up for reelection in 2004. Following the logic of the meme, we can expect the Democrats to lose another 5 seats, so that the Republicans will have 56 seats. Also, several Republican incumbents are retiring, so the Republican challenger will not suffer from anti-incumbent fever and they might actually keep some of those seats, meaning 56 could be 57, or 58. Result of anti-incumbent fever: advantage, Republicans!

(Yes, I'm kidding, but I don't think I need to treat this idiotic meme will any more respect than I have.)

Take a look at this map at One Hand Clapping and tell me that California wouldn't become a Republican state if half of it falls into the ocean.

Let's hope that Meryl Yourish is right about what will happen after Yassar Arafat dies. My fears are that it's going to be blamed on some Jewish conspiracy or the stuation is so bad even Arafat's death won't remove any roadblocks. But, yes, faster, please. (Via Instapundit)

Of course the New York Times is rooting for the Red Sox, they're partial owners of the Red Sox.

More Red Sox Talk - (Stop me if you've heard this before) John Kerry is distorting Howard Dean's record again:

Kerry said Tuesday that if New York beats Boston in the best-of-seven series that begins Wednesday, he'll send New England clam chowder to Dean's campaign. He wants Manhattan chowder from Dean if Boston wins.

Kerry last month accused Dean, the former Vermont governor and current front-runner for the Democratic nomination, of being a Yankees fan.

Dean, a New York native, called the accusation insulting, and insisted he backs Boston.

"Howard Dean has a relationship with the Yankees that goes way back so we hope he is willing to put some chowder behind his childhood team," Kerry spokeswoman Kelley Benander said.

If only nasty Manhattan chowder were the end of story - "Kerry, better known for sailboarding and ice hockey than for baseball banter, also plans to launch a 'Cowboy Up for Kerry' effort, using the slogan Red Sox players adopted for the stretch run."

With tonight's glorious Sox win we can only hope that this kind of issue debate can continue through the Democratic primaries.

The New York Times is rooting for the Red Sox.

UPDATE Howard Dean is rooting for the Red Sox too.

From the same story:

Kerry, better known for sailboarding and ice hockey than for baseball banter, also plans to launch a "Cowboy Up for Kerry" effort, using the slogan Red Sox players adopted for the stretch run.

I thought Kerry didn't like cowboys?

1) An editorial in the International Herald tribune denouncing European discrimination against Muslim women.

2) Irresponsible Journalism: Has the discourse of American politics really devolved to the extent that warring sides need to bitch slap each others' voice mail? Bob McManus must have never been taught that two wrongs don't make a right.

3) Here's a dumb question: Why is Opinion Journal's James Taranto opposed to this? It's a college website that has a few pictures teaching people how to apply a condom with your mouth. What's wrong with that? The real outrage should come from the MSU's Flyer Page which states that only 51% of sexually active students use condoms. That's a very scary number. It needs to be much higher.

4) Things that maybe should happen but definitely won't (at least any time soon): Christopher Hitchens has an an interview piece with Hossein Khomeini. It's loaded with lots of interesting exchanges about the Iranian street's perspective of the US liberation of Iraq. Khomeini also calls for a similar liberation of Iran, much to the chagrin of A.N.S.W.E.R.

The following two items are reproduced from the Council on American Islamic Relations October 6 news brief:

VIRGINIA MUSLIM STABBED, CALLED 'TERRORIST PIG'
FBI urged to investigate attack on woman wearing head scarf

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 10/6/2003) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the FBI to investigate an attack Sunday on a Muslim woman in Virginia as a possible hate crime.

The Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group said the woman, who was wearing an Islamic head scarf, was attacked from behind in a K-Mart parking lot in Springfield, Va. The white male teenage attacker allegedly shouted, "you terrorist pig," before running away.

The 47-year-old convert to Islam was treated at a local hospital for a 2-3 inch deep wound on her lower back. She was released from the hospital later that same day. Lt. Butch Gamble of the Fairfax County Police Department told CAIR the incident is being treated as an "apparent bias crime.'

"Unfortunately, we are seeing a rise in Islamophobic attacks that parallels the ongoing right-wing campaign to demonize Muslims and Islam," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "This smear campaign is having an impact on those in our society vulnerable to the siren song of hatred and prejudice. As we have requested many times in the past, elected officials and other opinion leaders must speak out against this, and all other forms of religious intolerance."

Since the beginning of the year, CAIR has received a number of reports of physical assaults against American Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslim) and Islamic institutions. Those incidents included a recent arson attack on a Georgia mosque, a cross burning at a Maryland Islamic school, the kidnapping and beating of a Massachusetts pizza delivery man whose attackers thought he was Muslim, and the shooting of a Sikh man in Arizona who may have been mistaken for an Arab. Similar incidents have been reported in a number of other states.

Last month, CAIR demanded that federal terrorism charges be brought against an Illinois man who got off with just two years probation and "anger management" classes after he bombed a Muslim family's van. In Florida, a man was sentenced to just 12 years in prison for plotting to attack some 50 Islamic institutions in that state.

-----

QUOTE OF THE DAY: 'IF STUPID BIGOTRY WERE A FELONY...'
Mark Shields, CNN CAPITAL GANG, 10/4/03

SHIELDS: And now for the "outrage of the week." The Council on American Islamic Relations took out a full page ad in "The New York Times" to condemn the attacks of September 11. And on that date since, has sponsored an interfaith day of National Unity in Washington. But nine term Republican Congressman Cass Ballenger of North Carolina says his marriage broke up because he lived next door to the Office of the religious group, which was so close to the capitol, he worried "they could blow the place up." If stupid bigotry were a felony, Congressman Ballenger would be doing long, hard time.

Why hasn't Cass Ballenger suffered the Trent Lott treatment yet? Has there been any pressure at all on Cass Ballenger to resign?

As of 11:46pm with 10.6% of precincts reporting, recall is at 56.0% while Arnold is at a stunning 51.9%, with Bustamente at 29.8% and McClintock at 12.2%. Looking at the results I noticed something curious. Arnold and McClintock are at a combined 64.1%. No on recall is at 44.0%. This means that 1) at least 8.1% of the population voted against the recall and voted for a Republican candidate, and 2) almost one in five of those who voted No voted for a Republican. Kinda puts the lie to the claim that this is just a Republican conspiracy to subvert democracy, doesn't it?

UPDATE Results holding steady at 12:37pm. And those Georgy numbers sure are disappointing. With 25.1% reporting Brooke Adams leads Georgy Russell 483-455.

A few weeks ago, TAP detailed the conflict in the Wesley Clark campaign between the draft Clark grassroots supporters and the professionals who are running the campaign. The supporters are claiming that the professionals are "destroying the parts of the draft movement that worked really well and they are transforming the draft movement into people who want to lick envelopes", while the professionals say the supporters don't understand the reality of running a presidential campaign. Now news comes today that Clark's campaign manager has resigned:

Donnie Fowler (search), 35, told associates he was leaving over widespread concerns that supporters who used the Internet to draft Clark into the race are not being taken seriously by top campaign officials. Fowler also complained that the campaign's message and methods are focused too much on Washington, not key states, said two associates who spoke on condition of anonymity.

From the start, there has been tension between the campaign's political professionals and the draft-Clark supporters, many of whom consider Fowler their ally.

Fowler has complained that while the Internet-based draft-Clark supporters have been integrated into the campaign, their views are not taken seriously by senior advisers, many of them with deep Washington ties. He has warned Clark's team that the campaign is being driven from Washington, a charge leveled against Al Gore (search)'s campaign in 2000 even though it was headquartered in Tennessee.

Shouldn't the people who are running Clark's campaign know that Howard Dean became a frontrunner by capitalizing on grassroots support? If they are shut out of the Clark campaign, it would become, in the words of a draft Clark member, "the Kerry campaign with a better candidate." What the professionals probably don't realize is that while the draft Clark supporters are a small number, they can raise a lot of money and support for Clark and create a buzz which would otherwise be absent with a traditional campaign. Their presence also makes their candidate more attractive to voters, since they create an impression that Clark is not part of the Washington establishment.

Maybe it will improve over time, but Clark's campaign has been less than impressive in its first month.

Did you know that Hank Aaron and I have hit a combined 755 home runs in Major League Baseball?

If you think that statistic is useless, then you should be equally suspicious of this statistic in USA Today stating that 50% of those surveyed in a poll say gay unions "would be an improvement or have no effect" on society. As Eugene Volokh points out, that 50% number doesn't mean anything if one doesn't know what percentage say gay unions would be an improvement and what percentage say it would have no effect.

THIS JUST IN The Beatles and I have 27 number one hits combined.

Jeanne Zelasko, talking about the Cubs during the FOX's introduction of Marlins-Cubs game 1: "whether you believe in miracles, or the law of averages ..."

Many people talk about the "law of averages" without knowing what it is and how it applies. The law of averages concern only random events and applies only over a long period of time. For example, it means that if one flips a coin 10,000 times, odds are it will come out heads about 5,000 times. It DOES NOT mean that if a team is on a long losing streak, they are more likely to win the next game or the next championship. For one thing, teams winning and losing in sports are not random events. For another, winning a championship is a single event, so even if the results of games were random, the law of averages still would not apply.

Steve at Begging To Differ writes:

Our drive was accentuated by radio coverage of the thrilling Game 5 victory of the Red Sox over the A's, a game that came down to the very last pitch and had Boston fans all over the world grimly pondering the Curse of the Bambino.

I know the national media has given the impression that every time the Red Sox loses the fans blame the curse, but that is simply not the case here. Few people around here actually spend any time talking or thinking about it. Meanwhile, the national media tries to bring it up as frequently as possible (for example, yesterday Fox showed a banner in Oakland with Babe Ruth and "1918" multiple times, and brought up Bill Buckner after a ninth-inning ground ball). The only people around here who do bring it up are one writer trying to sell books and a few people trying to get on television. Unfortunately, reporters trying to get some Sox fans to talk about the curse outside Fenway Park will always be able to find a few people, even though 95% of the people blows off the reporter. But when what is shown to the audience are old grainy clips from 80 years ago, one writer talking about the curse as if it were something tangible, and two or three people talking about it outside the ballpark, the audience will inevitably get the impression that Red Sox fans are obsessed with the curse.

I know it'll be hard to get the national media to deviate from this tedious narration, but we in the blogsphere don't have to buy into all this quagmire curse talk, do we?

CNN: "Appeals court rules national "do-not-call" registry can be implemented while court considers whether it violates telemarketers' free speech."

Did pretty well with my first round predictions. Got 3 of the 4 series winners correct, and even got the number of games correct in 2 series. Onward and upward ...

Marlins-Cubs
Pryor and Wood were dominant against the Braves, and there's no reason to believe they won't be as good against the weaker-hitting Marlins. The four Marlins starters are solid, but none of them are capable of shutting down an offense. Neither team has a reliable bullpen. When the Marlins have to rely on Ugueth Urbina, Chad Fox, and Carl Pavano, you know they have something to worry about. The Cubs bullpen is just as suspect. The Marlins have a slightly better offense, but not enough to overcme the Cubs edge in starting pitching. Cubs in 6

Red Sox-Yankees
Nope, sorry, not going to do it. Love to see a Red Sox-Cubs World Series, but I don't see it happening. The Yankees have one more good starter and one more reliable reliever than the Red Sox. The Red Sox bullpen was good enough in the last series and actually didn't give up a single run, but there's no way that's going to happen again. Mariano Rivera, on the other hand, is pitching well again, so while Joe Torre can trot him out in the ninth, Grady Little will have to pick a name out of hat randomly every night. Yankees in 6

Eric Lindholm and the Corner crew all predict Yes on recall and victory for Arnold. My three predictions:

Recall passes 52%. Don't remember who said it, but I agree with one blogger's opinion that when they're at the voting booth, many Democrats who said they'd vote Yes wouldn't be able to bring themselves to do it, because they know that Bustamente has no chance and a Yes vote is a vote for Arnold. I think if the voter turnout were the same as a normal election, the recall would lose, but all the new voters will put the recall over the top, since most first time voters will be voting for the recall. (Ironically, the Democrats finally get new voters to show up in the one election where a higher turnout is bad for them.)

Arnold 44%, Bustamente 32%, McClintock 12% Easy call. Both new voters and Arnold-McClintock fence-sitters will vote for Arnold. And even Democrats don't like Bustamente.

Duck Season value added: Georgy Russell finishes ahead of Arianna Huffington. Just a hunch.

Maybe I'd take all this more seriously if it were my state or if it were my party who is getting trounced, but this Mark Kleiman spiel on why the Democrats lost in California today just cracks me up.

First he blames Arnold for running a dishonest campaign, then he blames the press for letting Arnold off the hook, then he blames talk-show hosts and bloggers (bloggers!) who talked about Bustamente's MECha connections, then he blames Susan Estrich for "deciding that the weekend before the election was a good time to give aid and comfort to the enemy" (which is ironic, since he's also blasting rightie bloggers for defending Bush on the Plame affair; apparently they should give aid and comfort to their enemies), then he blames "family value" Republicans (his quotes, not mine) for not being outraged at grope-gate (nevermind that most of these Republicans probably voted for McClintock). And he's not even half-done! His next targets are Bustamente for running a bad campaign, Davis for not endorsing Bustamente, and the national Democrats for not giving the voters a better Democrat to vote for. Nowhere is any consideration of the possibility that the voters are choosing Arnold because they think he would do a better job as governor than either Davis or Bustamente. Usually I'd make sarcastic comments about liberals not trusting voters, but you'll have to pardon me; I'm still laughing.

A Scrappleface exclusive.

Who knew that "leaping" was illegal for the defense on a field goal attempt?

Since the release of the Kay report, parts of the blogsphere has revisited the issue of whether Bush has declared Iraq to be an "imminent" threat. Some anti-war bloggers and commenters are saying that since Bush said that Iraq was an imminent threat, and the lack of actual WMDs found in Iraq proves that Iraq was not, we were wrong to invade Iraq. That, however, was not what they said before the war. Remember that one of the anti-war arguments was not that Iraq did not have WMDs. Many argued that Iraq was not an imminent threat even though they do have WMDs. So to say that the lack of WMDs proves we were wrong to go to war is disingenuous because even if we had found WMDs, that still would not have been enough to satisfy the anti-war side's criteria before the war.

9:06 p.m. Bob Graham drops out of the presidential race.
9:07 p.m. Talks about reasons for quitting.
9:09 p.m. Declines to endorse another candidate.

NineDwarfs lives.

Red Sox fans travel, and, no matter where they are, in a big game when you can hear the chant of "Let's go Red Sox" bouncing around the visitors ballpark, there's no feeling quite like it.

Operation Give:

Operation Give was founded as a not-for-profit corporation in answer to a call from a soldier stationed in Iraq, known affectionately as Chief Wiggles. His request? To send toys and other goods to help the children he encountered every day in Iraq. Operation Give is grass-roots, non-partisan, volunteer-driven, and non-political. All we want to do is help children of Iraq in their recovery from years of depredation, and make the world a better place.

If you have toys or other appropriate goods you want to send to Iraq, we can help you figure out how to get them there. If you want to give money, we'll use your money to ship more kid stuff to Iraq. If you have an organization that would like to help promote our efforts, we can help you with that as well.

If Trot Nixon's God did help him swing that bat, who is anyone to say otherwise? I keep hearing about fans helping teams win games, but I don't see anyone complaining about how the drunk in Section 11 didn't really help player X do Z. What's the difference? It's okay to say fans can affect player performance but not God? As far as I know, only one of the two can violate the laws of physics, and it's not the fans.

And you definitely don't want God to do this to you.

Viking Pundit links to a Trot Nixon quote where the Red Sox right fielder attributes his game winning hit in Game 3 of the Sox-Oakland AL Division Series to the Lord Jesus Christ. Apperantely "I wasn't me swinging that bat. It was the Lord Jesus Christ." Hopefully the Lord suits up again tonight!

Our friend Eric adds that "I, for one, was elated to see an athlete profess his faith so sincerely." Eric, are you out of your mead drinking mind? Athletes profess their faith so overwhelmingly that it makes the NBA illegitimate birthrate seem almost pious. Their obsession with the Lord is probably the only thing that has kept an Old Testament style wrath from cleansing many of these exponentially immoral athletes from our midst. The practice of attributing success to the Lord is so common in sports that Gregg Easterbrook dedicated a whole TMQ column to the subject:

Whether Christians should believe that God controls earthly events is a complex topic; at the end of this column I'll recommend a brilliant book that devotes 100 pages to the pros and cons of the argument. Short version: if God is actually in control of sports events, the human prospect is in far worse shape than previously feared. Consider that just a few weeks after looking so marvelous in the 32-point comeback game, Frank Reich looked awful in the Super Bowl, committing five turnovers as the Bills were blown off the field by Dallas. So what divine message to humanity was encoded in that sequence of events? Beats me. If God actually intervenes in football games to send us sports-encoded messages that we can't understand, woe be unto us.

****

Praising God for success in sports can be not only grating but a form of self-flattery. When an athlete says, in effect, "God helped me catch that touchdown pass," he's saying that in a world of poverty, inequality and war, higher powers thought his touchdown catch so vastly important that God intervened on Earth to make sure that both feet came down inbounds, while doing nothing to prevent slaughter in Africa or the Middle East. Though meant to suggest humility, praising God for success in sports often becomes a form of vanity: God wanted me to catch that pass! When I hear athletes imply that this is what the divine is like, I think: No thanks.

I'm inclined to agree with Gregg. I think it's wonderful for Trot that he has found something of great value through his religion, but to suggest that God cares about any sporting event is a comment that strikes me as being more arrogant and obnoxious than those diamond studded Cross' found on many hip-hop artists, and just as ignorant to the nature and the purpose of God.

(Sad yet true: far too many Red Sox fans take the Lord's name in vain on the internet for Google to confirm if the I/it gaffe in the quote above was Trot's own, or if it's a typo from the blog i'm quoting.)

Julie Flint in the London Observer:

Disaster has been prophesied, self-servingly, at every turn: the war would be long (it wasn't, and most Iraqis had no direct experience of it); tens of thousands would die in the battle for Baghdad (they didn't); there would be a fully-fledged humanitarian disaster (there wasn't). Now, we are told, Iraqis fear the very real prospect of civil war. Not those I know. Not yet. Nor those polled in Baghdad last month by Gallup: 62 per cent thought getting rid of Saddam was worth the suffering they've endured; 67 per cent thought their lives will be better five years from now.

From the very beginning, the anti-war lobby has refused to listen to those Iraqis who supported war over continued tyranny. Banners saying 'Freedom for Iraq' were confiscated at anti-war rallies and photographs of Halabja, where Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurdish civilians, were seized. No voice was given to people such as Freshta Raper, who lost 21 relatives in Halabja and wanted to ask: 'How many of you have asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when forced to watch her son being executed? How many know that these mothers had to applaud as their sons died? What is more moral: freeing an oppressed, brutalised people from a vicious tyrant or allowing millions to continue suffering indefinitely?'

Link via Andrew Stuttaford in The Corner. Take Andrew's advice and read the whole thing.