Winning in losing

By Jennifer J. Foster

Finally tonight, I did something tonight I don’t usually do: I watched a Major League Baseball event.

I could write for a long time about why this lifelong softball player finds almost nothing redeeming in professional baseball, but in a word, it’s sportsmanship, and everything good and honorable that comes with it. Sportsmanship is lacking in professional baseball (and in all the other professional sports, for that matter). I get very angry when I see tape of bench-clearing brawls, disrespectful players screaming at or spitting on umpires about balls and strikes, managers throwing bats out of the dugouts and throwing rosin-bag “grenades” and sticking their armpits in umpires’ faces in protests about this or that decision, etc. You’d think that for as much money as they make, grown men like Manny Ramirez and Phil Wellman and Kash Beauchamp and others like them could learn to act a little less like moronic idiots and a little—just a little—more like men.

For example, Manny would do well to be less Manny, more Josh.

I came back to baseball a little bit tonight as I watched Texas’s Josh Hamilton ascend into the record books from the depths of a cocaine and heroin addiction that nearly cost him his career, his family and his very life.

Read Josh’s incredible story here. You can’t make this stuff up—and you wouldn’t want to.

Even though he went to Yankee Stadium tonight and hit 28 homers in the first round of Home Run Derby and 35 in all, he ended up losing the contest to Minnesota’s Justin Morneau.

But I suspect that after being through what he’s been through in his life, Josh Hamilton would tell you that by even being there tonight, he was already a winner—even if he hadn’t hit the first home run, much less three past 500 feet.

It was fun to watch. It was impossible not to pull for him. Josh Hamilton showed us tonight what baseball—and, indeed, life—should be all about.

Hamilton may have lost Home Run Derby. But he’s winning the battles that count: The daily fight against his drug and alcohol addiction. The fight to reclaim his career. The struggle of living with the knowledge that three years of his life have been poured out and smoked away.

It is the battle for his life, every day of his life.

I am among his newest fans.

Obama: Surge in Afghanistan

By Jennifer J. Foster

Barack Obama talks a lot about how he opposed the War in Iraq from the beginning.

He also opposed the so-called “surge,“ which beefed up the presence of U.S. military forces in Iraq to quell growing violence there last year.

Obama has made further comments about his Iraq policy over the past week, and he’s been accused of backing off of his commitment to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq if he is elected president.

John McCain points out that he was for the surge when Obama was not. Judgment, McCain says: I’ve got it; he doesn’t.

Obama says the surge was a tactical success that wouldn’t have been necessary had the U.S. never invaded Iraq to begin with.

ANYWAY ... as it turns out, Obama might not have been for the surge in Iraq. But it sure sounds like he supports one in Afghanistan, where violence in increasing against U.S. and coalition forces there.

From the Associated Press:

Democrat Barack Obama repeated his assertion Monday that as president, he would send at least two more combat brigades to Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers face rising violence ...

Obama’s proposed force increase is part of a plan to pull combat troops out of Iraq and focus on the growing threat from a resurgent al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

“As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan,“ Obama said in an op-ed published Monday in The New York Times ...

“We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there,“ Obama said. “I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.“

Surge: OK in Afghanistan. Not so much in Iraq, according to Obama.

See also:

Official: Insurgents kill 9 U.S. troops in Afghanistan

Losing ground in Afghanistan

Quick hits

By Jennifer J. Foster

Here are a few quick hits I wanted to draw to your attention:

The US environmental protection agency (EPA) has lowered the value of a human life by nearly $1 million under George Bush’s administration, according to the U.K. Guardian::

The EPA’s estimate of the “value of a statistical life” was $6.9m as of this May - down from $7.8m five years ago - according to an Associated Press study released today.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule.

The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation - such as the tighter restrictions on pollution that the EPA refused to impose today, effectively postponing any action on climate change until after Bush leaves office.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Um, I bet it will be worth it for THE FAMILIES OF THOSE 2,500 PEOPLE!

Wow. Is this how government agencies really make policy decisions—with mathematical calculations?

I knew I should have listened better in algebra.

Perhaps in a related item …? From the Washington Post:

Under pressure from farmers, livestock producers and soaring food prices, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is weighing a policy change that could lead to the plowing of millions of acres of land that had been set aside for conservation.

At issue is the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), under which the government has paid farmers to stop growing row crops, such as corn and soybeans, on 34 million acres across the country. Designed in the mid-1980s to hold down production and bolster commodity prices, the $1.8 billion-a-year program has turned into a major boon for conservation, with much of the acreage planted with perennial grasses or trees, or restored to wetlands.

But the ethanol boom, widespread flooding and high prices for feed crops have changed the equation. Livestock producers have been howling about the high price of animal feed. Pork producers say they are losing $30 per pig.

Hey, math guys: What’s the calculation for the life of a farm animal?

Barack Obama wins the UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE MILLENNIUM award.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Obama “told a potential donor to his campaign that Hillary Rodham Clinton is on his list of possible vice presidential running mates, but that her husband’s status as a former president makes matters ‘complicated.‘“

The potential donor, Jill Iscol, had been “an ardent supporter” of Hillary Clinton, and Obama “reached out to her because he heard she was unhappy about the way the New York senator had been treated by the Democratic Party and the media,“ the Times said.

Iscol turned their phone conversation Thursday to the vice presidency—something the Obama campaign has refused to discuss publicly. She said she told him that Clinton would be his best running mate.

Obama replied that she is on his list, Iscol recounted, and that it would be a mistake not to have her on such a list. But he also explained that he was thinking through a potential “complication”—Bill Clinton.

“He said once you’re a president, even if you’re a former president, you’re always a president,“ Iscol said.

Well said ... especially for a man who hasn’t been president.

Read the rest here.

The New Yorker cover

By Jennifer J. Foster

Everyone’s all up in arms about the New Yorker’s cover this week.

It’s a cartoon drawing of Barack Obama, dressed in traditional Muslim garb complete with a turban, standing with his wife, Michelle, who’s shown with a huge Afro and an Uzi on her back. The two are standing in the Oval Office, which has been redecorated to include a portrait of Osama bin Laden above the fireplace—in which is burning an American flag.

Oh, I almost forgot: They’re fist-bumping.

I saw it, and I laughed out loud. I thought it was a funny, clever depiction of all the rumors that have been going around about the Obamas.

Have I mentioned here before that I love sarcasm?

I’m a similar fan of satire. (Really.)

So maybe that’s why I found the cover funny.

But other people—the candidate himself, among them, as it turns out—weren’t amused at all. From CBS News:

The Obama campaign quickly condemned the rendering. Spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.“

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive.”

I can just see ol’ Bill and Tucker, sniffing condescendingly in response.

Hey, guys: RELAX!!

Or do I have it all wrong? Is this some sort of dark indictment of race in this country? Of what “everyone” thinks about the Obamas but are too politically correct to say out loud? Should we be concerned, as some folks have said, about the cover and what it says about us as a society?

CNN’s resident curmudgeon, Jack Cafferty (who’s no stranger to offending people, himself), tackled this issue in the CAFFERTY FILE (oh, that’s so official-sounding) last hour. Check out some of the responses here.

What do you think?

Troy King news

By Jennifer J. Foster

The news on Troy King is that there’s no news on Troy King.

RE: this ongoing rumor mill, who knows? First, there was a vicious rumor – or a series of vicious rumors that played on the same theme.

The Montgomery Advertiser was going to have something on it.

They didn’t.

Then, the Tuscaloosa News was going to have something on it.

They didn’t.

Then, WSFA was supposed to have something.

They didn’t.

Then, the Birmingham News was supposed to have something yesterday, and King was supposed to have had a “full confrontational” news conference today, in which he would presumably deny what was to have appeared in the News.

They didn’t. So he didn’t.

Some say the News still has a story and is just waiting for the right time, more info, better sourcing, etc. Others say that because the story hasn’t been able to move beyond the blogosphere, its credibility is continuing to crack. Mainstream media outlets have lawyers. Lots of lawyers. And lawyers don’t like rumors. So although newspapers use “anonymous sources” (and don’t get me started on that), they still have to know who those sources are—so the lawyers can talk to them, you know, in case of a suit. That the newspapers can’t find sources—a week to several months after the fact, depending on the version you’re hearing—who are willing to go on record, even privately, about these rumors is the biggest reason for skepticism, in my view. Unless and until newspapers can source this to the satisfaction of their lawyers, these rumors will remain just that: Rumors.

And to that point, as for King himself, the most interesting theory I heard for his continued silence on the matter is that he doesn’t want to give the mainstream media the news hook they need to drag something that had previously existed only on blogs out into the open. If they can’t get across the river on their own, he supposedly figures, he’s not going to build the bridge for them.

All in all, I have to say I agree completely with Danny over at the Parlor on this. I have never seen anything like this in my life. Everyone knows something, or knows someone who knows something, or heard from someone who knows something or ran into someone who went to school once with someone who knows something. People will say matter-of-factly that they just KNOW it to be so. Others will tell you, just as matter-of-factly, that they know it CAN’T be true. Both camps will look at your like you’re stupid if you have an opinion opposite of theirs – or if you haven’t yet formed one at all.

I’ll just say this: Troy King hasn’t exactly been the Bradley Byrne of the newspapers and their editorial boards. Where they admire Byrne and his leadership of the once-beleaguered two-year system, they decry King and his unabashed, unapologetic conservatism.

In other words, if the papers have something on Troy King, they’re not sitting on it because they’re his friends. 

And speaking of friends, does King’s supposed strategy of not dignifying the rumor with a response also explain the GOP’s deafening silence on the issue? More than a few folks have suggested that this began in GOP circles, whether to get rid of King in the AG’s office or simply to damage him beyond repair so he’ll be out of the way in 2010. (Interestingly enough, there’s been no denial from top-level GOP leaders on this, either.)

And that begs one final question: If it did begin in GOP circles for 2010 purposes, when did supporters of other potential GOP gubernatorial candidates start seeing Troy King as such a threat?

See these posts on this issue over at the Parlor. Check out the comments, in particular:

King ‘not going to resign’

McCain scrubs King’s name or not?

http://www.politicalparlor.net/wp/2008/07/14/planned-troy-king-press-conference-now-off/#comments” target=“_blank”>Planned Troy King Press Conference Now Off