Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Ollie Mack:

Oh yeah, open borders is a great policy idea:
A Mexican national infected with a highly contagious form of tuberculosis crossed the U.S. border 76 times and took multiple domestic flights in the last year.

And working to make getting a FISA warrant as difficult as possible is another bit of genius:
U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year, The Post has learned.

Item: 46 percent of Americans feel that the US economy is in a recession, according to a CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll. You know, there are random idiots out there who are impressionable and gullible to believe that man walked the earth with dinosaurs, that the US or Israel of both either committed or had advance knowledge of and allowed 9/11, or that Bush lied about WMD in Iraq. But how can such a large segment believe something such a blatant falsehood? I understand that mainstream media propaganda in service of the DNC is relentless, but it still saddens that so many people can be so uninformed as to be so far off the mark on such a fundamental fact.

I turned on the Lakers opener and a Tennessee-Houston football game broke out.

Speaking of the new Lakers season, suppose you want to go to a home game and partake in the convenience of valet parking. Well…that will be $4510, up front (tips not included). Yep, you have to buy the entire 41 game season at $110 a pop. I’d just like to be one of the valets, I can catch the game later on TiVo.

And finally, thanks to (genius blog name) Kissing Suzy Kolber for perfectly summarizing my thoughts on the recently concluded baseball postseason.

Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Chico Salmon:

News you may have missed, as most US media tried to ignore or bury it: the latest BLS report shows that September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market, and that more than 30 percent of the nation's net worth has been added since the President's 2003 tax cuts. The effect of presidential policies and actions on the economy is almost always overstated (cf the Clinton mythology), but to the degree they do matter President Bush has objectively been a godsend for the US economy.

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High def may be the future, but it still isn’t the present. When an NFL game on CBS, in this case Houston at Atlanta on September 30, is not in HD while at the same time a women’s college soccer game on the Big Ten Network is, you realize this whole thing still isn’t ready for prime time.

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Just when you think you can no longer be shocked…19% of Democrats think that the world would be better off is the US loses in Iraq and another 20% are not sure? Seriously? That’s about an order of magnitude higher than I would have expected even from a group so infested with anti-American sentiment. It is shocking that such a significant group of Americans, perhaps one in ten overall, could be so fundamentally ignorant of the world around us. Our schools must, sadly, have been doing a terrific job of brainwashing young Americans to hate their country in the past couple of decades.

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And lest you think that brainwashing youth is purely an American phenomenon, recall this story from the Great White North:

“First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.”

Sadly for the “educators” involved, even after so many repetitions of this propaganda the message still did not take with young McKenzie. It takes a strong-minded kid to get through school these days and retain the ability to think critically.

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Here’s some footage of Wilt Chamberlain at age 17. Money quote from narrator Marty Glickman: “Remember the name, Wilt Chamberlain - It will probably make big sports copy for years to come."

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Did Barack Obama really say “I’m going to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great”?!? Is he unfamiliar with the first 231+ years of our history? Shouldn’t understanding why this country IS great be a bare minimum prerequisite for presidential candidates?

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James Taranto notes that Paul Krugman stole the exact title to his new book from the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who had in turn stolen it in 2001 from former Connectivut governor Chester Bowles, who had in turn had in 1962 co-opted the idea from Barry Goldwater. The idea of Krugman stealing from, ultimately, Barry Goldwater, would be enough fun for some days but I bring the whole thing up to quote Taranto’s genius introduction:

"Remember Paul Krugman? Once a promising young economist, he ran into hard times in the 1990s, when he served as an adviser to Enron, an ill-fated energy company. Subsequently he was reduced to writing angry op-eds for the New York Times. In 2003 he published a memoir, and two years later he mysteriously disappeared from public view. But last month he resurfaced, still writing his Times column."

Hammernailhead.

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I figured that this week’s matchup of unbeatens between New England and Dallas was unusual, but I had no idea it was this unusual…hope you had the dog and the under in that Buffalo-Akron tussle.

NFL Games in which both teams were unbeaten with 5+ wins:

Date Teams - Result
11/13/21 Buffalo All-Americans (6-0) at Akron Pros (7-0) - BUF 0, AKR 0
11/04/23 Canton Bulldogs (5-0) at Chicago Cardinals (5-0) - CAN 7, CHI 3
10/28/73 Los Angeles Rams (6-0) at Minnesota Vikings (6-0) - MIN 10, LA 9
10/24/04 New York Jets (5-0) at New England Patriots (5-0) - NE 13, NYJ 7
10/14/07 New England Patriots (5-0) vs. Dallas Cowboys (5-0)

Cover your eyes until October 30

The exhibition season has started, which means that, inevitably, some absolute spare will light up the opponents' camp fodder for 20+ points in particularly impressive fashion, causing you to be sure that your team has unearthed that rarest of birds, the late second rounder or undrafted free agent that's going to jump right in and be a valuable NBA player. Time to point out, courtesy of Dave from Blazers Edge, The Ten Commandments of Pre-Season:

1. THOU SHALT NOT believe anything you read in glowing reports about returning players until thou hast seen it demonstrated with thine own eyes during the regular season...repeatedly. Everybody is talented in the off-season.

2. THOU SHALT NOT put any stock whatsoever in any team's pre-season record or what it might indicate.

3. THOU SHALT NOT clamor for a player who gets 22 minutes a game in pre-season (for purposes of evaluation and giving the veterans a rest) to get that same 22 minutes once the regular season starts.

4. THOU SHALT NOT pass judgment on the current year's draft picks until at least an entire season has passed, preferably two or three. Pre-season is too soon!

5. THOU SHALT NOT judge veterans by whether they show up for unofficial pre-training camp workouts with their teammates. This does not guarantee team cohesiveness or better play. The classic example is the 1996 Indiana Pacers who, after going 52-30, winning their division, and losing the Eastern Conference finals in 7 the year before, showed up to a man a month early to train together. That year they played inconsistently, finished with the exact same record, and bowed out in the first round. Rookies and young guys need to work early. If vets want to rest their bodies, let them.

6. THOU SHALT NOT believe that a guy who comes into camp out of shape can play his way into shape during the season. That used to be true but the pace and intensity of the game has changed. Only two things happen to guys who come in out of shape nowadays: either they get benched and don't play a lot or they do play a lot and get injured.

7. THOU SHALT NOT give too much credence to stories of personal reform. Guys who have truly reformed don't tell everybody about it beforehand and expect immediate credit for it, they hush up and let their actions speak for them.

8. IF THOU HAST SPENT the entire offseason convincing everybody in earshot why thy previously putrid team hast improved, thou shalt not abandon said position in disillusioned cynicism when they getteth off to a 3-10 start. And thou certainly shalt not then regale us with stories of how they really suckest! It's early in the season, improvement is incremental, Rome wasn't built in a day. If thou expectest more than that, it is thy problem, not the team's.

9. Similarly, IF THOU HAST SPENT the entire offseason predicting that thy team will stink, thou shalt not gloat, nor even be happy, shouldst thou turn out to be correct. Realistic analysis is fine, but be a fan first, a smug smarty-pants second.

10. THOU SHALT NOT brag that your pre-season predictions are holding true in Week Two. Period!

A day the world became a better place

Powerline notes that it's the anniversary of a glorious event:

Today is the 40th anniversary of an excellent day in the history of freedom -- the day the bloodthirsty Communist thug Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia.

I've always been at the same time intrigued and repulsed by the fascination a segment of the left has with this brutal mass murderer. Does it really just come down to the fact that he was a photogenic guy? After all, I've never seen anybody wearing a t-shirt with Adolf Eichmann's mug.

But there's really little more to it, right? There are still holdouts who, despite mountains of undeniable evidence to the contrary, still believe that Communism was and is something other than a death cult like Nazism. Or that socialism was and is something other than a discredited Utopian fantasy.

Thus we continue to see the blend of ignorance and cognitive dissonance that views the pure evil of thugs like Fidel and Che as somehow noble, even "cool" instead of acknowledging that they were just Hitler and Eichmann clones in another place and time.