It's early in September.

The Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics are already eliminated from the divisional chase, and Detroit is not far behind (maybe that's why they traded Verlander).

In the National League, just as in ancient times, Philadelphia and the Mets are out of the race as are San Diego and San Francisco.  No, I don't believe the Dodgers have the most wins this year.  And I'm still not used to Houston being in the American League and leading the Western Division.

Dungeness and Draggings

• Damn.  Another rebuilding year.
• Arpaio convicted.  There's a slight chance he'd actually have to do time.

  Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of a criminal charge Monday for refusing to stop traffic patrols that targeted immigrants, marking a final rebuke for a politician who once drew strong popularity from such crackdowns but was ultimately booted from office as voters became frustrated over his headline-grabbing tactics and deepening legal troubles.

• Scaramucci is Out.  Jurassicpork points at the nonexistent chaos at the White House.

  So now we have no:
  Secretary of the Army
  Secretary of the Navy
  Surgeon General
  Deputy Secretary of State
  [...]
  No strategy for defeating ISIS but a great one for combating a street gang and now no
  Communications Director or
  Director of Homeland Security.
  You know, Donnie Dumbo, I'm not as experienced as you in this presidenting business, but I do know one thing: When you're playing Musical Chairs, the idea is to have more people than open seats, not the other way around.

• Let's hope this isn't true.  (Trita Parsi, AlterNet)

  President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October—the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisors have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this.

  There were no WMDs in Iraq. Anyone remember that?
  

• Tomi Lahren, conservative firebrand, bashes Obamacare while benefiting from it

  It's the headline.
  
• Driftglass.
• Zandar.
• Zandar on hacking the vote.
• ETA:  Shakesville.
• Not The Onion.

I'm trying to imagine all this as a Mel Brooks movie.

In Memoriam

• Liu Xiaobo, Nobel laureate and dissident
• Christopher Wong Won (aka "Fresh Kid Ice"), co-founder of 2 Live Crew, rapper
• Frances Gabe, the self-cleaning house
• Barbara Weldens, singer
• Chester Bennington, singer (Linkin Park)
• Konrad Reuland, football player (December of last year); his heart lives on in Rod Carew.

It's the Bermuda Dodecahedron

I've been hunting wabbits accumulating links for a week.  Those things are indigestible.

• wendelah at dreamwidth has some links for the disastrous Senate version of a "healthcare" bill.
• Feministing supports saving the ACA before it gets destroyed.
• Echidne of the Snakes comments on the "free market religion" of conservatives and how that really doesn't help with healthcare.
• How "conservatives" are robbing you of health care and how "corporate media" have been "aiding and abetting."  (Adam Johnson, AlterNet)
• An actual shortfall problem which the Senate bill does not address.
• "Civic illiteracy" and how we got there. (Henry A. Giroux, Salon)

  I am not referring here to only the kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such as Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky and Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of manufactured illiteracy that has become a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges captures this demagogic attack on thoughtfulness in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idioms of mass culture.” Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.
  
  This updated form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. At the same time, illiteracy bonds people: It offers the pretense of a community bound by a willful denial of facts and its celebration of ignorance.

• Senator Franken talks about the Senate "health care" bill (the header is a little misleading).  (Alexandra Rosenmann, AlterNet) on Morning Joe.
• Speaking of Morning Joe, he noticed the President has called the "health care" bill "mean."  (Travis Gettys, Raw Story at AlterNet)  "Jedi Mind Trick," indeed.
• Paul Ryan may be vulnerable (politically). (Capper, Crooks and Liars)
• Authoritarianism creeps in on little cat feet.  Time for the squirt bottle.  (MJ Stephan and T Snyder, The Guardian)
• In Memoriam:
• Glenne Headly, actress
• Bill Dana, comic
• Gabe Pressman, TV journalist
• Pete Flynn, Mets groundskeeper

In Memoriam

• Jack O'Neill, surfers' wetsuits
• Jimmy Piersall, ballplayer
• Peter Sallis, voice actor (Wallace of Wallace and Gromet)
• Roger Smith, actor

In Memoriam

On Saturday, too.

• Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter and father to Mika (TV reporter)
• Jim Bunning, Hall of Fame pitcher (perfect game) and (*sigh*) conservative Senator from Kentucky
• Gregg Allman, musician (Allman Brothers Band). Full story as it unravels.

In Memoriam

• Gilbert Baker, the Rainbow Flag
• Katy Feeney, baseball executive
• Don Rickles, "Mr. Warmth," comic

In Memoriam

• Van Williams, actor (The Green Hornet)
• Margaret Whitton, actress (Major League, et seq.)
• Andrew Sachs, actor (Fawlty Towers)

In Memoriam

•  Ralph Branca, pitcher.
•  Sharon Jones, singer

108

= 3³ x 4

Cubs win the World Series.  Apocalypse does not happen.

"Traveling Eternity Road, What Will You Find There?"

First let me say that tracking the game yesterday at the MLB site is weird.  I'm not watching on Fux and I'm not a subscriber to MLB.tv, so I followed along on their graphic representation of the game, which was ...

(I got into baseball as a child--I have told that story before--through listening to it on the radio.  There are certain disadvantages to that method, one of which is that I don't know what a split-finger four-seam lightly tongued fastball looks like.  Although Bugs Bunny was sort of a tutorial.)

... silent.

On the radio and TV, the audience gets both the play-by-play and incidental chatter meant to fill the silences and gaps between action impart the lore of this storied game.  In the graphic representation, none of that happens.  Totally mit out sound.  There's an image of a batter in the batter's box (right or left, with the uniforms facing the correct way) against a backdrop of stadium.  The strike zone is indicated by a rectangle divided into 9 parts approximating the width of home plate and the length between knees and midchest.  Trajectory of incoming balls (there must be a device recording this stuff behind home plate) is shown graphically.

And that's it.  There's other information--batting order, strikes and balls, strikeouts, walks, doubles, scoring, the usual statistics.  But silent.

I have to check that out again this evening.

Oh, and Cleveland won the first game.  6-0.

---

And now for sewer-side:

• Meta family structure and political/moral value beliefs.  Doug Muder, from 2005, and still prescient.
• Echidne of the Snakes warns of the threat of the alt-right.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid on a deliberately-engineered glitch in Obamacare.  (The Republican governors' non-expansion of Medicaid, that is, not the fact that healthy people aren't getting health insurance as much as unhealthy people are.)

  Republican governors refusing to take money set aside to soften the blow for consumers through expanded Medicaid and health insurance companies bailing out of the single-plan market have largely succeeded in damaging the system in enough states to put the burden on shifting costs to premiums[...]

• Two-fer:
  
  • Yastreblyansky:

    That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.

  • Driftglass:

    Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
    
    [...]
    
    What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
    
    What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
    
    [...]
    
    For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they have have never really had the slightest fucking clue as to what was going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general[.]

    (See the post for the Douthat quotes, or go to the New York Times [linked in post] to get the full experience.)
    
  • ETA:  Now three-fer:  Susan of Texas (Hunting of the Snark):

    The purpose of academia is to gain knowledge and pass it on to our young. Bureaucracies exist to run the business of governing, the entertainment industry exists to make money, and the legal establishment exists to create, maintain, and enforce a code of law. None of these organizations owe conservatives a living. If these organizations are meritocracies, moreover, then the cream will rise and the dregs will fall. The same conservative philosophies that glorify individual achievement and success through hard work and discipline should make whining for more power, money, and jobs a humiliating task. Sadly, however, Douthat is forced to admit that competence has a liberal bias.
    
    Since, as Douthat admits, the conservative elite don't have enough brain or artistic power to succeed in lucrative and/or prestigious profession[s], they must depend on their base's power to get jobs. But once again, an impediment stands in their way. After yanking around, lying to, and ignoring their followers, the followers no longer trust their elite.

    (Ahem. It's called "reaping what one sows."  A conservative value.)
• The ballot ( I vote absentee; there's usually a 50-50 chance I won't be here in November) for federal, state, and county offices and various propositions is four pages long, and the pages are approximately 11 x 17.
• Conspiracy satire, from Paul Bibeau.

  It makes the Trumpkins crazy. The worst thing for a conspiracy theorist is to discover an actual fact. They go insane over it. It's like chumming the water around a few dozen tiger sharks. You give them a little bit of detail, and what happens? They're out there on Twitter and Facebook trying to convince their friends and family that every time John Podesta had a conference call it was so he could help the Fed put tracking chips in your Lucky Charms. They sound angry and unhinged, and the fact that their niece with the big H on her profile doesn't care makes them even more angry and unhinged. Nothing sells a seventh Clinton term like Trumpkins frothing and ripping their hair out.

• Pernicious is the word; more on voter suppression with loud cries over non-existent fraud.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Bringing the day the Hollywood Walk of Fame is enclosed to a depth of 4 inches of plastic and requires airline-travel levels of security to visit closer:  Vandal destroys Trump's Walk of Fame star.  More details from Oliver Willis.

• And as we all know perfectly well, The Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.

  Driftglass. Because...
  

Impossible Dream

So.  The Cubs face the Cleveland Indians on Tuesday.

Gedanken

Yeah, the mechanism is creaky, but it still works.

• Jake Tapper was interviewing Curt Schilling (whom I respect as a pitcher, much as I do Jim Bunning, but whose politics I despise, much as I do Jim Bunning's, but Bunning is retired and Schilling never pitched a perfect game.  I have standards) when the latter got ... weirdly anti-Semitic and tried to lasso Mr. Tapper into playing that game.  He wants to run against Elizabeth Warren. Mostly the voters in Massachusetts have better sense than to elect him, but he was a hero of the Red Sox curse-breakers.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars.  See also the update.)
• Yastreblyansky takes a whack at Mr. Brooks (following Driftglass's thorough evisceration of a Brooks column, linked in both posts) and points out that Mr. B. is trying to legitimize Mr. "No Sex, Just Lies on Videotape" O'Keefe, apparently in the name of "repairing moral capital." And this is where I have to say that when I hear conservatives talk about morals or morality, I (a) make sure my wallet is in a safe place and (b) start scanning the media for the incoming scandal, because there's always a brewing incoming scandal.  
• I like the idea of balancing the budget; I have, however, noticed that the people who are supposed to bear the belt-tightening are never legislators, millionaires, billionaires, or large and/or multinational businesses.  Also, when taxes were "lowered," fees for the services formerly covered by taxes were imposed.  Also, remember inflation, the bugaboo of the '70s?  It never really went away.  It just slowed down.  Somewhat.  
• Speaking of economics, naked capitalism has an article by Lynn Parramore on what economists fail to understand about race.  (A lot, apparently.)

  Asked if there have been improvements in the way academic economics tackle issues of inequality since his student days in the 1970s, Darity does not have particularly good news:
  
  “Actually, I think it’s shifted even further to the right so that alternative approaches are even more marginalized now,” he says. “The ideological content of economics is masked somewhat by the high degree of technical requirements. So in some respects I think economics is even less open than it was when I was first exposed to the field.”

  "Stratification economics" looks at this situation.
• When I see the term "intellectual elite" in the first paragraph of an article, I reach for my revolver tend to suspect the point of view of the rest of the article, and this is a piece that raises all sorts of red flags ("red" flags, get it?), but being reminded of the long history of the populist tendency in the United States and the dangers thereof (yes, I said "thereof."  The pearls are in the next room) is useful.  (Anis Shivani, AlterNet)

  Whether or not Trump is a neo-fascist is less interesting than tracing his similarities to European right-wing populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Umberto Bossi, Gianfranco Fini, and others. It can’t be denied that every extreme right-wing movement has a tendency to slip into overt fascism at times, as when entire populations are targeted for exclusion and punishment. But to understand Trumpism we are better off searching for familiar strains in American populism, from Father Coughlin to George Wallace, from Huey Long to Pat Buchanan. I mention Long, the populist governor of Louisiana during the Great Depression, because there are elements of Trump’s critique that have something of the redistributive element as well, though Coughlin’s charismatic media presence, Wallace’s appeal to white supremacy and Buchanan’s America First xenophobia and protectionism are clearer markers of Trumpism’s homegrown origins.
  
  [...]
  
  Trumpism and allied movements cannot take on globalization without also taking on multiculturalism. The neo-populists see no way around neoliberal globalization except through overcoming multiculturalism. They see those unfairly benefiting from the multicultural model as being the cause of their misery, their perpetual uncertainty in the new economy, because there is no telling when their jobs might be permanently lost due to lower wages in other countries or because of unfair competition from immigrants who ought to have less of a rightful claim than natives. Whether it’s called France for the French, Germany for the Germans, or Make America Great Again, the idea is the same.

  It is an unwritten rule that invoking -isms is a hallmark of stuff trying to sound profound.
• "Why the Media is Botching the Election." (Brian Beutler, New Republic.  Say no more.  I can say no more.)

• The dark carnival that is the Trump Campaign continues to limp onto the ash heap of history by butt-scooting it's crackpot theories and racist demagoguery all over the hallowed ground of Gettysburg. I'm not sure which Trump brain-wizard decided that the sight of a doomed racist cause making a suicidal charge into the teeth of overwhelming force was the very best metaphor on which to begin the final chapter of the campaign of their unhinged orange fire demon, but I hope they got their money up front.

  Driftglass. Who is running his annual fundraiser. SEND HIM SOME MONEY!
  
• ETA:  [Yes!  I know!] Bruce Springsteen does not care for Trump.  (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, at AlterNet)

Probably more than you want on a Saturday afternoon. Take your time.

Triple Threat

• Via Mark Evanier, who excerpts 2 paragraphs to make a point, an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders in the New Republic.
• Senator Elizabeth Warren beats on Trump's lack of qualification for office like the traditional rented mule lambastes Mr. Trump's unfitness for office.  She may have Curt Schilling running against her in 2018.
• Guess who has endorsed Trump?  (Chauncey DeVega sounds the alarm.)

  Will Donald Trump, the Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate, and his basket of human deplorables reign? Or will the American people send them back into the shadows and the dustbin of history? 

  The American people will again have to decide what type of people they want to be and the country they want to have.

Not the Debate Anticipation Room

• In memoriam:  Jose Fernandez.  What an arm.
• The Chicago Cubs have not only clinched their division, they also have the best record in the National League, which insures they will not get out of the first round of the playoffs.
• The Dodgers and Washington have clinched in their respective divisions.  The Wild Card is looking like the Mets, the Giants, and the Cardinals.  Maybe.
• Texas is the Western Division champ in the American League.  Cleveland and Detroit are still contesting the Central Division.  Boston has clinched a playoff spot, but Toronto (Toronto!  W0000t!) still has a very tiny chance.  
• Toronto, Baltimore, and Detroit have a shot at the Wild Card.

Shaping Up

I was going to talk about the upcoming election because this is a political blog (although there are either 9 or 10 games left to play and some teams [hi, Cincinnati!] are just waiting for the season to be over, already.  Tampa Bay, Kansas City, the White Sox, Minnesota, the Angels, and Oakland get to play out the string on the American League side; Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Diego, Colorado, Arizona, and everyone in the NL Central Division who is not the Cubs have cancelled the champagne orders [Wait till next year!].  I don't have favorites this year.  I'm...curiously apathetic.  Must have been the Céspedes transaction.), but I keep getting...distracted.

• Happy 67th to Bruce Springsteen.  His songs, ranked by Caryn Rose for Vulture.
• Avedon lays about with knout and cudgel.
• Michael Caine had to change his name legally (he had been travelling under his original name).  Another reason to kick a terrorist.  (via Avedon's Sideshow.)
• Terry Jones (the other Terry in Monty Python) has been diagnosed with dementia.
• Via Mark Evanier, a long article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine about accusations of Hillary Clinton "scandals."

  Open up any interview with undecided voters, and you will find them equating Trump’s shocking lack of qualifications with Clinton’s mundane transparency issues. (For instance, this Florida voter: “Mr. Trump scares him, Mr. Lewis said. Mrs. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election.”) The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.

• Douthat displays his tush ignorance.  Professor Chaos to the rescue:

  Oh. My GAWD! They're pushing a message of anti-hate? And anti-discrimination? And anti-bigotry? What kind of radical leftist bomb-throwers are these that would have us not hate our fellow Americans based on minor differences?

  And Yastreblyansky:

  What the Monsignor [that is, Douthat] is up to in this column isn't the development of some big and magisterial political science theory, as his language might lead you to suppose; it's really first steps in the construction of a narrative about how even though Clinton is going to win it will be bad for the Democrats, and in fact she really isn't going to win in the baseball-statistics sense, because it's the preposterousness of the Trump that will bring her victory and not any virtue of her own.

• Whedon Get-Out-the-Vote video.  Definitely biased.  (This vid precedes  some news videos.)
• Signature (barbershop quartet) doing Queen's "Somebody to Love."  "At Last."  The Barbershop Harmony Society's YouTube page.  Traditional a capella street group doing "My Girl."

Political Emetics

• Driftglass:
• Willful American political amnesia. Warning: Rude. For (mentally and emotionally) adults only.

  Sorry, Mr. Dionne, but all available suggests that most of the people at the top of your profession are simply incapable of learning from this simple lesson, no matter how many times you hit them in the head with the same 2x4. Because the professional and financial rewards for collaborating with America's domestic enemies are just too great and their moral compasses just too damaged.

• David Brooks may have discovered The Workers.

  And just one year later, Mr, Brooks has suddenly become a Champion of the Working Man. And all it took was the complete destruction of every lie on which Mr. Brooks has built his entire career for the last 20 years.

  We'll see how long that lasts, eh?  With a list of movies/books Mr. B still needs to take in.
• The Daily Irritant also pummels Mr. Brooks.

  Also, I'm fairly sure that the purpose of teaching history is to indoctrinate kids into the "tenets of their creed." It only takes a few minutes to teach American History properly. It's George Washington, then Lincoln freed the slaves, then we defeated Hitler, then 9/11 happened because they hate our freedom. You can skip over the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Trail of Tears, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps, you know all the stuff that makes people feel doubt that America is the greatest country in the fucking world!

   
• (Whenever I think that David Brooks doesn't deserve so much opprobrium, I read his column and start screaming "Liar!  Liar!!" no later than the third paragraph.  I am deeply grateful that Drifty and Professor Chaos take their sanity the time in hand to read and dissect Brooks' work, because there is only so much Chopin in the world for clearing that mess out of my head.)
• Shakesville:

  The truth is, it's only because Clinton's policies are as strong as they are that we're not hearing about policy at all. If they were a vulnerability for her, the press would be all over them. But they cannot be exploited to give her bad headlines, so they are of no use to media determined to try to derail her candidacy.
  
  Thus, it's not strictly true that the media has abandoned policy analysis. They've certainly scrutinized Clinton's policies—and found them to be of no use in coverage designed to harm her.

  Well, why aren't the media talking up her stated policies?  The horse race, yeah; the clown, yeah; the broader picture, yeah.  But, you know, I'm not having glasses of wine (beer, ugh) with any of these people.  All I know is that nothing would induce me to vote for Mr. Orange-Haired Surprise.
• Oh, snap.  (Also, the early comments [it's an Open Thread] are not bad.)
• Software Update really wants me to update Right Now.
• I need to go look at the standings.  The Giants are in trouble and my team is trying to stay out of the cellar.  The Cubs have clinched NL Central, so they'll be eliminated in the first round.

In Memoriam

• Clarence "Choo-Choo" Coleman, original Met.  
• Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphonist.
• Fyvush Finkel, actor and remnant of Yiddish theater.

In Memoriam

New York Times obits:

• "Dandy" Dan Daniel, disk jockey, WMCA Good Guy
• Bernie Worrell, funk keyboardist
• Jim Hickman, original Met
• Scotty Moore, guitarist
• Pat Summitt, women's basketball coach
• Mack Rice, songwriter ("Mustang Sally")
• Bill Cunningham, photographer

Los Angeles Times obits:

• Anton Yelchin, actor (Chekov, Star Trek reboot)
• Michael Herr, chronicled the Vietnam War

In Memoriam

• Jim Ray Hart, SF Giants 3rd baseman
• Alan Young, actor (Mister Ed)