I believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe in, the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in, and the personal freedom that America used to believe in.
Monday night in Progressive Field, Asdrubal Cabrera joined Ball and Wamby as the only players in Indians history with unassisted triple plays.
Cabrera turned his triple play in the fifth inning of the second game of a doubleheader against Toronto. The Indians lost, 3-0, in 10 innings.
Kevin Mench led off the fifth with a single to left off Cliff Lee. Marco Scutaro singled to center.
With left-handed Lyle Overbay at the plate, both runners got huge jumps on a 1-0 pitch. Overbay broke his bat on a sinking liner up the middle. Cabrera made a diving backhanded catch [Out #1], got up, stepped on second to erase Mench [Out # 2] and tagged Scutaro [Out #3].
It happens almost too fast on the video to realize what happened, which I’m sure is exactly how the Blue Jays felt.
Prince George’s County Executive Jack B. Johnson, a Democratic convention delegate pledged to support Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, said yesterday that he thinks Sen. Barack Obama has “in a real sense” won the Democratic nomination and that he now plans to support Obama at the August convention.
Johnson, who endorsed Clinton nine days before Maryland’s February primary, said he will urge Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, who co-chair Clinton’s Maryland campaign, to bring all of her delegates to Obama’s camp for the sake of party unity.
“I cannot in good conscience go to the convention and not support Barack,” Johnson said in an interview. “She ran a great campaign, but she fell short of the line.”
I just don’t think this is over yet, and I don’t think that it is smart for us to take a position that might disadvantage us in November. And also remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged. You know, there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They’re just like superdelegates.
That’s right Hillary, they aren’t pledged to anybody, not even you.
The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He—or she—is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.
This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. The vision of the president as national guardian and spiritual redeemer is so ubiquitous it goes virtually unnoticed. Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes. And with great responsibility comes great power.
It’s difficult for 21st-century Americans to imagine things any other way. The United States appears stuck with an imperial presidency, an office that concentrates enormous power in the hands of whichever professional politician manages to claw his way to the top. Americans appear deeply ambivalent about the results, alternately cursing the king and pining for Camelot. But executive power will continue to grow, and threats to civil liberties increase, until citizens reconsider the incentives we have given to a post that started out so humble.
As Healy notes, it wasn’t supposed to be this way and we’ve only got ourselves to blame for the way things have turned out.
Barr’s hard core, small government, fiscal conservative record, combined with his unwavering pro-life positions may well attract some disenchanted conservatives, many of whom still dismissively refer to the presumptive GOP nominee as “Juan McCain” in private. Of course, his position on the Iraq war may well scare off a number of those supporters, while attracting the more Libertarian inclined Ron Paul supporters in the fall. Will he have an impact? It may be tempting to say no, at least until we remember the effect Ross Perot had on the GOP in 1992. There is also the lesson of Ralph Nader who scored roughly 100,000 votes in Florida during the 2000 election, where George W. Bush was awarded the state with a 577 vote margin of victory.
It’s a new blog designed to make up for the terrible feeling of retrospective loss I feel for all the years when there was no blogging.
I’m assuming that the real blogging of news, culture, and politics began in 1998 — we can argue about that if you want — and this project will look to 100 years before 1998.
I’ve used a random integer generator to spit out my first 100 year numbers, and the date will always be today’s date. I’ll advance to a new random year each day. Today’s blogging happens to be for May 12, 1974. I adopt the mindset I have when I look at the day’s news to blog here on Althouse, but I look at the New York Times archive for the chosen date. I pick a few things to post about with exactly the sort of attitude that I have when I pick what to write about here.
An interesting idea if you have the time to read it, not to mention the time to write it. Unfortunately, all of the articles that she links to her in posts at the new blog are hidden behindtheNYTimesfirewall and only available to Times Select subscribers.
So, basically, what we have are entirely meaningless results for two reasons.
First, it’s fairly obvious that most of the responses are based on name recognition. People know who Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee are. They don’t know who Kathleen Sebelius, Ted Strickland, Mark Sanford, and Tim Pawlenty are. It makes sense that the names with higher name recognition would poll higher at this stage.
Second, who the public likes for the Veep nominee isn’t, in the end, all that important. The candidates will choose who they will choose and the public will, for the most part, accept it assuming it’s a smart choice.
I’ve long thought that the true importance of the Vice-Presidential choice isn’t who the candidate chooses so much as whether or not that choice reflects good decision making.
The Clinton Campaign will proclaim that the result is a game-changer
The victory in West Virginia will, in reality, be entirely meaningless.
I’m pretty confident I’ll get this one right and, quite honestly, don’t even plan to spend the evening watching Chris Matthews and the rest of the talking heads discuss something when I already know how it’s going to end.
For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.
And there are tales of some incidents of vile, stupid racism directed toward Obama supporters canvassing for votes in Indiana and Pennsylvania, but then there are anecdotes like this:
Aaron Roe, 23, was mowing lawns at a local cemetery recently, lamenting his $8-an-hour job with no benefits. He had earned a community college degree as an industrial electrician, but learned there was no electrical work to be found for someone with his experience, which is to say none. Politics wasn’t on his mind; frustration was. If he were to vote, it would not be for Obama, he said. “I just got a funny feeling about him,” Roe said, a feeling he couldn’t specify, except to say race wasn’t a part of it. “Race ain’t nothing,” said Roe, who is white. “It’s how they’re going to help the country.”
Is this guy a racist ? Frankly, I don’t see it.
The candidate himself has sought to downplay the impact of race on the campaign:
“Will there be some folks who probably won’t vote for me because I am black? Of course,” Obama said, “just like there may be somebody who won’t vote for Hillary because she’s a woman or wouldn’t vote for John Edwards because they don’t like his accent. But the question is, ‘Can we get a majority of the American people to give us a fair hearing?’ “
Given the fact that he’s on the verge of becoming the Democratic nominee for President, I would say that the answer to that question is yes.
The media, on the other hand, seems to want to concentrate on the negative. Yes, there are ignorant, stupid people out there who will never vote for Barack Obama because of his race — heck, they wouldn’t even vote for the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan if he didn’t have white skin — but that doesn’t mean that everyone who doesn’t vote for Obama is motivated by the color of his skin.
A new era is beginning in the career of Frank Sinatra even if the Chairman of the Board isn’t here to participate.
The iconic singer died May 14, 1998, and the 10th anniversary is being marked with a flurry of activity, including a new U.S. postage stamp with his likeness, lavish new CD and DVD collections, a major revival of his films on television and high-profile media appearances by his children.
This surge in all things Sinatra is more than just a fleeting commemoration, however — it’s more like the beginning of a corporate brand roll-out.
(…)
What Sinatra offers to any venture is that most elusive of auras: eternal cool. Like Elvis Presley, James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra’s image has compass-point clarity in pop culture despite the passage of time. For advertisers, he could be an especially potent signifier of sophisticated standards and rakish elegance, and Warner executives sound like gamblers with winning hands when they talk about it.
“There’s a famous old saying that, ‘It’s Frank Sinatra’s world, we just live in it,’ and that’s kind of how we feel around here now,” said Jimmy Edwards, one of the executives at Warner’s Rhino Records who will be leading the day-to-day operations of Frank Sinatra Enterprises LLC. “Frank opens the door to a very exclusive club. . . . He crosses so many zones too; he’s working-class, but he also runs around with the country-club set.”
And it seems to be stronger than ever, even without Sinatra around.
Interestingly enough, he apparently had doubt about how long his legacy would last:
After decades in the spotlight, Frank Sinatra performed in front of a live audience for the last time in February 1995. The final song was “The Best Is Yet to Come,” but his health made a liar of the lyrics. Two years later, his body giving out, he sent daughter Nancy to accept a Congressional Gold Medal in his name.
In his final months, staring into the twilight, the music titan wondered how he would be remembered. During one late-night conversation, Tina Sinatra remembered, he said his legacy might be as fragile as vintage vinyl.
“He said he thought it depended on who held him close to their heart in their record collection and if they’d pass it all on,” she recalled. “He wasn’t certain. There was no arrogance. There was doubt in his voice.”
This month, Sinatra’s voice will be everywhere and his legacy difficult to ignore.
Appropriately so, I would say.
I’m sure there will be more over the next several days, but let’s start out with the music:
