Old Man Winter Arrives

It feels like 1995 all over again.

Secession and Ron Paul

Via Lew's blog comes Jeiel Schalkwijk's socialist case for Ron Paul.

I will give three examples, socialized healthcare, moral laws and gun control. Ron Paul is not an advocate of these things, but his presidency will help the groups that advocate these things.

Since the federal government will take in less tax, states can afford to raise taxes as high as they see fit and use it to implement socialized healthcare. Now you do not need to convince the entire United States that socialized healthcare is better, but you only need to convince the people of your state, a much simpler task.

Your state can have its own healthcare plan and you could withdraw from Medicare and Medicaid.

Among the many reasons I support Paul is that I believe he would not murder secessionists if they initiated leaving the United States. I don't think there's another candidate in the Democratic or Republican fields that wouldn't at the least try very hard to cajole secessionists away from pushing forward with their plans. Many would use overt force of arms.

During my evening exercise I realized that this goes to the crux of why I support Paul. He recognizes the inherent right to secede and the flourishing of humanity and freedom that would occur during a peaceful secession. While I don't think we'll see him openly advocating secession as a means to weaken the Federal behemoth I do believe that if posed the question he would unequivocally support the right to secede from the United States.

Knocking on the Door

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Ron's 5% showing in Gallup is the highest he's garnered to date with Gallup. He's keeping in step with Huckabee and distancing himself from Brownback, Hunter and Tancredo.

And these baby steps may start turning into adult steps real quickly as the money continues to pour into his campaign.

The Best Pitcher You Don't Know

Webb

Underappreciated Sawx

Lowell

Devilish Movement

Carmona

Colorado's Twenty-Two Year Old Leader

Tulowitzki

The Final Four

I haven't looked this forward to the Major League Baseball Championship Series for years. The Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians offer a match-up of great 1-2 punches in the starting rotations as well as top-to-bottom strong offenses. Out west the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks match-up holds many of the game's youngest stars and should be a rollicking affair of homers, stolen bases, fine pitching and great defense.

On Pace to Exceed 3rd Quarter

Here's a guy that knows how to have fun with graphs. And the subject is Ron Paul's fund-raising.

Lock Up Your Back Door

Jen, I found this interesting. You may also.

Paul's Live Show

Now you can track Ron Paul's campaign contributions by the hour.

Computer Warfare

John Robb gives an overview of a particularly nasty bit of malware. It reminds one a tad of fourth generation warfare.

Storm is designed like an ant colony, with a separation of duties. Only a small fraction of infected hosts spread the worm. A much smaller fraction are C2: command-and-control servers. The rest stand by to receive orders. By only allowing a small number of hosts to propagate the virus and act as command-and-control servers, Storm is resilient against attack. Even if those hosts shut down, the network remains largely intact, and other hosts can take over those duties.

Well, That Was Quick

Not a good last half week for the Angels and Vlad Guerrero. Also, not a good week for me. The Angels just finished getting swept by the Red Sox today. I picked the Angels to win the World Series this year in what my Dad called a sentimental pick. Looking back in retrospect I think he was half right. The Angels were a 94-win force all season but I did feel a shine towards a ball club that's run by one of the best all around managers in the game and is led by a superstar player who plays the game hard and asks for no special favors from his team or teammates.

But, gone are the Angels until next February. Vlad must come down and be replaced by no lesser a man than Ron Paul.

The March to One-Hundred Million

I've pledged my 100 bones! It looks like I was number 1,043.

Jocketty Out

Will LaRussa be the next to go? And if he does where would he manage? Possibly he'd pull a Lou Pinella and sit out a year and then consider the inevitable openings that will arise after the 2008 season.

I don't envision too much manager movement this off-season. The Royals have an opening. Torre may not survive another Yankee winter. Toronto's Gibbons could be a darkhorse firing. Randolph still has to be cleared by the Met's upper brass. Mackanin in Cincy doesn't know if he'll be retained as of this writing. And with a new sheriff in town, Pittsburg's Jim Tracy could have a one-way ticket handed to him.

Barring any surprise retirements everyone else seems safe and secure in their positions.

If LaRussa leaves St. Louis he'll pick his next situation very carefully. LaRussa places the relationship he has with his General Manager high on his list of priorities and also places a high premium on organizational stability and shared purpose. That would put Kansas City and the Mets at the top of the list. The Pirates would be a distant third. I can't see the Yankees as the right fit for the mercurial LaRussa and in Toronto the general manager has an entirely different idea of in-game strategy than LaRussa.

The Royals have highly thought of general manager Dayton Moore at the helm and as a protege of John Schuerholz he bleeds competency and stability. In New York the Mets have experienced strong and competent leadership during general manager Omar Minaya's tenure. Minaya definetly sets a stablizing tone at Shea (look at how he rallied the troops in Montreal on a shoe-string budget). In Pittsburg general manager Neal Huntington is less of a known quantity and may not be secure enough to bring in such an overpowering personality as LaRussa for his first year on the job.

I wish I knew more about Drayton Moore's personality to determine whether he and LaRussa would be a good fit but I'll go out on a limb and say that if LaRussa leaves St. Louis and looks to manage in '08 he'll be heading to the Royals. The Midwest is more his speed and he'd be making a trimuphant return to the American League to try and raise a once proud franchise back from the dead.

Secession on the Table

Two of America's major secessionist groups lead a conference to discuss secession from the United States.

Vermont, one of the nation's most liberal states, has become a hotbed for liberal secessionists, a fringe movement that gained new traction because of the Iraq war, rising oil prices and the formation of several pro-secession groups.

My question for the leftist Vermont secessionists is whether they'll tone down their secessionary rhetoric if a Democrat wins the presidency. Because, you know, a Democratic President will bring us home from Iraq.

*wink*

Ron Paul Tops $5 Mil

A huge third quarter fundraising haul for Paul. The $5 million-plus he raised is five times the amount that the MSM's anointed top second tier candidate Mike Huckabee raised. On this ABC news video Paul talks about his impressive 3rd quarter figures and is the most relaxed I've seen him since he started campaigning.

Temporary Changing of the Guard

Ron Paul's been the pictoral standard bearer for Notes of Interest since he replaced Vida Blue on July 22nd. In KC just days before, Rush had said, "Vida's gotta go!" and I took his advice and put up Paul's snazzy pic.

Now enter Vlad the Impaler for as long as the Angels stay alive in October. Hey, a guy with Willie Mays, Duke Snider and Frank Robinson as his top three age-thirty comparables can't be all bad.

Experience Will Matter

The Angels begin their march to World Series glory tomorrow evening against the Indians. Baseball has not had a repeat World Series champion since the Yankees won in '98, '99 and '00. Since then there have been six different champs. The 2002 Angels were one of those six teams and if they take the crown this October they'll have to be in discussion for who the team of the aughts is.

So, who on today's club played on the '02 championship team and how was their performance?

• Chone Figgins played in 12 games that year and served twice as a pinch-runner in the Series
• Garrett Anderson enjoyed one of the two best seasons of his career in '02 placing 4th in the MVP voting
• John Lackey rode a half-season rookie year into a 2-0 post-season record including the World Series game seven win over the Giants
• Francisco Rodriguez pitched in his first five major league games in September of '02 and then delivered an impressive post-season run for a twenty year old with twenty-eight strikeouts in 18.2 innings across eleven games
• Scot Shields produced a 197 ERA+ during the '02 campaign but saw very limited action during the post-season

All five of the above have played significant roles during the 2007 campaign. In the upcoming series this experience should make a positive difference for the Angels as they face a first-time playoff team in the Indians.

The Stats Are In

Time to tool around Baseball-Reference.com and find some interesting year-end numbers. As an ode to my Kansas City homies let's start with the Royal offense. Twenty-two Royal position players took a turn at-bat during the '07 season. Only two of them produced an OPS+ above the league average. Reggie Sanders led the team with a 131 in twenty-four games and Billy Butler put up a 102 in 365 plate appearances.

Every other Royal batter produced an OPS under 100. Here's the tail of the tape for the starting lineup.

C John Buck 87
1b Ross Gload 92
2b Mark Grudzielanek 97
3b Alex Gordon 84
ss Tony Pena 63
lf Emil Brown 66
cf David DeJesus 86
rf Make Teahan 95
dh Billy Butler 102

The Royal offense combined had an OPS+ of 82. That's the lowest team total since Detroit's 81 OPS+ in their 119 loss season in 2003.

Despite these horrid numbers the Royals boast two very good (possibly great) projectable hitters in Gordon and Butler, an additional solid one in Teahan and an average one in DeJesus. If they can produce at the level they're projected to reach and the rest of the offense can stop being horrendous and just plain old below average the Royals could make a big offensive move into the top half of American League teams in 2008.

The Push To Iowa

Cool idea here at PledgeBank.com. If a million people pledge a $100 to Ron Paul's campaign then Ron pulls in a cool 100 mil. The nice catch is that if the pledge doesn't reach a million then you don't have to feel obligated to donate.

So far 793 people have signed up. There's a nice stat page to track the progress of the campaign in the coming months. Do yourself a favor and favorite this site! Then make a pledge!!

The Capitulators

The Senate approved a new $150 billion Iraq/Afghanistan War funding package by the vote of 92-3. That means that some Democrats came along for the patriotic ride. Terrified of a backlash by the 30% of Americans who still support the wars, the Democrats who oppose the wars but just voted to continue funding them are, quite simply, capitulators of the worst kind.

The tired argument that if the troops aren't funded then they will starve on the battlefield is non-sensical. Cutting off funding for the troops would cause field commanders in-theatre to immediately re-deploy their forces out of harms way. They'd use the remainder of the funds in the pipeline to fold up shop and retreat to safer territory in Kuwait or Saudi Arabi and await their return home to the United States.

Using the logic that we can't cut funding off to the troops essentially takes all power out of the hands of the Congress and provides the Imperial President the power to decide on all matters relating to war. That is a dictatorship, no?

Umpire Assignments

Tonight's choice of umpires for the playoff entry tie-breaker that was played between the Rockies and Padres was a refreshing and interesting one. Tonight's six man crew consisted of Tim McClelland behind the plate, Ed Montague, Tim Tschida and Chuck Meriweather around the infield and Fieldin Culbreth and Jim Wolf on the foul lines.

It was refreshing because all six are serious about there performance on the field, aren't attention-getters and are typically measured in their on the field responses to challenges to their authority.

It's interesting because I believe those Major League Baseball officials who decide on who umpires which games made a calculated decision to field a) a skilled and competent crew and b) a crew where the personalities are such that if some player/manager confrontations occurred these six would be the least likely umpires to go off the handle and create an unnecessary scene.

Fielding Culbreth

The blatant baiting of Padre outfielder Milton Bradley by umpire Mike Winters in the last week of the season as well as a number of other incidents over the past few months has highlighted the ridiculously short fuses of some umpires. I believe this has caught Major League Baseball's attention and they have begun to take real steps in addressing the actions of these umpires.

The first step in the process of getting the umps in line was to suspend Winters for the remaining five or so games of the season after he uttered something akin to, "You're a f****** piece of s***" to Bradley under his breath in an attempt to provoke the notoriously short-tempered player. In the ensuing argument Bradley was wrestled to the ground by his manager and during the fall tore his ACL. He'll be on the disabled list well into next year. In regards to the Winters suspension I can't remember the last time an ump was publicly suspended.

The second step was the assignment of these six umpires to tonight's game. While the Winters suspension was more for public consumption tonight's game assignment was probably meant more for the umpiring fraternity's consumption. In other words, if you want to make tens of thousands of extra dollars each October umpiring the playoffs and World Series you'd better not be a jack-ass when dealing with players, coaches and managers.

In tonight's crew Major League Baseball got it right.