A follow-up on OffermanGate. The Atlantic League, perhaps having reviewed the incident more closely than the national media has, decided to maintain the suspension of Jose Offerman until after the criminal charges against him are resolved. No life ban, not even a season-long suspension. A good article placing the incident in context can be found here.

Electoral College Reform: I think Kaus is right that the proposed initiative to divvy up California's electoral votes is much ado about nothing, but I would like to address the unstated assumption that this sort of thing would be fair and appropriate if done nationwide, as opposed to targeting specific states. The biggest problem with the Electoral College is the imbalance in favor of low-population states, like the Dakotas or Wyoming, which enable the voters in those states to have a disproportionate say in the outcome of the election. The other big problem, which partially counterbalances the first, is that a candidate wins all of the electoral votes in a state, no matter how close his margin of victory.

The proposed "reform" on the June ballot cures the second problem, but exacerbates the first. Kaus correctly points out that gerrymandering has made most House seats non-competitive; in California, the lines were drawn pursuant to a gentlemen's agreement in 2001 to protect both parties' incumbents, freezing into place a significant partisan advantage for the Democrats incurred from the previous redistricting, which was done by a panel of judges. At the time, the Democrats thought they were preserving their party's advantage into the future, not believing that it could be conceivable that they would be able to expand their advantage.

As it turns out, the post-Prop. 187 shift toward the Democrats in California was only just beginning in 2000. Only the incumbent-friendly lines drawn in 2001 have kept the Republican Party from disappearing into marginalization in the Golden State. Thus, the lines in California favor the GOP more than their actual strength would merit, and in a Presidential election, it would take a landslide of historic proportions to give the Democrats more than a fifteen-seat edge in the Electoral College under the proposed reform.

But in a state like Florida or Ohio, where the lines were rejiggered to maximize the dominance of one party, even a close election could result in a lopsided electoral count. It is almost certain that the GOP would win a majority of electors in a close election in Florida, even if Hillary or Barack were to win the state, simply because of how the House districts were drawn last time to favor that party.* It is certainly conceivable that a similar scenario could happen in Ohio, a state where a number of troubled incumbent House members were able to win reelection in 2006 in spite of the toxic political situation for Republicans in that state.

In any event, reducing the influence of the large states by dividing up their electoral votes only increases the power of smaller, more homogenous states. That doesn't seem like much of a reform to me.

*The GOP has a 16-9 edge in the state delegation, in spite of it being the state that perhaps best exemplifies the even divisions in the country following the 2000 election.

Now here's a good way for hitters to reclaim the inside part of the plate. My all-time favorite ballplayer, Jose Offerman, went after a battery with a baseball bat after being hit by a pitch in a minor league baseball game last night. For this act of self-defense, he spent the night in jail. Both pitcher and catcher were recuperating.

I know there's a "code" that tolerates "throwing inside" to a batter, but I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often. Having a 100-mph pitch deliberately thrown at your skull may seem to the outsider as a pitcher's prerogative, but to someone in the heat of battle, that's assault and battery. At least one player, Ray Chapman in 1920, has died because he didn't get out of the way fast enough from a pitch aimed at his head, and two other famous players, Mickey Cochrane and Tony Conigliaro, sustained injuries that led inexorably to their deaths years later. Charging the mound with nothing but your fists seems a disproportionately weak response.

But a baseball bat expands the arms race exponentially. Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal once pounded in the skull of LA Dodger John Roseboro because he thought the catcher had thrown a return pitch to the mound a little too close to his ear. He got off rather easy, with a short suspension and a fine, but the public outcry was so great that a player who was arguably the best pitcher of the 1960's was kept out of Cooperstown for a few years because of the incident. Offerman can expect no such mercy from the predominantly white media or from organized baseball. Expect the home run he hit in his previous at bat to be his last.

UPDATE (8/17): Here's a real time slide show video of the attack. It's not even close to the Marichal attack; Offerman appears to take one aborted swing, connecting with both catcher (who's rushing him from behind) and pitcher, but it looks from the video that he went out hoping to scare the pitcher, and the fact that he only used one hand testifies to his lack of deadly intention. Still, if you point a loaded pistol at someone, you pay the consequences if it goes off.

Flap your wings, Junior Orwells: Ron Rosenbaum asks whether this Stanley Fish op-ed, on the travails of going to Starbucks vis a vis a traditional coffee shop, is the "worst op-ed ever written?" Maybe, but I would guess that honor should be reserved for one of those cheerleading liberal hawk op-eds, circa 2002-3 (like this one), that compared Saddam, Osama, or fill-in-the-blank Islamist up-to-no-gooder with Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany or whatever, which directly led to the ongoing Iraq disaster. Millions of people aren't going to die because Prof. Fish has an aversion to cafe au lait.

Mickey Kaus points to this ugly attack on Mike Huckabee; it's a good indication of why he can never be the Republican nominee. He will never appeal strongly enough to the racist base of the party.

It's safe to say the investigation of L.A.'s Mayor has gone stone cold, if this is any indication. [link via Luke Ford]

Bush's Brain Quits: I'm most unimpressed with the legacy of Karl Rove. His brilliant decision in 2000 to have Bush campaign in New Jersey and California, and not campaign on weekends, at the tail end of that election was meant to show that his boy was confident and coasting, and it was based on polling that showed Bush with a double-digit lead. Bush lost, and would have been a forgotten footnote were it not for the machinations of the Supreme Court. In the wake of 9/11 and a quick "victory" in Iraq, it shouldn't have been difficult to reelect his client, especially with a liberal Massachusetts Democrat as his opponent, but Bush almost lost that race as well. Considering that since 1952, electing Republicans as President has been the default choice of the electorate, it's hard to be impressed with his legacy.

Moreover, the Republican Party under his watch is now the weakest it has been since Watergate. The party is hemorhaging seats in Congress and at the state level, largely because of Rove's deliberate tactic of playing to the base, which has become increasingly extreme (and irrelevant). A major, potentially enormous political realignment has begun that will favor Democrats for perhaps a generation, much of it the result of the shortsighted, dunderheaded tactics of the man the President nicknamed "Turdblossom." As long as Americans study politics, they will note the hubris shown by the man who predicted a Republican victory in the 2006 election with the line "I'm looking at 68 polls a week for candidates for the US House and US Senate, and Governor and you may be looking at 4-5 public polls a week that talk attitudes nationally...You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I'm entitled to THE math." Right now, "THE math" shows Republican minorities in both houses of Congress, and no Republican presidential candidate beating Hillary Clinton.

And of course, his role in outing Valerie Plame made his very existence within the Bush White House toxic. The Plame Affair generated enormous heat within the blogosphere, with lefty bloggers suddenly appreciating the sanctity of preserving CIA secrecy, and righties obsessed with irrelevant tangents about Amb. Wilson's bona fides. But to the public, the real scandal was the cold-blooded manner with which the Bush Administration attempted to deal with a critic, potentially putting a covert agent's life (as well as the lives of the assets she dealt with) at risk. Rove's involvement in the outing of Ms. Wilson effectively proved that the action had met with the approval of the President, and further plunged his client's approval ratings into the Nixonian toilet.

Perhaps Josh Marshall has it right when he speculates, "[W]ith the recent news of cutbacks on funding of human intelligence in the intel budget, there's the possibility that there were no more CIA agents whose cover could be blown and he decided to move on to greener pastures."

UPDATE: Kevin Drum agrees, and passes along a devastating anecdote about the Bush-Rove team at work.

For the first time in nearly two years, I ventured into a cinema. The movie that lured me out of my cockoon was Michael Moore's latest attack on the American Way of Life, SiCKO. It is, without a doubt, his best work to date, and having found that Moore's docs don't work as well on the small screen as they do in front of a live audience, I'm glad I spent the twelve bucks to see the matinee showing in Pasadena. When his critics are left to debating whether the U.S. has a better health care system than Cuba, or that our relatively high infant mortality rate or low life expectancy aren't necessarily the most important factors, you can tell he has the best of the argument.

But I have a personal reason for backing Moore on this one. I just saw my late grandmother's hospital bill for a five-day stay after she fell in May. The extent of her treatment was to stitch up her face, and to give her liquids for dehydration. Neither the doctors nor the staff diagnosed that she had suffered a stroke; that was only determined after they sent her home, and we had to take her to a real hospital, Providence-St. Joseph's.

For the ludicrously small amount of treatment and attention she received, she was billed $45,000.

Nice Tie: Markos Moulitsas gets some props from an unlikely source in the blogosphere....

Random Thoughts concerning sexism in the lefty blogosphere:

1. By and large, political bloggers generate 90% of the publicity, but get only 10% of the traffic, in the blogosphere.

2. There is no female blogger, or female-centered blog, on the left that has anywhere near the traffic or the influence of Michelle Malkin, who has two sites in the Technorati 100. Arianna Huffington's blog may be bigger, but the fact that she lends her name to a site does not change the male-dominated world of the lefty blogosphere.

3. Much of the success of the lefty blogosphere in the last election cycle stems from the fact that it was an excellent tool for fundraising, organizing, and publicizing. When the entire government is run by the other side, and the Fourth Estate seems little more than a mouthpiece for the organs of power, an angry, fighting populism is the most effective way to rally the opposition. Bloggers who have the testosterone flowing are more likely going to get traffic and influence debate than bloggers who are more studious and calm in their approach.

4. That sort of attitude occurs more naturally in men than it does in women. Female anger manifests itself in a different way than male anger does; when female bloggers attempt to ape the style of an Atrios or a Kos, they tend to badly misfire, as the John Edwards campaign learned to its regret a few months back. To quote Garance Franke-Ruta, "[I]f you're an angry man you're righteous. If you're an angry woman, you're crazy or a bitch." When the Democrats take over after the 2008 election, that sort of testosterone-laden anger won't be as pivotal, and female bloggers on the left will gain more influence and relevance.

5. While there are a few female bloggers who are ensconced among the Queen Beez of the lefty blogosphere, their influence and importance tend to be a fraction of their patrons at Daily Kos, MyDD or TPM (which, contrary to what Jane Hamsher says, is a blog, and not a direct rival of CNN). Little Green Firedogs, Feministing and Pandagon are popular sites, but tend to be more in the nature of novelty acts than blogs which set the agenda (Ned Lamont got his ass kicked, remember, and Kobe Bryant and the Duke Lacrosse players were ultimately freed).

6. Digby has the best political blog, right or left, in the blogosphere. TalkLeft is the best issue-oriented blog. Period. Neither site is run by a man. There are plenty of good blogs out there that are written by women, even good political blogs. But it's pointless to pretend that the lefty blogosphere isn't afflicted by the same problems as the rest of society, no more than major league baseball or the performing arts, to name two predominantly white, male institutions, are.

What we all need when we're down:

Like the Laffer Curve and the West Coast Offense, it was originated on a cocktail napkin !!

Headline of the Day: Of interest to polished pols and those who work the pole....

This isn't exactly the Birth of Metal. Something was lost between Idea and Execution:

Tillman's Legacy: I haven't bothered to weigh in on the ongoing feud between certain right wing bloggers and the New Republic, since it was hard to know who to root for, but Josh Marshall hits it right on the head:

Beauchamp makes his charges. The US Army allegedly investigates and finds the highly embarrassing charges to be false. But no information will be released about which of his charges were false, how they were false or how they were determined to be false.

They then punish Beauchamp by preventing him from having any communication with the civilian world. And if that's not enough, an unnamed military source tells the Standard that Beauchamp has undergone a successful self-criticism session and has recanted everything. But an Army spokesman tells TNR that he's not aware of any confession or recantation.

We can at least be thankful that the matter is being handled with such transparency.

Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales. He wouldn't be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic. But it's hard not to have some suspicion that the Army has put itself in charge of investigating charges which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the Army; that it has provided itself a full exoneration through an investigation, the details of which it will not divulge; and it has chosen to use as its exclusive conduit for disseminating information about the case, The Weekly Standard, a publication which can at best be described as a charged partisan in the public controversy about the case.

This hardly inspires much confidence.

Like the Tillman Affair, we made need a Congressional investigation to figure out who's telling the truth. Considering that the Weekly Standard's principal source has been a former gay prostitute, a fact which they failed to disclose, I'm betting on TNR.

To no one's surprise, the TV station that employs the "reporter" who's been sleeping with the Mayor has seen its ratings skyrocket. When you consider that Srta. Salinas had already been taken off the air, it cannot be said that Telemundo's credibility has been harmed among the only group that matters: the viewers. [link via HuffPost]

This is the sort of legal cause people that inspires people like myself to go to law school....

Prof. Kleiman examines the current fallout from the collapse of the real estate market, and states a rather obvious point, which is that Congress should revisit the 2005 BARF legislation to make it easier for delinquent homeowners to obtain bankruptcy relief. The first place to start would be to modify or annul 11 U.S.C. §1328(f), which forbids filers from obtaining a Chapter 13 discharge if they had received a Chapter 7 discharge in the previous four years (a so-called "Chapter 20"), or another Chapter 13 discharge within the previous two years. Or at least that's what it appears to say; the whole measure seems to have been drafted by the Regent U. Law School after a weekend kegger, and the courts have pretty much thrown their hands into the air trying to figure it out.

Chapter 13s are the preferred alternative for debtors who wish to keep their homes, while paying off the arrearage every month over a 3-5 year period. The standard bankruptcy, under Chapter 7, is geared toward protecting those who are current on secured loans (like houses and cars) but delinquent on unsecured debts (ie., credit cards). Section 1328(f) was designed to thwart those who had defaulted on everything except their mortgage from obtaining bankruptcy relief; a family with high medical debts or huge arrearages on their credit cards could no longer give priority to keeping their home over their unsecured debts, then filing again if their financial difficulties continued to the point that they fell behind on their home. With foreclosures spinning out of control, Congress will have to do something to save the mortgage industry, and the draconian features of the BARF legislation aren't helping.

Three reasons why the attempt by GOP attorneys to redistribute California's electoral votes from a winner-take-all system to one based on the capture of Congressional districts is overblown:

1. The 2008 Presidential election will not, in all likelihood, be that close. The last ten Democratic wins (going back to Wilson) did not require all of California's votes to reach 270; in fact, two of the winners (JFK and Carter) didn't even win California. Close national elections tend to be the exception, 2000 and 2004 aside, rather than the rule, and the massive unpopularity of the President and the Republican brand indicate that the country will see a Democratic landslide next year. As in 1992 and 1996, expect to see the networks call the election for Hillary or Barack before the polls close in California.

2. Passage of the initiative in California in June, 2008 will probably lead to a flood of other initiatives in Republican-leaning states to impose the same law before the November elections. Losses incurred in the Golden State can easily be made up by passing the same law in Texas or Florida. If the Democrats continue to control the nation's state legislatures after 2010, expect to see similar laws get enacted everywhere, along with some intricately gerrymandered districts drawn with an eye to 2012.

3. The Democrats will have to spend money to defeat such an initiative, if it manages to reach the ballot. That's good, especially for Democrats. Any initiative that faces any sort of progressive opposition is usually doomed to fail, and anything that sparks partisan interest by the Democratic Party will lead to more voters being registered and more activity to spur political interest. A higher turnout will mean more voters in November, and possibly a pick-up of several Congressional seats.

Making It: This is what happens when one loses the Lean and Hungry Look. A scene from YearlyKos:

Not that anyone didn't know this already on some level, but it really was striking to get the visual of yesterday's gate crashers quite literally mingling with the dread establishment at a cocktail party. The question that nobody seems to know the answer to, though, is whether the revolution ended because the revolutionaries won, or because they sold out? The boring, but probably boring-because-accurate, answer is that it's a little of both.

Won what, exactly?

Now is the winter of our discontent, baby: