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I’m pretty far behind the pop culture news curve here, but I was saddened to see Jerry Orbach leaving “Law & Order”. He is reportedly leaving to participate in yet another spin-off and will be replaced by Dennis Farina (who is a good actor, but one that, for whatever reason, I’ve never particularly liked).

Anyway, this MSNBC article had a good summary of Orbach’s contributions to the original show, including some of Detective Briscoe’s best one-liners.

I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the 40th president's baseball connections:

*Straight out of college in 1932, Reagan got a job with radio station WOC in Des Moines, Iowa; within a year, following the station's merger with WHO, Reagan was installed as the station's broadcaster for Chicago Cubs games, a job he would hold for five seasons, until he landed his first Hollywood job in 1937. You have to recall that, in those days, the technology didn't exist to broadcast games live from the ballpark to a coast-to-coast or even a regional audience. So, Reagan wasn't the Cubs broadcaster - just the broadcaster for Des Moines and the surrounding area reached by WHO. But to people who lived there, he was the voice of the Cubs for those years.

What that meant was, Reagan would sit in front of a ticker reeling off the play-by-play and re-creating the game as it was happening. Imagine doing this by watching the play-by-play on the internet and you get the idea. I recall Bob Costas doing a demonstration on the pregame show for the NBC Game of the Week back in the 80s showing what this process was like; among other things, the broadcaster would click two sticks together to make a bat-hitting-ball sound, and play a tape of canned crowd noise. Once, the tape jammed and Reagan just improvised the batter fouling off pitch after pitch until they fixed the feed.

Reagan often said that his biggest baseball thrill was the last month of the 1935 pennant race. It's not hard to see why. Reagan was a 24-year-old broadcaster that season, and the Cubs were chasing the defending World Champion Cardinals of "Gashouse Gang" fame. On the morning of September 3, 1935, the Cubs stood in third place, 2.5 games behind the Cardinals (but 5 back in the loss column). The Cards would go on to have a fine stretch run, going 17-11. But what the Cubs did the rest of the way was remarkable, winning 21 straight, including three straight (culminating with a doubleheader sweep that kicked off by beating 28-game-winner Dizzy Dean) from the Cards to clinch the pennant before dropping the final two games to St. Louis.

*Reagan was born in 1911. Of course, this means that even without the Alzheimer's, at 93 he was too young to remember a Cubs world championship (they lost to the Tigers in the 1935 Series, including three 1-run games). What baseball players were born in 1911? You could look it up; the better-known names on the list:

Hank Greenberg
Joe "Ducky Wucky" Medwick
Frank McCormick
Walter Alston
Denny Galehouse
Van Lingle Mungo

What do these guys have in common? Well, among other things, other than Galehouse (who died in 1998), all of them were dead by the time Reagan left the White House in 1989.

*Last December, I panned Reagan's performance in the Grover Cleveland Alexander biopic The Winning Team:

You may remember that shortly after Alexander died, Hollywood rushed out a movie of his life called "The Winning Team," starring Reagan as Alexander and Doris Day as his wife. It was just awful. The movie had a few dramatic high points, but they made little enough attempt to capture the real Alexander. And Reagan – put aside your politics for a minute and just think acting – gave what had to be the worst performance of his acting career: adept at playing the genial Everyman and the B-movie hero, Reagan was completely out of his league trying to portray a morose, moody alcoholic. Only Reagan’s political career kept the movie from disappearing into complete obscurity, but the butchering of Alexander’s life story left him less well known today than Crash Davis and Moonlight Graham.

An interesting analysis of the situation in Fallujah, with a conclusion that's not so reassuring, from a Marine on the front lines. (via Andrew Sullivan)

It's amazing how many guys there are on the front lines who are capable of drawing a compelling narrative of what's going on and are willing to put in the time to do so. We've come a long way from Vietnam and Walter Cronkite having absolute control over what the public got to hear (or, for that matter, World War II and the Pentagon having absolute control). And, of course, the less a few anti-war voices in the media can control the storyline, the better.

Twins Fan Dan at All-Baseball.com asks, reviewing the current crop of first basemen, "Has the position ever been this deficient in greatness?" The commenters note that we're nearing the end of a golden era, so the premise is a bit faulty. But there have certainly been darker times.

The 1900-1919 period was pretty slim for first basemen. Hall of Famers for that period are mostly guys ending their careers (Jake Beckley), starting out (Sisler), or touching first on the way out the door after they were already washed up (Wagner, Lajoie). My initial assumption was that the best first baseman of the period was probably Frank Chance (who had a short career), and if not him some nondescript type like Fred Merkle or Stuffy McInnis, or a crook like Hal Chase.

The Win Shares system rates the top first basemen for the 1900-09 decade as Chance (209 WS, 17th among all players for the decade); Harry Davis (189 WS, 23d) and Fred Tenney (165, 43d). For 1910-19, tops are Ed Konetchy (204 WS, 12th among all players for the decade); Jake Daubert (182 WS, 21st); and Merkle (176 WS, 28th). Konetchy, a guy I've barely heard of, seems to top out the group with 287 Win Shares between 1907 and 1921.

By contrast, my "Established Win Shares" list of the top players in baseball entering this season lists four first basemen in the top 10 (Giambi, Thome, Helton and Delgado; five if you count Pujols). And there are a couple of active first basemen, still productive players, who are well past Ed Konetchy in terms of career totals: Jeff Bagwell, Rafael Palmeiro, and Frank Thomas all cleared 300 WS years ago. (Even John Olerud's career stacks up fairly well with the Konetchys and Frank Chances).

So no, we are not at a historic low ebb for first basemen. Far from it.

Phil Carter notes some preliminary progress in a good and long overdue idea: leaving behind the last vestiges of America's Cold War-oriented military bases in Germany and rearranging our forces to fit their current and likely future missions.

I've been a bit short on Reagan hagiography compared to some other people around the blogosphere, but then I don't have the luxury of time, so I generally write only a fraction of what's on my mind. I should note that, while there's a good deal of bickering about Reagan's legacy from the usual sources of bickery, I have to confess that there are two presidents I'm not really able to discuss entirely rationally: Carter and Reagan. The reason is obvious: I was 5 years old when Carter was inaugurated and 18 when Reagan left office, and my perceptions of both men were heavily filtered through the prism of youth. It's one thing to go back and revisit your youthful convictions in light of later experience, as I've done and as most people do (I have changed my mind over the years on a few issues). It's another to revisit the incidents of your youth themeselves. I've had a similar experience in trying to come to grips with the idea that maybe Jim Rice never really was a superstar . . . the mind doesn't grasp it.

Not that I have a lot of doubts, mind you, but I'm really in no mood to argue the details, that's all. Suffice it to say that, after the drear of the Seventies, I found Reagan to be a deeply inspiring figure, one who left a permanent mark on my notions of leadership and the goals of the American enterprise.

Still, it wasn't just my childhood; Carter really was, as Dave Barry put it, a colossal weenie. Just re-read the famous "crisis of confidence" speech, and contrast it with the tone Reagan set throughout his presidency. (Link via the MinuteMan).

Bonus observation: I hadn't realized how much of the Clinton "feel your pain" and "listening tour" stuff came from Carter.

Smash has some fine first-hand reporting on what can only be described as an anti-America protest. More picking on far-out wackos who don't deserve the attention? Maybe. Until Smash points out that the leader and at least one of her friends who came out to encourage "a peoples’ movement" to follow the Vietnam model of support for a "determined national liberation struggle" by the Iraqi 'insurgents' and "[a] historic revolt within the US armed forces" are public school teachers, and the leader teaches history to high school kids, apparently influenced by her radical socialist politics.

Another reminder why I send my kids to Catholic school. Of course, not everyone can afford that option, so their kids have to swallow this sort of propaganda, paid for with our tax dollars. The education of a child with no other options, of course, is a small price to pay for a teacher's freedom of speech.

This is probably just an oversight, but it seems an odd one - today's Washington Post's lead article on Reagan lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda asserts:

Reagan will join a list of those who have lain in state beneath the Rotunda that includes Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, William H. Taft, Warren G. Harding, William McKinley Jr., James A. Garfield, Herbert Hoover and Lincoln.

That's seven other presidents, all Republicans. Have Democratic presidents not been given this honor, or is the Post just ignoring them?

National Review gives Ralph Nader's organization good marks for supporting the use of DDT in countries where malaria is still a tremendous killer of humans, despite lingering debates over DDT's environmental impact.

Interesting chart here showing the distribution of American soldiers killed in Iraq by proportion of state population. Unsurprisingly, given the formula, small states dominated the top of the list, mostly "red" states in the mountain/plains area (the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska) but also including several New England states. The more urban states - NY, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts - tended towards the bottom half.

Ombudsgod has some background on the Washington Post's Dana Milbank's history of playing it fast and loose.

Punch the Bag has a first-hand remembrance of Reagan's presence.

I can't presume here to sum up Ronald Reagan's legacy; I'd suggest you head on over to the National Review, which is heading into saturation-coverage mode, and properly so. I'll offer a few disjointed thoughts; for tonight, two snippets:

*Reagan, from his speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day:

The men of Normandy had . . . the deep knowledge - and pray God we have not lost it - that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

*I think I've mentioned this before . . . my career in radio was extremely short, a few months of doing news updates on campus radio in my freshman year of college, in the fall of 1989. But the one highlight: I got to go on the air and announce that the Berlin Wall had come down. It hardly mattered if nobody was listening. After all those years and all those people saying it was just another system, the good guys won, the oppressed got freedom - and Reagan was vindicated. I can only hope we will live to see such victory again.

It seems almost beside the point at this stage to talk about domestic politics - the political terrain is 100% Iraq at the moment - but if the economy winds up becoming an issue in the election, the recent job growth reports may send the Democrats looking to take this helpful advice from the Politburo.

Will Carroll (subscription only) notes the severity of the knee surgery Joe Mauer had and concludes, "I would be stunned if Mauer can stay at catcher for the next six years." As usual, I suggest you cough up the money to subscribe and read the whole thing - Carroll's injury analyses are worth the price of BP Premium by themselves.

(On the other hand, I was skimming his book "Saving the Pitcher" in Barnes & Noble last week, and it looks way too medical-detailed for me).

Sad news: CNN reports that President Reagan is dying. Given how much Alzheimer's has taken from him already, it's probably for the best for the 93-year-old Reagan and his family if the end comes soon.

To be cold-bloodedly political for a second, how would Reagan's death in the next month or two affect this year's presidential race? Not much, of course - most things that are supposed to affect the presidential race turn out to be overrated - but a wave of Reagan nostalgia would undoubtedly be a bit of help to Bush, reminding people of the coommon principles both have stood for and the common criticisms both faced. This is in marked contrast to the coming wave of Clinton nostalgia that will arrive with Bill's book - the further away one gets from the Clinton years, the less of lasting importance (other than his trade deals, for which his successors are none to quick to claim credit) can really be traced to him, and the things people remember fondly about Clinton (his charm, empathy and optimism) are palpably lacking in the Democrats' current nominee.

Jack Shafer fisks an email disclaimer. It's not really a fair fight.

I see his point - disclaimers on email messages are hardly ironclad legal protection - but any careful lawyer will tell you that you're better off trying. In some contexts, such as protection of the attorney-client privilege, courts will look at what steps you took to keep things confidential - and having a disclaimer, while hardly determinative, can't hurt. Granted, it's hard to argue that something a computer stamps on every outgoing message is an indicia of the privileged nature of the contents, but it's at least a sign that you are notifying an inadvertent recipient that this could be sensitive stuff they should give back.

I agree completely with David Pinto that the teams that didn't bid on Vladimir Guerrero - or, in the Mets' case, teams that bid halfheartedly - are looking pretty dumb right now, as Guerrero is singlehandedly keeping an injury-riddled Angels team in the race. Baseball Prospectus rates him fourth in the major leagues in VORP (Value over Replacement Player), behind only Bonds, Sean Casey, and, er, Melvin Mora, and Hardball Times has him first in the AL with 14 Win Shares (behind only Bonds, Casey and Scott Rolen in the NL and tied with Mike Lowell). Guerrero, need we be reminded, is 28, the same age as Karim Garcia and four years younger than Shane Spencer. Who are not leading the league in anything.

RatherBiased.com notes David Brock, discussing his new project (left-wing media commentary site MediaMatters.org), undercutting his entire thesis by talking about how mainstream media figures love MediaMatters:

"In the past few weeks -- as I have been on some of these TV shows, either talking about my book or about MediaMatters.org -- I have been -- off air -- been told by network talent: 'Thank God you are doing this because we can't do it -- because [conservative minister] James Dobson can send an e-mail and turn NBC upside down'"

* * *

"I think they are afraid," Brock said. "For a long time, the mainstream media has not stood up. They've essentially allowed Fox to happen. They do not cover Limbaugh -- he is a serious political figure in this country -- they don't write about what he says."

Reports of Barry Zito's demise seem premature; with another spectacular outing last night, Zito's line since May 1 is a 3.21 ERA, 7.50 H/9 IP, 0.64 HR, 3.21 BB, and 7.07 K. In his last four starts, Zito has allowed just 1 home run and 19 hits in 29 innings of work.

Barry Bonds is closing in on another home run milestone: he's four homers from 500 as a Giant. Which is pretty impressive, seeing as he was already a two-time MVP when he got to San Francisco.

Rafael Palmeiro is also still plugging along, batting .280/.446/.403. A closer look at the numbers, though, reveals some possible danger signs. Palmeiro's walk rate has spiked sharply upward this season - he's on pace for 126 walks compared to 84 last year and a career high of 104 - while his power has dropped off very sharply. I recall a Bill James thesis that an old player who starts walking a lot more may be compensating for slower bat speed, and will usually be found out soon enough by the pitchers. Then again, it wasn't a systematic study, and Palmeiro's strikeouts are at their lowest rate since 1989, while players showing this pattern typically start striking out a lot more as well. We shall see.

I made it out to Shea last night for what turned out to be a remarkably fast-moving game, nosing the Mets above .500 with a victory over the defending champs. Jae Seo was in fine form, somehow surviving a brutal defensive infield with Piazza at first, Wigginton and second and Zeile at third. AJ Burnett was unimpressive in his return from surgery, getting cuffed around (with the help of Miguel Cabrera, who botched a key Ty Wigginton triple in the second inning, letting it roll past him to the wall).

Cliff Floyd attempted two stolen bases, which tells me two things: his legs are healthy again after last weekend's collision with Mike Cameron, and the Mets have very little respect for the Burnett/Mike Redmond battery.

I have to say, the Mets would really be in some deep trouble if they hadn't signed Kaz Matsui - not that he's been great, but with Jose Reyes shut down from rehabbing his hamstrings due to a bad back, it's a good thing the Mets weren't more reliant on Reyes. The team ought to just plug in Danny Garcia at second and see where it goes from there.

As numerous studies have told us, clutch hitting is a result, not a skill. But it sure is nice to get those results, as Todd Zeile followed Tuesday's game-winning hit in the 10th inning with a 2-run 10th inning homer that put last night's game out of reach. Of course, the Wagner-less Philadelphia bullpen had a bit to do with that, as Tim Worrell ran out of gas in his second inning of work Tuesday and Roberto Hernandez was serving up meatballs last night. Still, any time you can win consecutive extra inning games on the road against the strongest team in the division, you take what you can get.

It's a long season yet, and I'm still no believer in Zeile, but it's starting to look like a respectable ending to his 16-year major league odyssey since his arrival as a catcher with Whitey Herzog's Cardinals.

Drezner and Michele discuss the relative paucity of female bloggers among the tippity-top of the A-List of bloggers who influence the media. Michele asks:

Lots of stuff going on today about women in the blogosphere. Are females underrepresented? Has Wonkette become the media's official spokesperson for the female portion of the blogosphere? Are we destined to just be cute and adorable playthings? Or is the whole idea of sexism in blogs just a manufactured tale thought up by people who just aren't making the time to find blogs that aren't already on their small links list?

Well, looking over my own blogroll - which, given the concentration of baseball blogs, is bound to be male-dominated - I see five female-authored blogs (Michele, Bookworm, Erin O'Connor, Meryl Yourish, and Jane Galt), plus NRO's Corner, which is male-dominated but moderated by Kathryn Jean Lopez, one of the most active contributors to the group, and The Command Post, at which Michele is one of the ringleaders. Other female bloggers I've linked to - only sporadically - would include Dana at Note-It Posts, law blogger Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage, Baldilocks, Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, and, of course, Wonkette. Not nothing, but clearly a minority.

Here's the thing: at the dawn of blogilization (late 01-early 02), the leading blogs were overwhelmingly white, male, bespectacled, between 30 and 50, pro-war, centrist/libertarian on domestic issues, and dominated by academics and professional writers, especially those with ties to the New Republic (Reynolds, Sullivan, Lileks, Kaus, Volokh, Marshall, Goldberg, den Beste, Welch, Jarvis, C. Johnson . . . each of them hits several if not all of these points). The image stuck, and those guys ascended to a sort of firmament.

While people have to be pretty dim to ignore the likes of Michele, Jane Galt, and Yourish, Wonkette is indeed one of the few female bloggers who has the paid position, journalistic background, etc. to get instant credibility with the media - other female bloggers tend to be civilians, as it were, rather than journalists or academics (Merritt may be something of an exception, as a sometime TV pundit).

You see, in the blogosphere, when it comes to influencing the media, there are still two classes of bloggers: the credentialed in-crowd and the civilians. Bloggers who are professional journalists are in the in-crowd, however much they may (like Sullivan) maintain a contrarian pose that costs them with employers inside journalism. Bloggers who are academics get the entree as well; besides having jobs that permit them to blog at length during business hours, journalists respect academics. Look at how Drezner slid easily into a column at The New Republic. (If you're young enough, like Matt Yglesias, you can write your way into the in-crowd. If you're old enough to have a job and a mortgage, you're out of luck).

My conclusion here: Michele is among the best and brightest of the "civilian" bloggers. And we ought to be a happy bunch, since we've come a long way from the days when civilians had no hope of getting published. But except for Wonkette, few female bloggers are part of that in crowd. The fault isn't the blogs themselves; it's the who-you-know nature of journalism.

(It may also be that fewer women are interested in writing political blogs; Yglesias explains the gender gap as it pertains to men vs. women following politics).

Bob "The Prince of Darkness" Novak - a fine conservative of good standing in many domestic battles, but also a guy who's been a relentless critic of the Bush Administration's foreign policies, to the point where the National Review openly questioned his patriotism - has a gloom-and-doom look at Afghanistan. Sgt. Hook, who's actually serving in Afghanistan at the moment, takes umbrage.

(Link via Dean Esmay)

News reports are expressing surprise at Alfonso Soriano leading the AL All-Star balloting, but this should be no big surprise; he's probably got loyal backers both in NY and Texas, and there's precious little competition among AL 2B. (The Win Shares leaders at second right now are Juan Uribe, Ron Belliard and Mark Bellhorn, none of them household names).

The fun story: with Mike Piazza leading among NL catchers, the likely starting battery for the NL will be Piazza with either Randy Johnson . . . or Roger Clemens.

Nikita at The Command Post links to a NewsMax report of John Kerry giving the finger to Ted Sampley, a particularly rude and aggressive Vietnam War vet and activist, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in front of a bunch of schoolchildren. I'm not buying the story on the basis of a single-source report from NewsMax, particularly given that Sampley appears to be the source for the story. Something like this would be a real "Dead Zone" moment if it had happened, though.

We can't well judge where we stand on victory in Iraq - and how much more needs to be done - without stepping back and reviewing what our objectives there were in the first place. I'm not looking so much to answer all these questions in this one entry as to frame the issues:

1. Removing the Regime: As I've explained repeatedly before (see here, for example) and will no doubt return to again soon, the first and primary reason for the Iraq war was the nature of the regime itself - implacably hostile to the United States, planted at the center of the region that has been the epicenter for terrorism against the United States and its allies, immune to outside persuasion or pressure, safe from any internal revolt, and unpredictable in its actions. The regime's record on numerous issues supported the conclusion that it could neither be changed nor safely ignored. Recall just one example, one of the most critical facts about Saddam Hussein's regime: after September 11, when nearly all of the world's worst dictators - Castro, Khaddafi, even Arafat - were lining up to give lip service to denouncing the attacks, Saddam's state-run media was trumpeting them with front-page celebrations. The Ba'athist regime put up murals cheering the attacks. All of which underlined why the United States Congress had passed, and President Clinton signed into law, legislation making "regime change" in Iraq the formal policy of the United States. Removing the regime would also take care of its appalling human rights record.

The objective of removing the regime was, of course, accomplished by mid-April 2003, which is what anyone who was paying attention understood to be the "Mission Accomplished" announced by President Bush a few weeks later. The final nails in the coffin were the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein and the December 2003 capture of Saddam himself. While it's true that some ex-Ba'athists are starting to resurface in the new Iraq, notably in the Fallujah Brigade tasked with pacifying Fallujah (and now the head of the new provisional government), that's as unremarkable as the presence of ex-Communists (like Yeltsin and Putin) in post-Soviet Russia, given the lack of alternatives to being in the Ba'ath party while Saddam ruled the country. There's nothing to fear in terms of the regime rising again in anything resembling its prior form, especially given how much of that form was dictated by the personality of Saddam Hussein himself.

2. Removal of the WMD Threat - While the human element was Iraq's chief threat, the regime's persistent pursuit of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, nuclear - was, famously, the subject of international debate for years before the war dating back to Israel's bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. On the issue of WMD programs, we can feel pretty good about what we've accomplished - we know that the regime was continuing to, at a minimum, 'keep its powder dry' in terms of maintaining the know-how and capability to ramp up production of chemical and biological weapons, which are cheaper, quicker and easier to produce and transport than nuclear weapons; that that capability was concealed from weapons inspectors; and that that capability is now dissipated.

Actual weapons - including the large stockpiles previously identified by the UN (and cited by President Bush) but not accounted for - are another matter. If we ever get comfortable that there really were no such stockpiles by the time of the war, of course, that would be good news; a propaganda victory for war opponents, but good news nonetheless. On the other hand, if there's one thing that's made me genuinely nervous about the aftermath of the war (or perhaps the interminable 14-month "rush to war"), it's the possibility that WMD materiel made its way to Syria or into the hands of rogue individuals or groups, including Al Qaeda or other international terror groups. Thus, it remains premature to declare victory on this front, and we may never really get to the bottom of the question.

3. Eliminate Iraq as a Terrorist Safe Haven: Regardless of the continuing debate over the extent of Saddam's active operational and financial assistance to various terror groups, the incontestible fact remains that Iraq before March 2003 was (as Iran and Syria remain) a black hole on the map into which terrorists of all kinds - Zarqawi, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, Ansar Al-Islam, possibly some of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers - could disappear or encamp without fear of being apprehended or reliably traced. For the moment, that aspect has been greatly diminished - it's true that we haven't found Zarqawi, but then fugitives in the US have been known to evade capture for years as well, and there have been many, many foreign terrorists captured or killed by US forces there. There's at least been very significant progress in reducing the freedom of terrorists to move into Iraq as a safe haven. And, of course, Saddam is no longer pumping cash into the suicide-bombing operations in Israel, which is good.

4. Prevent the Re-Emergence of a Hostile Regime: Obviously, this is the big-ticket endgame right now, and one that might ultimately require us to play power politics, since neither the Shiites, the Sunnis nor the Kurds can create a dangerous rogue regime in Iraq if the other two groups retain some base of power. The major danger would be an Islamist theocracy controlled by Iran under someone like al-Sadr (who's pretty well discredited and weakened at the moment, although the careers of the likes of Khomeini and Saddam suggest that a guy like this is a continuing danger to bounce back until he's actually dead or in permanent US custody).

5. Prevent the Descent of Iraq into a Failed State: The opposite pole, and the first of the objectives that represents an objective of the reconstruction rather than the war (although Christopher Hitchens, among others, has argued that Iraq was headed this way anyway) is preventing anarchy - if Iraq winds up looking like Somalia, it will resume its status as a place for transnational terror groups to congregate. Again, the jury's still out, but the growth of local institutions in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south hopefully could create a fallback position where if post-occupation Iraq started to crumble, there would be hope of salvaging parts of the country from anarchy.

6. Building a Role Model: Most of the objectives of the Iraq war were negative - get Saddam out of power, stop the spread of weapons and terror groups, etc. The positive goal - building democracy in Iraq - has attracted mountains of scorn, but when you consider that we had little choice but to try to rebuild the place anyway once we'd removed the existing regime, why wouldn't we want to use all the persuasive powers at our command to try to provide a positive example to the rest of the region? Needless to say, this aspect of President Bush's "forward strategy of freedom" has a ways to go, although there's no reason to suspect that there won't be elections by January - the more troubling question is what comes after that. My own bottom line: regardless of the shape it takes, if the resulting institutions provide accountable government that the Iraqi people are happy with, that alone will put pressure on the neighbors to shape up. Considering the number of former tyrannies around the world that have transitioned to functioning or semi-functioning democracies in the last 20 years without any U.S. troops at all, and sometimes in the face of bitter-end internal resistance, faltering economies, and/or inhospitable cultural traditions, I hardly consider this an unrealistic endeavor.

7. Humanitarian Reconstruction: Rebuilding roads, schools, hospitals, etc. Keeping the lights on. By all accounts, this is going well. In fact, we made significant progress just by putting and end to the failed sanctions regime, which gave the "containment" policy a brutal cost in human life.

8. Prevent Iraqi-on-Iraqi Violence: At the end of the day, this is Iraq's problem, not ours, although we obviously need to keep violence from overwhelming the other mission objectives. The US media has tended to elevated this to Job One in Iraq, thus missing the entire point of the exercise.

(I'm ignoring "prevent violence against US troops," since that's not so much an end goal as something we're trying to do while working towards our goals; in military terms, force protection is an ongoing priority but not a mission objective - if every other job on the list was done, we could keep the troops safe just by bringing them home. The importance and difficulty of protecting our forces has, of course, been a critical concern through all of this.).

9. "Flypaper": The notion that our troops would serve as "flypaper" - attracting jihadist fanatics to Iraq to kill them rather than have to hunt them down elsewhere - always struck me more as a sliver lining to the cloud of the insurgency rather than a positive goal. It's not that we actually want people attacking our soldiers. But if they are going to pour into Iraq, killing a lot of them is a laudable goal that will advance our ultimate war aims, and the casualty figures from the front suggest that we are indeed doing this at a fairly high volume.

10. Get the Wells Pumping: Nobody seriously argued that oil should have been a valid reason for war - we could have increased Iraq's production by lifting UN sanctions - but given oil's importance to the Iraqi, world and US economies, getting the wells pumping at full tilt was obviously an important thing to do. From what I've read, that's going fine, although it may be some time before Iraq can really tap into its full potential as an oil producer.

11. Reorganize US Base Structure: Basing US troops in Saudi Arabia, of course, was not only expensive and inefficient (like the Germans, the Saudis could be picky about where they would let us go), but also an irritant cited by bin Laden as a grounds for jihad. We seem to be headed towards the first leg of this objective, getting our bases out of Saudi Arabia, and for now we have temporary bases in Iraq from which to stage more operations against the likes of Syria and Iran. But it's an open question whether the new Iraqi government will agree to long-term basing rights.

I've probably forgotten something, and I'm also leaving off some of the more intangible objectives, like demonstrating US resolve, sending a message to other dictators, improving the future credibility of UN resolutions, repaying the Kurds and Shiites for abandoning them in the past, etc. I'm also ignoring the end of the oil-for-food boondoggle, since that wasn't and couldn't have been fully appreciated as a war aim before the war.

His first three years in the majors, Juan Uribe had a fairly large home-field advantage, batting .288/.468/.324 at home and .227/.345/.271 on the road. Which was to be expected; he was playing his home games at Coors Field. Uribe was nonetheless a disappointment, since he was expected to be better than a .227 hitter with minimal power, and was expected to take much greater advantage of Coors.

So, this season, Uribe goes to Comiskey Park, no bandbox. So what happens? His road numbers have, in fact, improved substantially across the board without the compression effect of playing on the road after having a homestand at high altitude: .277/.400/.347. But the really spectacular improvement is at home: a guy who was nothing really special at Coors is batting .371/.638/.416 in Chicago (oddly, he's also had nearly twice as many at bats at home, since the White Sox have played 27 home and 22 road games, and Uribe didn't have a firm grip on the everyday job until the end of the season-opening road trip).

The effects of Coors can be complex. For whatever reason, Uribe doesn't seem to have taken advantage. Contrast this with Vinny Castilla, up to his old tricks after three years away:

Park: Season	AVG	SLG	OBP
Home: 2001-03	.245	.399	.282
Road: 2001-03	.266	.448	.308
Home: 2004	.371	.773	.441
Road: 2004	.213	.447	.272

The Bush campaign has a very amusing graphic showing John Kerry's shifting positions on Iraq. (Link via Instapundit).

Not much in the way of new content this morning, as I'm catching up at work from the long weekend, although if you're just checking in, I had a flurry of new stuff on Friday night and Saturday. Some longer stuff on Iraq is on the way tomorrow, plus some ongoing baseball projects (I'm still trying to finish up the Established Win Shares Levels review by wrapping up the NL Central).

A high note yesterday to cap off an otherwise depressing weekend for the Mets, including Cliff Floyd's return to the lineup and a game-winning hit for Mike Cameron; Floyd really looked pretty severely injured after colliding with Cameron in the first inning on Saturday. The Mets seem to be matching up better with the Phillies than the Marlins this season, likely due to their inability to hit Florida's pitching.

Nazis, Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge . . . there's plenty of candidates. But very high on the list, and in close competition with Pol Pot's regime, has to be the government of Francisco Solano López, who ruled Paraguay from 1862 to 1870. Solano López, placing undue faith in his large and powerful army and completely ignoring geographic and demographic realities, led Paraguay into the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The war, described in more detail here, left 57% of Paraguay's population dead and the nation at the mercy of its neighbors:

The Paraguayan people had been fanatically committed to López and the war effort, and as a result they fought to the point of dissolution. The war left Paraguay utterly prostrate; its prewar population of approximately 525,000 was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men. During the war the Paraguayans suffered not only from the enemy but also from malnutrition, disease, and the domination of López, who tortured and killed countless numbers. Argentina and Brazil annexed about 55,000 square miles (140,000 square km) of Paraguayan territory: Argentina took much of the Misiones region and part of the Chaco between the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers; Brazil enlarged its Mato Grosso province from annexed territory. They both demanded a large indemnity (which was never paid) and occupied Paraguay until 1876. Meanwhile, the Colorados had gained control of Uruguay, and they retained that control until 1958.