In the face of so many formidable world evils, it's great to know you can turn to baseball to provide good old fashioned doped up October entertainment.

Who do you want to see win the World Series?
Now, this is who you root for, not who you are expecting, necessarily.
Like...going for Kucinich over Hillary is OK here.

In the continuing story of how a Texas scumbag corporation named Maxxam has planned to destroy hundreds of acres of old growth redwood forest for a neat profit, the plot has entered the final phase -- trying to get a bankruptcy court to annul the provisions of a habitat protection agreement hammered out several years ago by Senator Feinstein and state water boards.

Here's the link to the Houston Chronical version of the story:

http://www.chron.com/...

It seems Maxxam Corp. had a bad year in it's horse track business and can't pay the debt on the California land holdings (unless they can clear cut 2000 year old trees).

So I write my senator:

If you are a baseball fan, you either love or you hate the NY Yankees.

If you are not a baseball fan, please just move along to the latest GOP scandal diary, and be sure not to recommend this one. If you are a baseball fan, please weigh in here with why you love or hate the Yankees. In their moment of agony, as they end their 2006 baseball season. To Yankee-haters like me, that would be sweet, sweet agony. G'bye, mates. Tigers win! BLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLA! TIGERS -- WIN!!!

2006 payroll: Yankees $196 million, Tigers $83 million.
2006 ALDS:  Tigers 3 Yankees 1

Is that not a bit like Venezuela kicking America's superpower ass?

Why do we Yankee-haters so hate the Yankees, anyway?
Is it envy?

...the answer after the jump...

As I was growing up, there weren't many unifying things Amerka got near as whipped up about as The Olympic Games^TM every four years. I wasn't ten years old before I realized it was all about Amerka winning the most gold medals, we had to beat them damned commie countries, whether they fed their athletes steroids or not. Free people would never degrade the nature of pure sport with steroids. Nowadays, the commies are either beat, or else they hold our national debt, so who the hell should we root against? I simply cannot get whipped up to rage against Slovakia. I have been watching off and on the past week, and as a casual snowboarder I have to say, our girls rock. In general, extreme events rock, they should just cancel most all of the regular events and replace them with the Extreme Games.

Do you give a damn?

I am a frequent critic of NPR News shows, which increasingly seem to have moved away from hard news, especially hard-to-get news, towards fluff, cutesy puzzlers, funny quizzes, and the mindless common wisdom of Cokie Roberts and her wannabe imitators.

This morning Scott Simon wowed me. Not a word about his cute Chinese baby or lovely French wife. Nor a fawning interview with some aging pop icon. Instead, a gripping tale from the former police chief of Scottsdale AZ, who signed on with a "contractor"
outfit to train Iraqi police for a year. In March he was nearly killed when his hotel was crashed into by a 3000 lb truck bomb. 50 people were killed. He was transformed.

Connect to the stream at http://www.airamericaradio.com/#

This is a one-sentence diary, I mean a two-sentence diary. Or is it three? OK, I'll probably delete it if nobody comments while Kos is on.

A second paragraph would be nice?

How much must I write before the dreaded red warning text goes away?

That appears to do it.

Since my teams were eliminated from the NCAA brackets some time ago (St. Mary's and Stanford) and baseball doesn't start for another week, I got to thinking that there sure seem like alot of people on artificial life support these days, and too much attention paid to them, given all the bad shit going on in the world. I was wondering if it would be crass or off-color to place bets on the next one to check out?

As many of you may know, the Golden Gate Bridge District is currently soliciting public input on whether to build a "suicide barrier" between the east-side walkway on California's greatest human-made landmark and the view of America's most beautiful city (OK, Seattlites, maybe 2nd most beautiful). You can send your comments to bridgecomments@goldengate.org

My letter below:

Forgive me if this was posted yesterday, but I wanted to bring attention to it on the relatively slow weekend diary board, as this is news with long-range political consequences for Blue California.

This is excerpted from yesterday's LA Times (reg req'd)
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-secretary12feb12,0,5456808.story?coll=la-home-local

-- Choosing a Republican ally whose politics mirror his own, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday nominated former state Sen. Bruce McPherson as California's chief elections officer.

snip

McPherson, 61, was the most liberal Republican in the Senate until term limits forced him out last year. Since then, he has considered reentering politics while grappling with the 2001 slaying of his son, Hunter, during a botched robbery.

-- more snips and discussion below

The live NASA feed is getting underway, although the transmission from the orbiter Cassini is hours away. Nonetheless, for space geeks like me, the excitement is palpable. The video is at:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

This is a joint triumph for NASA and the European Space Agency, and should really excite people around the world looking for mankind to do great works rather than evil works.

I just returned from the funeral of my uncle in southeast Oklahoma. He died, like many do in that part of the country, from emphysema. He was suffering to the last breath, which he took in a hospital in Texarkana last Saturday night.

My uncle grew up in southeast Missouri during the great depression, the oldest of three boys in a house without a father, as my grandfather died when my uncle was 14. Thus my uncle worked the family cotton fields so that my father and his younger brother could do something better with their lives.

My uncle was drafted into the army and sent to the Philippines in 1944 after 6 weeks of basic training. On August 6, 1945, he was on troop carrier bound for the mainland of Japan, headed he thought into a ground assault, which, had it occured would have made the Normandy invasion look like a picnic.

But Truman dropped the bomb.

My sister lives in La Grange, heart of Bob Barr country (though Bob was a liberal compared to their current congressman). There's only two dozen white Democrats in town...OK, that's an ex-agg-er-a-shun...but it's so red there, the only place redder is up the Devil's own asscrack.

She writes:

"I'm very anxious about Tuesday, going from feeling hopeful to feeling hopelessly depressed.  How about you?  I'm sure out there it feels better because you're in a blue state (even Arnold is turning a little blue with time!).  I keep hearing things that make me think that the youth and black vote is going to be tremendous this year and it may end up being a decisive victory for our country.  I sure hope so.  What will happen with four more years?"

I wrote back...

My Dad is 80. He's a lifelong hardcore Democrat who lives in Greensboro. This year he's been active in GOTV efforts. He told me Greensboro has 14 polling sites open now to accept early voters. Dad has a list of mostly elderly folks who need a ride to the polls and want to go early. Most of them are African-American, over 70, and don't drive a car, and they are truly excited to go vote if somebody will help them. So far Dad has signed up 30 people for a ride, his first load is today. As word gets around he expects it to snowball next week. If the African-American vote, which is about 25% of registered NC adults, increases by 10% over 2000...Kerry will make up the 4% deficit in the polls! And Bowles will keep Edwards' Senate seat.

NC is on the edge of turning blue.

Forgive me if this appeared earlier, but I really hate this guy. Ahnold's personal anus licker, Congressman David Dreier, hoping someday to get the nod to take on Feinstein, is a self-hating hypocrite.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/44/news-ireland.php

Thanks to http://www.rawstory.com for busting the story in the first place.

Did I say I hate Dreier? Repugliscum of the worst variety..

I was listening to public radio today (not unusual) and I heard a snip from a program describing how Americans now spend more per capita on pet healthcare than the world spends per capita on human healthcare. Some family had just spent $22K to try to save their pooch from a terminal canine disease, but he died, and now the family is suing for veterinary malpractice. It's part of their pet insurance policy, as it turns out, to go after careless and callous vets.

Anyhow, the story went on to discuss how Americans are increasingly treating pets like children, and how this is a result of human-to-human alienation and a solitary life. Dog people were described as most likely to be gravitating towards this pet-as-family-member philosophy. And that pissed me off, because I would spend thousands to keep my cats alive.

What are you? Are progressives more pet people than conservatives? Or are we all equal suckers for the furry little things (or scaly or feathery, I'm not push-polling)?

I have been a fan of Steve Earle since the rockin' Copperhead Road, and Transcendental Blues is where Texas meets Ireland, and his recent Jerusalem is a modern classic of left-leaning rock and roll. "John Walker's Blues" says in three short verses everything that is wrong about fighting for God, whichever side you think He's on. Now Earle's new CD is about to be released and it's already number 15 on Amazon. With songs like "Rich Man's War" and "Condi, Condi" this is going to be Steve's greatest album yet.

http://www.airamericaradio.com has free links to three songs on their front page right now. Start with "F the CC".

I saw Steve Earle live in Santa Cruz this spring (NOT at a Clear Channel venue) and it was the best rock concert I've seen in several years. He played encore after encore until the management turned off his electricity.

Steve Earle is the American Billy Bragg.

Well here I am visiting the in-laws in Broward in mid-August, when the humidity and the temperature always adds up to 200. Meanwhile, back home in Santa Cruz they add up to 100.

Noteworthy is the density of presidential ads on local TV here in the Lauderdale area, every commercial break has at least one soft, fuzzy, and hopeful Bush spot followed by a tough but even more hopeful pro-Kerry DNC or 527 ad. Before I sat down to write this I saw three 527 ads in one 3 minute break, two anti-Bush. It's like the background noise of insects in the swamp, so pervasive and ubiquitous it fades out of hearing after a day or too.

Soon I am off to Miami to catch the Marlins-Cardinals game. Of course unlike SF or St. Louis, here I was able to buy tickets six rows behind the Cards dugout on the day of the game. And the good beer is only $5 instead of the $7.50 they get at Pac Bell.

Summer baseball in the heat! I know you guys envy me back home, right?

Googling "My Pet Goat" has led me to textbook scholars who identify "The Pet Goat" as a chapter in an elementary reader.

"The Pet Goat" appears on page 153 of
Reading Mastery II, Storybook 1,
by Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine Bruner
ISBN 0574101284
Publisher SRA/MacMillan/Mcgraw Hill

Other ISBNs associated with various printings this book are:
0026863383
0026863553

You can buy it for $1.00 (plus tax and shipping)!

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?tn=storybook&ph=2&imageField.y=0&image Field.x=0&cm_re=HP*Search+Box*Form&an=bruner&sts=t

Now I don't know how long this chapter is, but I want to see how long it takes me to read it. Seven minutes sounds slow, unless you are a Kindergartener maybe.

Here's a fun little site about the famous Bush reading, with a classic photo of the Commander-in-Disbelief:

http://s89194761.onlinehome.us/