Yadi and Ozzie

Yadier Molina, the Cardinals' catcher, is not-so-secretly starting to look like a Hall-of-Famer.   He is, by acclamation, the best fielding catcher in the majors, and has been for nearly a decade.   Want to know who I compare him to?

Ozzie Smith.   The Wizard of Oz, the Cardinals' star shortstop of the 1980s and 1990s, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Do you think I'm kidding?   Consider:

After his age 31 season, Ozzie had 6 All-Star game appearances, 7 Gold Gloves, 1 World Series, and career statistics that included 13 HRs, 374 RBIs, 1169 hits, and a .247 lifetime batting average.   His hitting improved in his later years, and he ended up with over 2400 hits.

Yadi is in his age 31 season.   With seventy games to go, his lifetime statistics include 84 HRs, 515 RBIs, 1132 hits, and a .284 lifetime average.   He has 5 All-Star game appearances, will almost undoubtedly win his 6th Gold Glove this year, and already has 2 World Series championships.  

Oh, and he has a chance this year to do some things Ozzie never did -- win a batting title and win an MVP.   I would say he's a good bet for the former, and, at this stage, close to a lock for the latter.  

Will he be able to have the longevity Ozzie had that enabled him to play until he was past 40?   Probably not.   Catchers don't last that long.   But I would argue that, for that very reason, Yadi will be a Hall-of-Famer someday.   Catching, even more than shortstop, is the most important defensive position on the field.   And no one has ever done it better than Yadi.   (Sorry, Mr. Bench!)

If Yadi plays, say, six more years, and ends up with 2,000 hits, 150 or so HRs, and 1,000 plus RBIs, plus probably 10 plus Gold Gloves, 8-10 All-Star appearances, and 3 (or, God willing, more) World Series championships, he has to go in, like Ozzie, on the first ballot, doesn't he?

Say It Isn't So, Sharknado!

Ripped from today's headlines:

Oh, the humanity!

 

If Obama Had a Son, He Might Look Like...

This young man, who was murdered on the South Side of Chicago last October:

Terrance "Jawan" Wright, 18, was shot and killed on Oct. 19 after five young men tried to rob him. But Wright’s family members believe he was murdered because of his sexual orientation. Wright’s uncle, Tywayn Bouldin, says the authorities are wrong to label the incident a robbery as the teen had nothing of value on him.  

"What they going to rob him of -- his books?" Bouldin told CBS. 

"I believe they only did that to him because he was gay," Wright’s 16-year-old brother, Javone, said.
 

Now, this would be an actual "hate" crime, unlike the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.   But you never hear Obama talking about the epidemic of black-on-black homicides in his hometown.

I guess that might suggest that his "community organizing" didn't do a whole lot of good for the community he was supposedly organizing.

More "Honest" Dialogue for Eric Holder

As I noted yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder called for "honest" discussion about the "complicated" issues raised by the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.   I'm fairly sure this sort of thing from Jason Riley at the WSJ was not what he had in mind:

George Zimmerman's acquittal of murder charges in a Florida court has been followed by predictable calls for America to have a "national conversation" about this or that aspect of the case. President Obama wants to talk about gun control. Civil-rights leaders want to talk about racial profiling. Others want to discuss how the American criminal justice system supposedly targets black men. 

All of which is fine. Just don't expect these conversations to be especially illuminating or honest. Liberals in general, and the black left in particular, like the idea of talking about racial problems, but in practice they typically ignore the most relevant aspects of any such discussion. 

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. 

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."  

The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and "the system," but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and '80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.
 

I would add that a candid debate would also note that the bulk of the victims of black crime are other black Americans, the majority of whom are hard-working, law-abiding, church-going "regular guys" and gals who just want what I want... a safe place to live and work and raise our families.

Why the Federal Civil Rights Case Against George Zimmerman Is Dead

If the DOJ brings a federal civil rights case against George Zimmerman, it will be a sham.   Here is the FBI report of an interview with the lead detective on the case, Chris Serino, from March 2012.   Note the highlighted conclusions:

What new evidence would the DOJ introduce to contradict this conclusion from the detective on the case from the outset?   In Zimmerman you have:

 

 

1. A Hispanic.

 

2. With African-American relatives.

 

3. With numerous African-American friends and neighbors.

 

4. Living in mixed-race community.

 

5. Who voted for Obama and is a registered Democrat.

 

6. Who had previously organized in support of a black man mistreated by the Sanford police.

 

 

 

The media-liberal complex's preferred narrative of a Southern white conservative bigot committing murder for racial motives was always false.   Now, the notion that the DOJ could criminally prosecute him for civil rights violations should be a scandal.   

Girl of the Day - Barbara Stanwyck

One of the great actresses of the classic period of Hollywood film, Barbara Stanwyck was born today in 1907.   Is there anything better than Stanwyck in The Lady Eve?

Birthday Today - Joshua Reynolds

The great English artist, Joshua Reynolds, was born today 290 years ago, in 1723.   A friend of both Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, Reynolds idealized portraits set the style for the 18th Century, as in this portrait of Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago:

Meanwhile, the Big News Gets Ignored

The Zimmerman case was one trial about one deadly encounter in Florida, albeit a particularly pathetic one.   Meanwhile, the big news gets ignored.... the jobless "recovery" America has had since the recession that began in 4Q 2007.   Mort Zuckerman has the data today:

The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period. 

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government's Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are "jobs." No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.

That's just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can't get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.  

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.

It Starts

From the Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore police say they are investigating a witness account that a group of black youths beat a Hispanic man near Patterson Park Sunday while saying, "This is for Trayvon."
 

I told my mom the other day that, if there are riots and people die, then President Obama and Attorney General Holder should be impeached, because I think inciting a riot that causes deaths would be a "high crime or misdemeanor."    And they have certainly used the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case to foment anger and division in America in a cynical attempt to gin up black turnout for 2012 and 2014. 

A Short Platonic Dialogue With Eric Holder

Eric Holder, speaking today:  "Independent of the legal determination that will be made, I believe that this tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly about the complicated and emotionally charged issues that this case has raised.’’

The Regular Guy, dubious:  You want us to speak honestly about race?   Really?  

Holder, adamant:   "We must not -- as we have too often in the past -- let this opportunity pass.”

TRG, still dubious:  Well, OK.   If you think that's a good idea.    Hmmmm... how about this?  As attorney general you are essentially the boss of the FBI, correct?

Holder:  Yes.

TRG: In 2011 there were 448 black-on-white homicides in the U.S., according to FBI statistics.

Holder:  Yes.  So? 

TRG:   The same year, there were 193 white-on-black homicides.

Holder:   Not sure where you're going with this...

TRG:   Well, doing the math, that means that there were 2.3 times as many black-on-white as white-on-black homicides, correct?

Holder:  That's arithmetically correct, but...

TRG:   But there are also 195 million white Americans, but only 35 million or so black Americans. So there are roughly 5.7 times as many white as blacks, right?

Holder:   I'm not sure what arithmetic has to do with the "complicated and emotionally charged issues" raised by the Trayvon Martin case.

TRG:   Well, I'm just "speaking honestly"... doing the math, doesn't that mean that, in proportion to their population sizes, blacks are.... let's see, 2.3 times 5.7... 13 times more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks?

Holder:   Now, wait a minute...

TRG:   Just "speaking honestly," Mister Attorney General... what has your department done to alleviate what appears to be a "disparate impact" in murder rates on white Americans?

Holder, stuttering:   That question... is.... racist!

***

No one really wants an "honest discussion" about race in America.   Period.   Because a truly honest discussion would ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions.  

But here's a question for the next press conference with Mr. Holder that someone in the MSM might want to ask, if they have any credibility left.

Mr. Holder, in 2011 according to FBI statistics there were 448 black-on-white homicides.   How many investigations did the DOJ initiate into whether any of those were "hate crimes" under the federal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. section 249?   If the answer is "none," why is that so?

Girl of the Day - Linda Ronstadt

One of the great voices in American popular music in the last fifty years, Linda Rondstadt turns 67 today.   Here's one of my favorites from the mid-1970s, when she was a big part of the soundtrack of my high school years:

Sad Thought from Thomas Sowell

The great Thomas Sowell offers this sad comment on recent events:

I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

Don't believe him?  Spend five minutes looking at Twitter for comments by young African-Americans about the George Zimmerman trial.   The lynch mob this time is black.   And that's sad.   Fifty years after the civil rights movement, this is where we're at in America today.

Sharknado!

Don't ask.   Just experience it.

Girl of the Day - Charlotte Rampling

Charlotte Rampling plays what I think will end up being this season's villain on Dexter.   The character is a psychotherapist and author who specializes in analyzing psychopaths and, in particular, serial killers.   So far we have found out (in somewhat of a deus ex machina) that she was friends with Dexter's father, and coached him into guiding Dexter to become the serial killer that he now is (albeit only killing supposedly "bad" people).   In Sunday's episode she gave a pretty creepy speech about how psychopaths are God's gift to mankind, because they are "alpha wolves" without whome the species would not have survived.   She also gave Dexter some creepy motherly affection, petting him, and calling him "perfect."   To a serial killer whose proclivities were formed when he witnessed his own mother's gruesome murder, this kind of mothering is pretty obviously manipulative.   (I think the writing is pretty obvious too, frankly.)   She seems like a sicko to me, and it wouldn't surprise me that she has groomed serial killers besides Dexter, and may be playing some truly twisted game of pitting Dexter against another one of her "creations."

Anyway, that's my prediction for the season, which is only two episodes along.   Rampling, by the way, is 67.   Once upon a time she was model who looked like this:

Zimmerman, Trayvon and Common Sense

I've been half-following the George Zimmerman trial via the Internet.   It is not disputed that Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin.   The only dispute at the trial is whether he has a valid defense of self-defense against an attack by Martin.   Florida must prove beyond a reasonable doubt, not just that he killed Martin, but that he didn't do so in self-defense -- they essentially have to prove a negative, and do so so clearly that no reasonable person could doubt it.   It has seemed obvious from the outset (and even before the trial) that the state could never carry its burden, and thus the trial has been somewhat anticlimactic, with the sole mystery being what will happen after Zimmerman is acquitted -- Rodney King-style riots? civil suits?  gabfests on TV news shows?   Only the last seems a given.

Anyway, on the central factual point of whether an audiotape of the assault features Zimmerman or Martin screaming for help (the prosecution says Martin, the defense says Zimmerman), Jack Dunphy in NRO provides some useful common sense:

There is a commonsense way to reasonably infer which of them was screaming for help. By now the extent of Zimmerman’s injuries are well known (though prosecutors seemed determined to keep this information under wraps for as long as possible). Zimmerman suffered a broken nose and lacerations to the back of his head, all consistent with his account of being punched, knocked down, and having his head bashed on the concrete walkway. Other than the fatal gunshot, Martin’s only injury was bruising to one of his hands.

For the jury to believe the screaming voice was Martin’s they would have to accept a scenario in which Zimmerman remained silent while sustaining his injuries, and in which Martin screamed for help while sustaining only a bruised hand. Unlikely.

For this and the prosecution’s many other manifest weaknesses, the jury will not convict. Nor should they.

The Forgotten Elephants

I commented to the Regular Wife this morning that one of the reasons I can't stand the debate over immigration reform (or gay marriage or Obamacare implementation or any of the other current distractions) is that we've lost sight of the elephants in the room.   In my mind there are at least two giant, angry elephants stampeding toward us:

1. The Debt.   Why is Congress spending any time at all on immigration reform when it simply doesn't matter whether we have open borders or not if our country goes broke?   Our projected national deficit for 2013 is well over $750 billion -- and that's significantly down from the previously four  years of trillion dollar plus deficits and almost $200 billion below what the White House estimated earlier this year.   (Of course, you have to ask yourself whether a federal government that can't predict its own deficit within $200 billion dollars should be trusted with any of our hardearned money at all.)   But, still... $750 billion.   In Obama's first five years, we will have added more than $5 trillion to our national debt.   By the end of his two terms, even under his rosiest scenarios, we will have added $7 trillion to our debt.   And that's before the "train wreck" of Obamacare starts sucking us dry.     

That's not good.

2. The Dearth of Babies.   According to this article from yesterday, 2012 had the lowest birthrate for America on record.   People aren't getting married, they aren't having children, they aren't having big families.   Put bluntly, young people aren't betting on America's future.

The problem is that the "bet" I'm talking about becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.   If your country is wildly in debt, particularly for entitlements promised to the non-working elderly, but young people simultaneously aren't having children, you are in a death spiral.   It has happened many times in self-contained industries with their pensions, where a union pension plan simply doesn't have enough workers anymore to pay into a plan to pay for the benefits promised to retirees.   It is going to happen to us, writ large.   And by "writ large," I mean epically, catastrophically, world-historical, Dark Ages large.

How big?   This big.

Just Another Day at the (IRS) Office

Apparently the IRS has accidentally released thousands of personal Social Security numbers in violation of.... well, the law, privacy, simple decency, etc.   Here's the story:

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it's a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group's founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency's January release, he took a closer look at the files in question. 

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government's website—just a small sample of the larger breach.  

Just the day before, Malamud had filed another letter to the agency describing a problem with the 990-Ts. Of over 3,000 tax returns contained in the January update, 319 contained sensitive data the agency should have scrubbed, Malamud wrote in the July 1 report that he filed to the inspector general's office. In that mixup, some 2,319 social security numbers—perhaps more—were revealed.

A larger point needs to be made.   The first principle from which all liberalism flows is a belief in the omniscience and (hence) omnicompetence of government agencies. The first principle of conservatism (at least Hayekian economic conservatism) is that government agencies can never know enough to be able to direct a command economy (which is what Obamacare is essentially trying to do with the health sector, an economy that would be larger than all but a handful of first-world countries). The daily stories of incompetence from the Obama administration proves that we're right and they're wrong.

Obamacare and Moral Hazard

Economists have a term that is useful to describe many aspects of Obamacare -- "moral hazard."   Insurance companies have a similar concept -- "adverse selection."   The concepts essentially define situations where economic incentives are structured so as to reward fraud with very low risk of punishment, or to reward free-riding on the wealth of others; under such circumstances, fraud and free-riding will predictably occur.   Wikipedia provides a telling example:

Health insurance is an example of a service that suffers both from adverse selection and from moral hazard, and often it is difficult to differentiate the two. Here are some examples:

• The insured person may choose to conceal certain unhealthy habits or genetic traits that make the insurance attractive for the person but unprofitable for the company. This is an example of adverse selection: The person getting insured has more information about the quality of his or her health than the insurance company.
• After getting insured, the person is more careless about health. For instance, he/she may take fewer dietary precautions, smoke or drink more, or indulge in physical activities dangerous to the health. This is an example of moral hazard.

There is some fuzziness between the problem of concealing a habit prior to getting insured, and becoming more reckless after getting insured.
 

Obamacare's employer and individual mandates obviously provide multiple versions of moral hazard.   For the employers, the incentives of Obamacare drive them to make decisions that might be viewed (by some) as immoral -- they are cutting full-time employees to get below the 50 employee threshold, and/or they are cutting hours of employees below 30 hours, all to avoid having to provide insurance to their employees.   Meanwhile, for individuals, particularly young individuals, the "fine"/tax for not buying insurance is so low, and the promise that you can't be turned down for coverage even if you have a pre-existing condition is so utopian (and foolhardy), that no rational individual under 35 or so and in good health should buy health insurance, period, regardless of whether they end up free-riding on the rest of us.  

But here's one I never would have believed, a mini-bombshell that the Obama Adminstration dropped (as is their wont) on the Friday of a holiday weekend:

If you thought the delay in the employer mandate was bad news for Obamacare, just wait. On Friday, Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post discovered that the Obama administration had buried in the Federal Register the announcement that the government won’t be able to verify whether or not applicants for Obamacare’s insurance exchange subsidies are actually qualified for the aid, in the 16 states that are setting up their own exchanges. Instead, until at least 2015, these states will be able to “accept the applicant’s attestation [regarding eligibility] without further verification.”...

The government is going with what Kliff and Somashekhar call “the honor system.” “We have concluded that the…proposed rule is not feasible for implementation for the first year of operations,” say the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “The exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan…without further verification, instead of following the procedure in §155.320(d)(3)(iii).”

And it’s not just there. The feds will also allow people to gain means-tested subsidized coverage on the exchanges without having to…test their means. “For income verification, for the first year of operations, we are providing Exchanges with temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification.”...

The goal here is plain as day. The Obama administration is laser-focused on making sure that enough Americans enroll onto Obamacare-subsidized health insurance platforms, because if they do, it will be politically impossible for Republicans to repeal Obamacare in the future.

Politics ain’t beanbag, they say. But deliberately encouraging tens of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in order to achieve a political objective is profoundly immoral. It’s a breach of faith with the hard-working taxpayers whose paychecks are being harnessed to a cause many of them don’t support.
 

In other words, the Obama Administration is like the cops walking the beat in Little Italy when the Mafia Dons ruled the streets.   In exchange for payoffs (votes), they are promising to look the other way while one group of citizens (the uninsured) commit massive fraud, essentially stealing tax dollars from another group of citizens (me, you and people like us).   They might as well announce that they aren't going to prosecute burglary as a federal policy.

Sheesh!   And these are the same people who ask us to believe that they are really really really committed to border enforcement!
 

The Bushes at Peace

Here's a terrific interview with former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush that I saw over the weekend.   What an amazingly nice, decent and disciplined man!   Note how he refuses to rise to the bait of criticizing President Obama, a courtesy that he has so rarely received in return.   A Christian gentleman, if that term has any meaning anymore.

By the way, for you liberals out there, just try to absorb how beloved George W. Bush is in Africa and then examine your own consciences about how you've viewed him and conservatives generally over the years.

 

Girls of the Day - My Girls at Nationals!

The Regular Daughters' ceili team took third place (out of 37 teams) at the National Irish Dance competition over the 4th of July weekend in Anaheim, California.   The only two teams that beat them were the #1 and #2 teams from the World Championships.   Wow.   How did I get so lucky?  

Anyway, here they are in their finery, looking beautiful as always (first and third from the left):

Girl of the Day - Hot!

Pulling bushes in the backyard.   Hot, dirty, sweaty work.   I need a palate cleanser:

There, that's better.

Birthday Today - Robbie Robertson

Is every great rocker 70 now?   Robbie Robertson is, as of today.

Here he is from The Band's great concert movie, The Last Waltz, with Eric Clapton:

Postponing Obamacare Implementation

I haven't yet blogged on the Obama Administration's decision to delay implementation of the employer mandate of Obamacare for a year, until Jan. 1, 2015.   It has been hard to decide what angle to take.

1. Arrogance.  There's the arrogance of power as the President presumes to rewrite a duly-enacted law by fiat.   Congress said that implementation of the employer mandate was to occur on Jan. 1, 2014.   By what right does Obama delay it a year?   Where is it written in the Constitution that Presidents get to decide which laws they will enforce and when?   Could a Republican President in 2017 simply decide that he was going to unilaterally have a one-year moratorium on enforcement of laws that he doesn't like (or, in Obama's case, laws that are politically-awkward for him)?   Which leads me to...

2. Cynicism.  The cynicism of delaying the implementation past the 2014 elections.   Everyone with eyes to see knows what is going to happen when the employer mandate hits... there will be layoffs, there will be cutbacks on hours, there will be a spike in unemployment and, most of all, there will be unavoidable (even by our in-the-tank media) stories of outrage by citizens who lose their jobs or their healthcare as a result of Obamacare.   "Train wreck" doesn't tell the half of it.   This is going to be a full-on epic disaster.   We don't want that with the Senate majority in the balance, now do we?

3. Hypocrisy.   The sheer hypocrisy of this decision is staggering.   What did Dems tell us about the "uninsured" that Obamacare was supposed to help?   That people were dying without health insurance.   Well, using their logic, how many people will die in the year that Obama delays implementation of Obamacare?   If the tables were turned, you know that the media and the Dems would be all over this angle, saying that a Republican President had killed people through his policy decision.   Because it's Obama... crickets.

4. Stupidity.   In the end, though, the most obvious angle is probably the best.   Occam's Razor and all that.   The ostensible reason for the delay is that the system is too "complex" to be implemented in three years.   Well, isn't that the exact reason why Republicans argued that Obamacare was a bad bill to begin with?   Didn't we tell everyone that having the federal government take over one-sixth of the largest economy in the world, take over a health-care sector that is bigger than the economies of France or Canada, well, maybe, that wasn't such a good idea?   The people who can't run the Post Office?   The people who can't get the potholes filled in?   Maybe giving all that new responsibility to a sclerotic government bureacracy wasn't the best idea in the world?  

Hayek wrote about seventy or more years ago about the "knowledge problem" in command economies and why free markets, where knowledge is discovered through the operations of the market and the pricing mechanism, are necessary for a functioning economy.   Command economies don't work precisely because a centralized government cannot martial the knowledge necessary to "run" the economy.   Instead, free markets permit the economy to run itself, using the dispersed knowledge that is only available to individual actors pursuing their own ends through their own means.   Hayek was right then, and he's right now, but the libs never learn.   They just keep making the same stupid mistakes, over and over again.

It's the complexity, stupid.

Lest We Forget - Happy 4th of July!

 

Girl of the Day - Dexter Version

The final season is upon us.   A good time to review the girls in Dexter Morgan's life.

1) Rita.   His wife.   This didn't end well.   She died at the hands of Dexter's rival, the Trinity killer.   She never knew about Dexter's "other life"... unless Trinity, in an ultimate act of cruelty, told her at the end.

2) Lila.   His psycho British girlfriend.   Also didn't end well.   She shouldn't have messed with Dex.

3) Lumen.   His girlfriend/partner-in-vengeance.   Not a psycho, and maybe Dexter's best actual relationship, because she knew who he was and accepted it, even though she herself was normal.   She escaped... but will she return?

4) Hannah.   His latest girlfriend/partner-in-serial killing.   Different from Lumen, because she too was a serial killer and a psycho.   But way, way up there on the hotness scale.

5) Debra Morgan.   And, of course, his foul-mouthed half-sister, who appears to have always loved him, but now hates him because he has corrupted her.   She found out about his murders by catching him in the act, then helped him cover it up and, ultimately, committed murder herself to save him.   Now she's tortured by what she has done.    Will Deb end up confessing and turning Dexter in?   Will she take matters into her own hands and kill him?   What a great character played to the hilt by Jennifer Carpenter.

Wrong Side of History

Have we ever had a more feckless foreign policy administration?   I can't imagine one.   Defeat and retreat in Afghanistan, death to our Ambassador in Libya, betting on the wrong horse in Egypt (and by wrong I mean, not just that Morsi turned out to be the weak horse, but also that Morsi turned out to be an Islamist thug or else a stooge for the Islamist thugs in the Muslim Brotherhood).    Obama is doing nearly everything wrong, and yet 45% of the people would probably still vote for him against any Republican.  

Why?   Because Racism!

Coach K on Lebron

Coach K, interviewed in the NY Post, talks about Lebron James:

Q: What’s your assessment of LeBron?

A: LeBron is brilliant. Brilliant. He’s not smart, he’s brilliant. His recall, I compare him to somebody who can play [an instrument] by feel.

I can show him and the team five things that Argentina does in a team meeting, offensively. And by the time we get to the court and walk through, he knows them already. And he’s already thought of ways of defending. So when you ask him well what do you think about this, he can give you input. A lot of times his input, that’s what we do.   

After London I told a lot of people, he’s what I call, ‘Mastering it.’ He and the game are one. It’s not just about X’s and O’s. He’s 28, I think right now, and it’s all hit in the last couple of years. He’s one of the greatest ever.
 

The Regular Son and I have talked in the past about how smart the really top level NBA players have to be to make decisions on the fly in games that are that much better than the decisions of the players around them, all of whom are also NBA players, i.e., world-class athletes.   Not "street smart" not "basketball IQ smart."   Just smart, high-IQ smart.    Really really smart.   Interesting to see Coach K, who also is really really smart, see the same thing in Lebron.

Girl of the Day - Jan Smithers

Jan Smithers turns 64 today.   The only role of any note she ever had was in the great 70s sitcom, WKRP in Cincinnati, as "Bailey Quarters," the assistant station manager whose glasses could not hide the essential hotness underneath.   Here she is on the show:




















And here she is as a young model in the 1960s.



Is it OK Now for the Media to Admit that the Left's Idea of George W. Bush Was, Not Just Incorrect, But a Lie?

George W. Bush is beloved in Africa for his huge and historic support of AIDS treatment and prevention on the continent.   This week he is in Africa, helping renovate a women's clinic in Zambia. I'm not sure it's gotten much press outside of Texas, but it should.   These types of pictures expose the Left's picture of Bush -- the mean-spirited, probably racist Texan -- as a gross and despicable lie.  

What a nice man.

Obama and Egypt

Obama appears to have been on the wrong side of history (again!) in Egypt, siding with the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood.   Now, in what has been described as the largest political demonstration in the history of the world, Egyptians appear to be trying to take back their country from Obama's friends.   Don't believe me?   Believe your eyes:































Anne Patterson is the U.S. ambassador to Egypt.  

Look, say what you want about George W. Bush... you didn't have to worry that he would all of a sudden start siding with the terrorists.