Remember the Digital Divide?

The New York Times admits today that the digital divide is a thing of the past.

African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the "digital divide" that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.

Experts? Any economist could have told you that computers would phase in slowly, like every other major innovation. Phones, cars, buttons: all of these started as luxuries affordable only to the wealthy, but as supply rose to meet demand, price fell enormously until they became common to all but the poorest.

Like Jason, almost 9 out of 10 of the 21 million Americans ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a report issued in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of them, 87 percent of white teenagers say they use the Internet, while 77 percent of black teenagers and 89 percent of Hispanic teenagers say they have access to it, the report said.

In the twelve or thirteen years since the internet became a reasonably well-known commodity, we've reached 77 percent saturation in the lowest-access racial group (among the young)? Phenomenal, in my opinion. It shows how incredibly cheap access is, and how universally desired. Of course, older people are slower to log in, but this is clearly a matter of preference, since the old are wealthier than the young, and if a black 13-year-old can get online, so can a black 63-year-old. But most 63-year-olds figure they don't need to find out what candy they are.

The divide was considered so dire a decade ago that scholars, philanthropists and even President Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address fretted over just what the gap would mean in lost educational and employment opportunities for young people who were not wired.

In other news, the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be such a big deal either.

Sovereignty on Trial

It is high time to stop the silliness. First in the cases of Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic, who mercifully died this month, and now in the cases of Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor, the Western establishment is attempting to bring dictators to justice. This is an exercise in vanity that can only hurt the image and substance of judiciousness built up by the establishment since 1945.

The model for trying members of violent regimes is the Nuremburg trials. Hitler, of course, was not tried; he had committed suicide. And the trials were not for show: they handed down acquittals when they were convinced that someone was not in fact a mover in the Nazi regime. The basic questions asked at each trial there and in the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia are (1) did this person commit war crimes or crimes against humanity and (2) does the "just following orders" defense hold here?

This is a good and valid system for members of violent regimes - not for heads of them. It is axiomatic that the head of a regime was not "just following orders", so the second question can be disposed of. As far as the first question, since almost all actions of subordinates can be linked to the leader, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which a court does not find a dictator guilty. In general, these trials violate the rule that there should be some doubt as to the outcome.

That said, I don't have a better solution short of executing the ex-sovereigns upon apprehension.

Making Sense of the Israeli Election

With 99.5% of the vote counted, Ha'aretz reports a solid, but not stunning, victory for Ehud Olmert and the nascent Kadima party (28 seats), which occupies the center-right. Labor, center-left, got 20 seats. Shas (Sephardic religious) climbed to 13, and Yisrael Beitenu, a newish Russian immigrant nationalist party has 12 seats. The true surprise is that Likud has a meagre 11 seats. Likud or its predecessors (Gahal, Herut) have been in the the top two since 1955. Of course, Kadima is a successor party to Likud, so this really doesn't break the streak, but it may represent a major realignment in Israeli politics. This is also only the second time in Israeli history that the top party has held fewer than 34 seats; the previous time was Ehud Barak's Labour-led government in 1999, and we all know how well that went. In addition, this election saw the lowest turnout in history, 63.2%.

A quick look:

Party	2006	2003	Position
Kadima	28	0*	Center-Right
Labour	20	19	Center-Left
Shas	13	11	Religious
Yisrael Beitenu	12	3**	Right
Likud	11	38	Right
Nat'l Union - Nat'l Religious	9	10	Right/Religious
Pensioners	7	0	Single-issue (leans left)
United Torah Judaism	6	5	Religious
Meretz-Yachad	4	6	Socialist
Arab parties	10	8	Arab (leans left)
Shinui	0	15	Center
Others	0	5

* Kadima had 14 members before the election, mostly defectors from Likud
** Yisrael Beitenu was a member of the National Union in 2003.
Bold indicates a party likely to join Kadima's ruling coalition.

Add up the boldfaced numbers, and you get 55. At least 60 seats are needed to govern. And this already includes the 7 pensioners, who are confident all their demands will be met - and with good reason; they'll be key mercenaries in coalition-building. But Olmert still needs two more members, and without defections from Likud, he'll need to embrace the religious parties or bring Likud back into the fold, or try to woo Meretz and an Arab party; but I doubt he's willing to move that far left. Basically, the political spectrum is so broadly distributed that any coalition will have to embrace a large part of the political spectrum.

Cowboys in Cairo

My last "Cowboy" post didn't directly highlight American unilateralism, though the implications were strong. In the same vein is Jackson Diehl's op-ed piece on a budding Egyptian daily - aptly called the Daily Egyptian (al-Masri al-Yom) - which has taken an objective stance towards the Mubarak regime. Why now? Unilateral American pressure.

"From 1993 to 2003 Mubarak was criticized once," [liberal publisher Hisham] Kassem told me last week. "He closed down the newspaper, as well as the political party that published it." Kassem himself published a spirited paper called the Cairo Times, but it was in English and appeared only weekly...

...Kassem brushed off the inevitable threats from the mukhabarat, or state security, and never looked back. In the past year the paper's daily circulation has grown from 3,000 to a peak of 40,000...

How did this space for press freedom open? Kassem doesn't hedge: "U.S. pressure on the Mubarak regime has been the catalyst for most of the change we have seen," he said. He traces the turning point to an April 2004 summit between Mubarak and President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at which the aging Egyptian strongman heard for the first time from an American president that political liberalization would be necessary to maintain good relations. After stalling a few months in the hope that Bush would lose the 2004 election, Mubarak reluctantly concluded that he must take some visible steps, Kassem says. One was the allowance of greater press freedom; another was the conversion of his reelection from a referendum into a multi-candidate competition.

After twenty-five years of alliance between the U.S. and Egypt, nothing had changed in Egyptian polity. Now, things are changing. Cowboy up!

Contra Adorem

Note: This post was written as a comment response to Adora, who complains about the lack of accountability inherent in a liberal doctrine of forgiveness. Read her post first. Credit my title to Contra Apionem

From a Christian perspective, your conclusions arise from three mistaken premises.

1. An underestimation of the gravity of sin. As long as we view our own sins as relatively milder than someone else's, we can't appreciate the meaning of forgiveness. See Luke 18:9-14 and Luke 7:36-50.

2. No amount of work (see your last sentence) can lead to forgiveness. According to Jesus, the only thing upon which forgiveness is conditional is that we forgive others. See Luke 6:37-42.

3. We don't make the rules. Suppose for example that God was an arbitrary, unfair tyrant, and that He decided our fate in the afterlife. Our best response would be to try and please His every senseless whim. In this sense, primitive pagans and animists are more logical than post-modernists. Fortunately, God is only arbitrary and unfair in our favor (see Matthew 20:1-16), and His rules are simple and consistent.

I can't speak for the rabbi, but I think that's a fair summary of the orthodox Christian view.

Cowboys in Darfur

Is America acting unilaterally in Darfur? Not enough, in GR's opinion!

Opinion Journal chronicles the international political inaction in today's feature article. As in Rwanda, the French are the best poised to act. Unlike in Rwanda, they are at least not aiding the genocidal regime, but they aren't pushing for troops on the ground, and they aren't giving much money. According to OJ, Kofi Annan came and asked President Bush for more military involvement, but the UN has backed down from that desire after sabre-rattling in Khartoum. It appears that putting white soldiers in harm's way is unacceptable to the Europeans.

The current statistics:

200,000 to 400,000	Sudanese killed since 2003. (Bloomberg)
2,000,000	Displaced persons
25,000	Excess deaths among the displaced*
7,000	AU peacekeepers on the ground
1,336,409,246	USD of aid given (UN)
..... 41.5%	U.S.A. government aid
..... 17.2%	U.K. and other Anglosphere gov't aid
..... 30%	EU and continental Europe gov't aid
....... 2.5%	Arab League gov't aid

Obviously, the Arabs and other Muslims are those who should be most ashamed. African nations have the boots on the ground, but are running out of money to support them (sounds dubious), and will let the UN to take over in six months. Apparently Sudan's threats to leave the AU if this happened were a bluff. Meanwhile, a Sudanese student group has somehow come up with $100,000 as a reward for Pronk's head; I wish my student groups had been so well-funded! And I wish the Western and Arab powers-that-be took the situation in Darfur as seriously as Sudanese on both sides of the lines obviously take it.

*70,000 deaths among the displaced (also Bloomberg, a death rate of 14.1 per 1000 over 30 months; compare to 9.16 for all Sudan and 8.25 for the U.S. Do the math, and you get 25,000 excess deaths.

The Disappointed Right

I spent last week in the capital, and what most surprised me was the level of disappointment with the administration and Congress among well-connected Republicans I know there. It's not a hatred for Bush, or anything like that. But things aren't getting done, PR is being handled poorly, the media is setting the agenda, and the only reason the GOP isn't being trounced in polls is the utter incompetence of the opposition.

In this environment, an independent candidate could do very, very well. John McCain, call your office.

The Bachelor Gourmet

I've always wanted to write a cookbook of bachelor cooking, getting entries from all my friends. Here's a start with two recipes that you can use when you have nothing in the fridge but chicken, ketchup, and Coke. For both recipes, prepare the chicken by removing fat and cutting slices into the chicken to allow the flavors in.

Ketchup Chicken. Smother chicken in ketchup. Let sit for a while. Bake in the oven. Serve with Coke. Submitted by bachelor Roberto Quispe.

Coke Chicken. [Optional: sear chopped garlic in oil]. Add chicken to heated oil [and garlic] and pour Coca-Cola in enough to cover the chicken. Simmer until the Coca-Cola is almost dried up. [Optional II: Halfway through, add mushrooms and sliced raw carrots to the 'soup']. Add pepper and remove from heat. Serve directly. Submitted by bachelorette Chen Yi.

Please feel free to submit your own entries.

I'm A Hater - Hater

More MSM fisking: E.J. Dionne Jr. has an article in WaPo today that appears at first blush to be reasonable. It's not.

Dionne begins with some statistics, and draws an incorrect conclusion:

In the 2004 election, according to the main media exit poll, President Bush won 63 percent of the votes cast by Americans in households earning over $200,000 a year, and 57 percent from those in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. All things being equal, wealthier people vote Republican.

Wrong. After a certain level, wealth tends to swing people back to voting Democratic (sorry: I don't know the source, but this was widely reported). Much of Dionne's point still holds, but it's still an abuse of statistics.

The gist of the article is that poor (red) states have greater income inequality than rich (blue) states, and that in rich states, voting is less correlated with earnings (or 'class', as Dionne presumptively infers) than in poor ones. But wait: in poor states, where supposedly Republicans are the party of the rich, they win. That doesn't make sense. A poor state with high inequality necessarily has a few wealthy people and a lot of poor ones. So there should be lots of Democrats and few (rich) Republicans. But Dionne isn't going to be bothered by math. Instead, he has this to say:

Southern Republicans such as President Bush pursue policies that are hugely beneficial to their wealthy base even as they try to diminish the political impact of class warfare by shifting the argument to other subjects: religion, values or national security.

First of all, as argued above, the idea that a successful party could have a base of rich people in a poor state is silly. Second, since when is it bad to be nice to rich people? Ceteris paribus, does Dionne endorse policies that hurt the rich? The real class warfare that's going on here is inside Dionne's head: he assumes that "good for the rich" is equivalent to "bad for everyone else", and assumes that his readers share the first assumption. The assumption may be valid in some cases, but not in others. Take the Bush tax cuts: there are lots of different metrics one can use, but everyone's taxes decreased and after the cuts the wealthy paid a higher percentage of taxes than before. That is, the tax cuts made our code more, not less, progressive, while benefiting all taxpayers.

Bush, of course, has avoided letting the other shoe fall by not cutting spending. If he did, he would have to make hard decisions about whom to hurt. But that doesn't let Dionne off the hook. That is to say, Dionne assumes that Bush is a class warrior and that most of his trademark issues are "shifting the argument". But since Bush is winning in poor states, he must have a base that includes lots of poor voters to whom those issues are paramount. And why would these poor voters vote for things that help the rich? Precisely because they, unlike Dionne, are not class warriors.

Grand Ole Party

Yesterday's Southern Republican Leadership Conference meeting in Memphis was no doubt an important event to the political persons present; to the rest of us, it was rather opaque. Working off the WaPo analysis by Dan Balz, yesterday's Drudge Report flash, and Adam Nagourney's NYTimes 'story', which bears only a vague resemblance to the facts.

It emerges that the media has as many problems as the candidates. To wit:

• Dear Global Shrink, I want to be president. This has been a very important goal to me for a long time, but a lot of people keep getting in my way. How could they override me on the Teri Schiavo thing? I'M A DOCTOR! And I'm the REPUBLICAN LEADER, and people need to understand that. How can I become president?
  - Frustrated in Tennessee
  
  Dear 'Frist'-rated,
  You're not going to be president. When a crowd with a majority of Tennesseans only casts 39% of its votes in your favor, you should take the hint. Call Al Gore; he feels your pain.
  
  
• Dear Global Shrink
  I just wanted to point out that there are some crazy people in Memphis to whom you should write. Ten percent of the delegates voted for President Bush. I know it was just a ploy by Senator McCain to muddy the waters, but didn't all those people gather there precisely to lead a Republican revolt against Bush? I mean, like I wrote in the Times, "Republicans gathered here this weekend acutely concerned with the elections ahead and distressed by the White House's performance since President Bush's re-election" (lead graf) and "in a hint of one way that this next generation of Republican presidential contenders is likely to diverge from the president, Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, went from heralding Mr. Bush's record on terrorism to embracing conservative concern about the growth of the size of government in his tenure." Doesn't that prove that even Republicans now realize that Bush is a cancer?
  - Brilliant in NYC
  
  Dear Brilliant,
  When Mitt Romney praises Bush on terrorism, but criticizes Washington Republicans on spending, isn't he embracing Bush and distancing himself from DeLay and Frist? Bush is only a master of evil inside your head. Believe it or not, most of the candidates wanted this to be about them, not him. And with McCain openly embracing the president's policies, it shows that the party base is more than ever behind Bush. You have no idea what two good SCOTUS appointees can do to mollify an edgy base. My advice is that you should quit the Times and start a blog; you'll find lots more crazy people, and you'll fit right in.
  
  
• Dear Global Shrink,
  I want to be president. Every poll shows that I would make a more popular president than Bush or Hillary, and every smart person in the country knows I would make a better president than either - just ask Dan Balz! Why do Southernors hate me? Even when I said nice things about Mr. Bush?
  - Hurt in Arizona
  
  Dear Hurt,
  I see what you mean. You really are held back by the two-party nominating system. Do you dare run as an independent and risk enshrining Hillary? It was a good idea to derail the straw-poll voting, but maybe unnecessary - Frist is the least of your worries. Do you realize that Mitt Romney has every quality that people like you for (except the war hero thing, but look what that did for Kerry and Cleland), plus he's young and socially conservative. "Electability" didn't figure too prominently into Democratic voters' minds in 2004, and it won't save you from yourself in '08. Sorry, pal.
  
  
• Dear Global Shrink, How can you say that?? John is my hero! I know he came in fifth in the straw poll and is treated like a senior citizen by most of the party, but he's still going to be our forty-fourth president, right? Every other prospective 2008 presidential candidate must figure out how to get around him - that was my lead graf in the Post. He's a force, he's a great man, you can't ignore him. He's my hero.
  - In Love in Washington
  
  Dear In Love, Don't ever let the facts hold you back. Just because McCain had to scramble to upset a vote that was going to embarrass him by pushing people to vote for an unconstitutional third term for President Bush, just because Mitt Romney matched Bush plus McCain, just because McCain hasn't built any new appeal since 2000, when he was overmatched by a poor-spoken, inexperienced Texan, just because he's already conceded Iowa and has no chance in New Hampshire... aww, forget it: love is blind.

Our view: Romney takes 14% in a poll dominated by Tennesseans, and takes a smart tack by embracing the President on foreign policy and leadership while distancing himself from the profligacy of Hill Republicans. What's not to like?

D-Train Derailed

It's a big day in Canada: the Canadian nine took a good American squad to school in our own national pastime. Dontrelle Willis was rocked for 5 runs in 2.2 innings, and Al Leiter and Gary Majewski couldn't stop the bleeding. By the time Jason Varitek hit a grand slam in the fifth inning, the Canucks already had a big eight on the board. Varitek's bomb capped a six-run fifth, and the Americans couldn't score again.

The ace who held down the U.S. lineup for the first 3.2 innings was Adam Loewen, a 21-year-old from B.C. who played Class A ball for the Orioles last year. All of a sudden yesterday's close games: Canada 11, South Africa 8 and U.S.A. 2, Mexico 0, loom large in the Pool B standings. If Canada can beat Mexico, it will advance in the top spot. If the Mexicans win, and all three teams beat South Africa, there will be a three-way tie of 2-1 records. Canada would most likely lose a tie, however, since the tie-breaking criterion in this case is runs allowed.

All of this confirms my strong sense that the U.S. will not be able to stop the D.R. from running away with the tourney.

Iran Bus Drivers Strike - Regime Cracks Down

Where were the New York Times (no mention) and Washington Post (part of one column) and other major papers on this one? The MSM leaves it up to an opinion writer to publish a piece in the Wall Street Journal to bring us some of the most important news from Iran. This should have been front-page news the day it happened. For shame.

Elsewhere: BBC: nothing, Boston Globe: nothing, Chicago Tribune: nothing, LA Times: nothing, Washington Times: nothing, CS Monitor: nothing. Instead, this is only being reported on Iran or labor-movement niche sites (see Google News result).

In brief: the Revolution of 1979 outlawed unions. In 2004, the Union of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran re-organized, demanding better better uniforms, a pay raise, etc. Rather than negotiate, the government has chosen to terrorize the union with goons and secret police.

Excerpts from Roya Hakakian's article:

The executive committee's first meeting came under fire. Baton-wielding thugs shouting "The bus syndicate, the monarchs' hideout!" charged in, set their office on fire, beat everyone in attendance, and promised to cut off the tongue of [Mansour] Ossanloo if he continued his activities. As a sign of their seriousness, they ran a blade over his tongue, shaving a layer off. He has spoken with a lisp ever since...

Days before the strike, several members of the executive committee were summoned to appear before the Revolutionary Court, where they were ordered to call off the strike. When they refused, they were arrested and taken to prison. The officials had declared the strike illegal and threatened to fire all participants. In the days that followed, security forces launched mass arrests of the union members. Those who showed up on the day of the strike were beaten while watching members of the security forces cross their picket line to take their places behind the wheels. In the last week of January, an estimated 1,000 workers were arrested and taken into prison. Though hundreds were released upon signing guarantees that they would not participate in any strikes again, and received permission from the Revolutionary Court to return to work, the company itself refuses to let them back. On the eve of the Iranian New Year, hundreds of these workers have become unemployed. The six union leaders remain in prison incommunicado...

What did enlightened people do to support the strikers? Very little. Most Iranian intellectuals, former Marxist activists included, were consumed by polite electronic debates over the Dutch cartoons. Hundreds of striking drivers were arrested, as the cameras of the world's biggest news agencies shot images of the couple of dozen government-paid hoodlums throwing rocks at the Danish embassy in Tehran. Wives and children, even distant relatives of the activists, were hauled off into detention to force the union leaders to turn themselves in, as India's Communist Party threatened to leave the ruling coalition in New Delhi if India voted to refer Iran to the Security Council. Clearly, workers of the world ought to postpone uniting until other scores are settled.

This should have been reported. The MSM, for fear of deviating from its "plotline" on Iran, kept from us a happening that is far more important to the future of the Middle East than the cartoon brouhaha. I don't share with some the pretense that bloggers can take the place of professional, organized reporting, but we can and will blow the whistle when we see that they've supressed something vitally important.

Free-For-All 2008: The Old New Democrats

Sideshow 2006 Don't tell the Democrats, but they could easily sweep the 2006 House elections on one issue: Pork. All it takes is 218 committed Congressmen to stop pork cold. A simple, universal campaign promise to Say No To Pork would propel Democrats to decisive victories in every close race. Think about it: if you're an undecided voter, you obviously don't have huge priorities tied to the spending habits of either party. Instead, you'll jump all over a bandwagon that promises to simply and suddenly stop pork.

The Democrats are like the New York Yankees: most of them had their best years in the 1990's. Check it out: Hillary, Kerry, Dean, Edwards, Richardson and now Al Gore, are consistently among the top pollers. That's the Class of '04 plus three Clinton-administration grandees. Mark Warner is the only outsider with a legitimate shot at the top of the ticket. And how well will he go over with the Democratic base? The issues that motivate Dem primary voters are the Iraq War (anti), the environment (pro), tax cuts (anti), and abortion (pro). Hillary has little cachet on the first two, Edwards only has cachet on the tax cuts, Richardson and Warner are unknown quantities, and Dean isn't going to run.

And while John Kerry doesn't know it yet, his present 'leadership of the party' is like Ted Kennedy's: he has the privilege of saying all the things that people who want to be president can't say. And while he has his party's firm support, nobody outside the Heinz ketchup factory thinks he's electable.

And Gore? I was shocked to see Gore listed as a potential candidate in a New Hampshire paper, and plugged by Dick Morris. Honestly, I'd give him better odds than Kerry. If, for some reason, Hillary can get no traction AND the electorate is desperate for a return to the Clinton administration AND the environment is a big issue in the primaries, Al has a chance.

The monthly prediction doesn't change; it won't be an interesting metric before a few more iterations:

Feb '06: Clinton & Warner over Allen & Rice.
Mar '06: Clinton & Warner over Allen & Rice.

Post your predictions and ideas in the comments!

Rank	Candidate	Chatter	Rank Change
R.T1	Sen. John McCain	1,010	0
R.T1	Secy. Condoleezza Rice	1,010	+1
R.3	Gov. George Pataki	557	+2
R.4	Sen. Bill Frist	546	-1
R.5	Rudy Giuliani	518	+3
R.6	Gov. Mitt Romney	399	-2
R.7	Sen. George Allen	369	-1
R.8	Sen. Chuck Hagel	213	+4
R.9	Gov. Mike Huckabee	201	+2
R.10	Sen. Sam Brownback	199	-3
R.11	Gov. Jeb Bush	179	-2
R.12	Newt Gingrich	110	-2
...............	...............................................	.......................	...............
D.1	Sen. Hillary Clinton	2,540	0
D.2	Sen. John Kerry	861	+1
D.3	Howard Dean	501	+5
D.4	Al Gore	389	new
D.5	Gov. Mark Warner	351	-3
D.6	Sen. Evan Bayh	338	+3
D.7	Sen. John Edwards	321	-3
D.8	Gov. Bill Richardson	294	+4
D.9	Sen. Russ Feingold	260	-2
D.10	Sen. Harry Reid	221	-5
D.11	Sen. Joseph Biden	122	-5
D.12	Gov. Tom Vilsack	121	-1
D.13	Sen. Barack Obama	78	-3

Notes: The Chatter Rankings are created by searching each candidate's name plus "2008" in the Google News database. This month's tested-but-not-qualifying list is Tom Daschle, Haley Barbour (who said this week that he will not run for president), Wesley Clark and Tom Tancredo. Some of the folks on the list almost surely won't run for president (Reid, Jeb Bush) and are there just in case, or as an indication of VP popularity. Remember that the VP doesn't have to be a primary candidate: that's how I think Condi will land the #2 job, since the GOP will need a woman against Hillary, and who else is there?

See the Chatter Rankings from February, December, August, July, June, and May.

Kroll

I got friends'd on Facebook today by a guy I haven't seen in years - Perry Kroll. Apparently he's at NYU now and becoming quite an accomplished cinematographer. Check out some of his work at his personal website.

Live Blogging the WBC

Unbeknownst to me, the World Baseball Classic began last night in the Far East. Korea beat Taiwan, 2-0, and Japan committed the baseball equivalent of the Rape of Nanking, beating the the real Reds 18-2.

Right now I'm sitting in the library computer lab sharing earphones with my classmate Lim Sup and watching the broadcast at Yahoo Korea. Unlike at the official WBC site, the broadcast is free. It's also in Korean, which is just another example of how foreigners are underpricing American producers, but the product isn't *quite* the same. For example, the broadcast has background music instead of crowd noise, and it's a high-pitched kiddie-techno sound that makes me feel like I'm playing a computer game or watching early anime.

9:50 Did I mention it's in Korean?

9:58 OK, so back to baseball. The Koreans scored on a sac fly in the first and just got their third hit to open the bottom of the third. They have four guys named Lee in the order. The fielding has been good, and it looks generally professional. The Koreans have put a crooked number up in the third. After Kim singled to open the inning, the Lees bunted him to third, doubled him home and then hit a two-run homer.

10:01. The library is closed!

Bode Wannabe?

Apparently, White House press correspondent David Gregory decided to use the Bode Miller Method of Excellence to move his career forward. He called in drunk to the "Imus In the Morning" talk show. But wait... Bode Miller sucks! D'oh!

I'll be surprised if this doesn't cost Gregory his position in the White House Press Corps.