April in Review: Red Sox Retreat to Fenway

The Red Sox are in full retreat after a gawdawful road trip. They went 3-6, lost every series, and now face the Terror of Taipei and Murderer's Row version 6.3 at home for (mercifully) two games. No-luck Timmy Wakefield has four losses in five starts, four of them quality starts. Coco Crisp is two weeks away, at least, and the Sox bench is so thin that I actually was wishing that Josh Bard would pinch-hit for one of our all-glove, no-bat middle infielders.

The biggest surprise of the month is Mike Lowell, who leads the team in batting (excepting Coco) at .318, and in doubles with 11. Wily Mo Pena is second to Ortiz in slugging, and has 18 K's in just 47 AB's. Bronson Arroyo is 4-0 with a 2.34 ERA, 7 BB, 30 K over five starts. Compare to Curt Schilling: 4-1, 2.88, 7, 40 over six starts. Note to Theo: you can never have too much pitching.

Something in Boston baseball lore needs to be corrected: Babe Ruth did not ditch the Red Sox for the Yankees. The owner sold him. Management, not the players, held back Boston for 86 years, with backwards and racist policies and lousy decision. This year's real Bad Guy is not Johnny Damon, but Theo, who traded a good pitcher who had just signed a hometown-discount deal because he loved pitching for the Sox. In Theo we still trust, but that's the kind of sleeze that builds up ill will with players and bad karma with the baseball gods.

Closed Doors

In the last two days, I found out two things that I will not be doing in the coming year: interning for USAID in Africa and living as a Graduate Head Resident in an undergrad dorm. A bit disappointing, but now I can at least start to plan my next year with greater certainty.

Robbing Peter to Pay Zebedee

The Republican Congress is planning to give $100 to every family as a bribe gas rebate. Naturally, the next generation or two is not complaining that this will be added to the debt we have to pay off to finance our parents' and grandparents' consumption habits.

This program is so senseless that I'm at a loss for words. So I need my readers to step up and fill in the blank:

"This program is the economic equivalent of ________________________________"

Leave your suggestions in the comments. If there are more than one, I'll pick the best.

The full story is at NYTimes and MarketWatch. Both report that this is tied to ANWR drilling and sundry spending. In that case, it will hopefully die as a 3rd-rate publicity stunt. The best way for the government to deal with the gas shortage would be to decrease its own spending; that would ease demand for gas, and generally stabilize the country economically. For anyone more interested, we just studied Aiyagari et al's paper on the effects of government spending; available here from NBER.

UBL: Boring, Negative, and "Different"

Osama Bin Laden is too hot for Khartoum. And Ramallah. And Beijing. And Canberra.

The CS Monitor reports (warning! meta-meta-journalism alert!) on news stories from all over, in the wake of Bin Laden's taped message globalizing the Jihad.

Hamas says Bin Laden has "different opinions". An Aussie journalist calls Bin Laden and his ilk "boring" (and notes that sometimes "different" means "the same"). Sudan says Bin Laden is a terrorist - not that there's anything wrong with that. China's UN ambassador capped the insulting day of news for Osama by characterizing him as "always, always negative".

The serious news here is that even other militant Islamists find Osama an unwelcome fellow-traveler. The U.S. has made it sufficiently clear that harboring al-Qaeda can lead to very bad consequences, and the Bush Doctrine is forcing even those who openly hate America to publically eschew an endorsement from the big O. And this is, I think, more than English-language PR. Seeing the influx of unaccountable Saudis into Iraq, other Arab countries would rather be left to fight their own battles against the infidel their own way. Another angle is that Hamas and Sudan's regime each have a lot to lose by further destabilizing their respective situations, and it's hard for even them to believe that al-Qaeda's insinuation would do anything but.

Shameless

The Bush administration and FOX News have come out of the closet and tacitly admitted their illicit relationship. More specifically, former FOX News anchor Tony Snow was appointed White House Press Secretary today (WaPo).

When asked if it would be difficult for [Snow] to transition from reporting the news to presenting the administration's spin on events, Snow demurred. "There's really a lot of continuity here," he said, "You could say that working at FOX was a seven-year audition for being the President's spokesman, or you could say that being the President's spokesman is just an extension of FOX's goals by other means. In fact, my paychecks will still come from the same place."

Bush agreed: "I can't count the number of times when Scotty was in the doghouse, and I had Tony break an important press release for us. Sometimes I'd give him a call to ask how we could possibly spin the latest disaster as good news. He's the mind behind the whole New-Orleans-as-the-Augean-Stables spin that got us out of hot water - no pun intended - after Katrina."

If you're wondering what the Augean Stables are, then you might not realize that this was a not entirely honest reporting of the press conference transcript.

First-Person Shooter

This is one way to beat the last level of (insert name of favorite first-person shooter game here). Hat tip to Drudge.

Too Rich to Waste

I don't think Robert Kaplan's WaPo editorial is all that enlightening, but this turn of phrase made my day:

...dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has turned Belarus into the political equivalent of a Brezhnev-era theme park...

Thank you, Mr. Kaplan.