The Zong

Awhile back, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed piece on the total cost of the Iraq War, hypothetically laying out all the things we could pay for with the money we spent on it. The approximate number was, conservatively, $1.2 trillion assuming the war ends someday. What with all the tax cuts and stuff advocated by this president, it has never been clear where all that loot might come from, or who would end up paying for it.

Today’s answer to that question seems to be simple: Impoverished children with diseases will!

Governors clashed with the White House on Monday over the future of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, an issue that some members of both parties said was as important as money for the Iraq war.

In the session at the White House, when President Bush reported on progress of the war, governors pressed him to provide more money so they could guarantee health insurance for children. In response, administration officials said states should make better use of the money they already had.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program doesn’t have (or need) a cute name. It’s a program that was started in 1997 as part of the Balanced Budget Act signed by Bill Clinton and supported by both parties in response to the number of uninsured children in the United States. As a piece of bipartisan legislation, it seemed as if politics worked the way it was supposed to for once because it demonstrated that, while there are a lot of differences in opinion on how to solve our country’s health care crisis, everyone recognized the need to provide health care to kids, regardless of the cost.

As with any national program, it isn’t perfect, but millions of children have health care because of it. Now, because the president and his GOP congress unbalanced the shit out of the budget and squandered the surplus they were handed, the President has decided that enough is enough, and that all these damn kids had better wipe their noses and suck it up, because we’re at war.

The federal government spends $5 billion a year on the program. Mr. Bush wants to continue that level, and he is seeking an ”additional allotment” of $4.8 billion over the next five years.

States would need substantially more to continue their programs with current eligibility rules and benefits. New estimates from the Congressional Budget Office show that the states face shortfalls of $700 million this year and a total shortage of $13.4 billion from 2008 to 2012.

$13.4 billion dollars to 2012? How much did the last 4 years of the Iraq War cost?

Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont, a Republican, said the Bush proposals would jeopardize his state’s phenomenal success in covering children. In Vermont, he said, fewer than 4 percent of the children are uninsured, and “we don’t want to lose ground.”

Bush administration officials emphasized that states received a fixed amount of federal money each year, and they said individual children did not have a legal entitlement to benefits. Michael O. Leavitt, secretary of health and human services, said he would work with Congress to find “a short-term solution” for states exhausting their allotments this year. He said states could avoid shortfalls by managing their programs better.

Thanks, Mike. We’ll do that. How many people lived in Utah when you were governor?

In California, we have close to 800,000 uninsured kids by the most recent estimate. Across the country, this seems to be a no-brainer issue with both the GOP and Democrats, and so hopefully our legislators will spare these helpless children from the greedy war machine.

An influential member of Congress said Monday that he would not be taking up White House proposals to restrict eligibility and financing for the child health program.

“I have absolutely no intention of moving the president’s proposals through our subcommittee,” said the lawmaker, Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey.

Mr. Pallone is chairman of the Health Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has authority over the children’s program.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that “Democrats in Congress understand the urgency” of the problem and would provide money to the 14 states that did not have enough to cover their current enrollment.

Of course, if all else fails, we can always count on THE GOVERNATOR.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican, said federal aid was essential to his $12 billion plan for universal health coverage. Mr. Schwarzenegger said that in a private meeting he told the president, “We need the federal government’s help.” He did not say whether he got a commitment.

Baseball season is upon us, and what better way to celebrate this great American tradition than to waste some more time talking about a new pitch that probably doesn’t exist.

Early in the afternoon, [Kazushi] Tezuka arrived with Masa Niwa, a journalist and his interpreter for the day, ready to explain the pitch. He had flown here from Tokushima Prefecture not just to meet with Texas Rangers reliever Akinori Otsuka – with whom he works as a performance coach, though Otsuka does not throw the gyroball – but, hopefully, to correct the fables of the gyroball.

Evidently, Tezuka “discovered” the gyroball, and according to Jeff Passan over at Yahoo!, he sells baseballs that teach you how to throw it for $25 a set. Before you go thinking that this whole thing sounds a little shady, you have to believe that this guy is 44 years old:

So, now that that’s over with, let’s delve into Master Passan’s grandiloquent observations about this “the gyroball.”

The theory behind the gyroball is this: When a baseball spins sideways, like a bullet, it should cut down on the amount of resistance on its path to the plate. Without the same amount of air resistance as a regular fastball, which rotates backward, the four-seam gyroball should not experience the same slowdown and look as if it’s exploding toward the plate.

A perfect gyroball should be straighter than the crease on a pair of slacks.

“It doesn’t move,” Tezuka said. “It doesn’t move at all.”

Turns out all the videos claiming to capture Matsuzaka’s gyroball were instead of his slider, a pitch that has confused gyrophiles since 1999. A television station in Japan tried to understand the dominance of Matsuzaka’s slider and noticed he pronated his wrist – or let it turn outward, like a screwball, except releasing the ball off the inside of his fingers rather than the outside – as Tezuka teaches practitioners of the gyroball.

For those of you pitching buffs, I probably don’t need to explain that this is all kind of hilarious. For those of you who aren’t, if you’re still reading, a lot of American pitchers pronate their wrists to throw some seriously nasty shit. Pedro Martinez, in his prime, threw his cut fastball like that. The slider that Robb Nen used to feature (everyone though it was a split-finger fastball) was also thrown like that. I’m not a very good pitcher, but I know that these are tried and true mechanics that are somewhat unnatural, but common amongst some of the more dominant pitchers of our time.

So is the gyrobal a cutter, a slider, a nasty changeup? Reading this article, it truly sounds to me like Passan met some Japanese guy who was selling his training balls, and wrote an article about him. As it turns out, Passan threw one himself using the training ball, and he seems to think that the gyroball is nothing more than a four-seam fastball.

“That’s the gyroball,” he said, and it was somewhat anticlimactic, the game’s purported great revolution looking in actuality like nothing more than a fastball.

Still, it was an explanation, something substantive, and something, too, that I could try. Tezuka has been teaching baseball for 15 years and has 1,300 students, from children to players in Nippon Professional Baseball. He gave me a short explanation, jogged behind the cage and told me to fire. On my fourth pitch, he jumped.

“Yes!” he said after I tossed the four-seamer. “You threw the perfect gyroball.”

Sounds great. So Jeff Passan, whom I hold in relatively high regard as far as Yahoo writers go, wrote an entire article about a guy who claims to have discovered the four-seam fastball. I can’t wait to see Matsuzaka throw one of those.

Update: As my more knowledgeable friend EZ hath pointed out, Pedro Martinez didn’t throw his cutter that way. He definitely threw some pitch like that, though, because I saw him demonstrating his grip on ESPN one time and I could have sworn it was a cutter. Perhaps it was simply a four-seamer, or a slider.

As requested, the gyroball video can be found here. That’s definitely a really dope slider.

Of all the things in this political climate that grind my gears, one of the most abrasive is our government’s newfound way of “interpreting” the concept of Habeas Corpus. I’m not a lawyer or anything, but the concept of Habeas Corpus is something that just about everyone in modern civilization should really know about. It says that, when the shit hits the fan, you have the right to see a judge and tell him or her why it’s fucked up that one minute you were looking for a nice antique end table in Vermont, and the next thing you know you’re being waterboarded by CIA agents.

My little Latin friend tells me that it means “You Have the Body,” and the concept predates the United States by a pretty long goddamn time. Since the middle ages, in fact. Jeffrey Toobin wrote a pretty good piece about it for the New Yorker last december.

The concept was so well established at the time of the founding of the American Republic that the framers of the Constitution allowed suspensions of the right only under narrow circumstances. Article I, Section 9, states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

There are some pretty good examples of when it was OK, by American standards, to suspend it. Abraham Lincoln did it when half the country decided it didn’t want to be American anymore. Ulysses S. Grant suspended it in a number of counties to deal with the KKK in 1871, in a formal declaration. It’s pretty serious business to suspend something that has been considered an absolute right in modern jurisprudence since before the Flinstones lived.

But since September the Eleventh, we’ve heard more and more talk about how Habeas Corpus isn’t an absolute right, that there are plenty of reasons in this modern age of terror that we should be able to suspend it and so on. This epoch of mind-boggling legal subversion reached a real milestone when our current Attorney General came out and said he doesn’t think the Constitution guarantees Habeas Corpus anyhow.

“The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas,” Gonzales told Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Jan. 17.

Gonzales acknowledged that the Constitution declares “habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless … in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” But he insisted that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

Specter was incredulous, asking how the Constitution could bar the suspension of a right that didn’t exist — a right, he noted, that was first recognized in medieval England as a shield against the king’s power to dispatch troublesome subjects to royal dungeons.

Keep in mind that Habeas Corpus isn’t even necessarily about getting a trial, or about giving terrorists the right to walk away from detention. It simply means that anyone who is imprisoned has a right to hear the evidence against them, and to contest it in front of an impartial magistrate.

Fast forward to yesterday’s court decision about detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a new law stripping federal judges of authority to review foreign prisoners’ challenges to their detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The decision set the stage for a third trip to the Supreme Court for the detainees, who will once again ask the justices to consider a complex issue that tests the balance of power among the White House, Congress and the courts in the murky context of the fight against international terrorism.

And so, because these prisoners are not technically in the United States, Habeas Corpus doesn’t really apply (pending a Supreme Court decision.)

My real problem with this isn’t that these detainees, and any enemy combatants and all sorts of detainees we probably don’t even know about, are being held without legal recourse, nor that many of them are being tortured and held without oversight. Those things are bad, but what really gets me is the amazing double standard that the United States finds itself in. As we invade and bomb other nations in the name of spreading freedom and democracy, we are supposed to be above things like this. We call ourselves an example to other people who live under oppressive rule and act like a savior of liberty for everyone, and yet our government does whatever it can to lock up as many people as it can without due process of law.

I won’t deny that it’s probably easier to fight terrorists by employing an autocracy that is tacitly ignorant of civil liberties and Habeas Corpus, but doesn’t that undermine everything we’re fighting for? If we cannot fight terrorists without eroding the things that make this country great, then perhaps the fight is already lost.

Presidents’ Day never really feels right to me until some asshole who doesn’t know anything about anything gives the country a history lesson.

“George Washington’s long struggle for freedom has … inspired generations of Americans to stand for freedom in their own time,” Bush said, using a morning visit to Mount Vernon to compare the dilemmas faced at the birth of the nation to the troubles he now confronts.

“Today, we’re fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life,” he said. “And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone.”

I know it’s kind of a silly thing to get pissed about, but that never stopped me before. Back when he was a lower-case W, did George Bush ever actually learn anything about our nation’s first president and the wars he fought in? If he had been properly learned, he would know that, first off, the Revolutionary War wasn’t all that similar to the Iraq war, but if it was, we Americans were certainly considered the insurgents.

That’s just about where the similarities end, because in the War on Terror we don’t even know who the hell we’re fighting most of the time. Also, if we lose the War on Terror then we’ll probably have to engage in some super-embarassing diplomacy, whereas if we lost the Revolutionary War, we’d all be speaking Middle-English and we’d probably have to listen to a lot more of Christopher Hitchens’ bullshit.

That said, I really hope the War on Terror isn’t as important to our freedom and liberty as the Revolutionary War, because George Washington is dead. I’m sure that if he were alive on September the Eleventh, he’d have stormed right into Tora Bora on his trusty steed and put a musket ball right in Osama Bin Laden’s stupid Jihad-Hole. As for Big Fake G.W., well, he’s got a pocket full of more bullshit!

Quoting the first president — and referring, by implication, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — Bush said: “He once wrote, ‘My best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever in any country I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.’ “

Mine too. Maybe the Iraqis don’t have a banner of freedom handy, so they’re trying to take one of ours.

So let me get this straight. Your football team goes 14-2 in the regular season, puts nine of its players into the Pro Bowl, loses a playoff game to one of the toughest postseason teams in history, and you fire your coach after all the other vacancies have been filled because your General Manager doesn’t like the way he butters his bread. Then you come over to San Francisco, a team struggling to put together a consistent plan on either side of the ball, and hire away their offensive coordinator, who has an overwhelming losing record as a head coach but who seems to be improving the prospects of the Niners’ young quarterback.

Please don’t misunderstand me when I say this:

Go fuck yourself, San Diego.

I don’t blame Norv Turner. He was offered perhaps the best coaching opportunity anyone’s ever been offered anywhere, although he should watch out for that slimeball of a G.M. he has to work with. With nine all-pros and perhaps the most dominant NFL player at any offensive position since forever, the Chargers could probably hire Dennis Erickson (who has a better winning percentage in the NFL than Turner) and still go 10-6 next season. If Norv doesn’t put together a couple winning seasons with this squad, then he should start looking for high-school football head coaching jobs where the principal doesn’t make the personnel decisions.

What is truly mystifying is that the Chargers didn’t even interview several available coaches, with postseason credentials, for their vacancy. Why not call Jimmy Johnson or Steve Mariucci, or even Jim Fassel? Is Norv Turner a better candidate than any of those guys? I for one can tell you that Mooch is dying to get off of the NFL Network so that he doesn’t have to do segments sitting next to Deion Sanders anymore. He’s probably deaf in his right ear by now.

All of this leaves the 49ers a lot worse off than they were, coaching-wise, and it’s pretty late in the game to be hiring coordinators. As Alex Smith tries to learn his third offense since college while Norv Turner’s team stumbles into the playoffs in the weakest division in football, I want San Diegans to remember that they live in a second-rate city, with second-rate football and baseball teams and the weakest housing market in California. Maybe more people would want to live there if you had any fucking idea how to put together a winning sports franchise.

Also, those “vintage” powder-blue uniforms make the Chargers look like they play for a community college.

It’s Presidents’ Day! Hows about that shit-kickin‘ president of ours?

American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.

Yeeee-Haw!!! That there president’s sure got them terrorists on the run since September the Eleventh, I’ll tell you what!

The new warnings are different from those made in recent months by intelligence officials and terrorism experts, who have spoken about the growing abilities of Taliban forces and Pakistani militants to launch attacks into Afghanistan. American officials say that the new intelligence is focused on Al Qaeda and points to the prospect that the terrorist network is gaining in strength despite more than five years of a sustained American-led campaign to weaken it.

Hang on a second. What the shit are you talking about?

Officials said that both American and foreign intelligence services had collected evidence leading them to conclude that at least one of the camps in Pakistan might be training operatives capable of striking Western targets. A particular concern is that the camps are frequented by British citizens of Pakistani descent who travel to Pakistan on British passports.

Uh. Go get them. Please?

During a news conference days before last November’s elections, President Bush said of the campaign against Al Qaeda: “Absolutely, we’re winning. Al Qaeda is on the run.”

But in a speech several days ago, Mr. Bush painted a more sober picture of Al Qaeda’s current strength, especially inside Pakistan.

“Taliban and Al Qaeda figures do hide in remote regions of Pakistan,” Mr. Bush said. “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West. And these folks hide and recruit and launch attacks.”

“Wilder than the Wild West”? A fucking grown man said that?

Is this really happening? I was gonna call up all the presidents in my family and wish them a happy presidents’ day, but now I’m remembering that this president promised to bring those responsible for September the Eleventh to justice, and this is like the brazillionth article I’ve read in the last 6 months about Al Qaeda and the Taliban regaining power in Afghanistan. Didn’t we kill all those guys? If not, then what are we doing in Iraq? Did I miss something?

A lot of good and innocent people have died because of this War on Terror, a war that has cost many of our soldiers their lives. There’s always a bit of rhetoric about not letting these soldiers sacrifice be in vain, but I wonder if, as our enemies regroup 5 years removed from the beginning of the conflict because we’ve invaded the wrong damn country, the soldiers think that maybe “in vain” is simply a relative term.

Yeah, I was up late last night learning some fun stuff you can do with the new Wordpress, and I decided to try my hand at re-formatting the Zong a little better. I hope you like it, because I’m not gonna do it again for awhile. As you can see, the format is similar but the colors are kind of arrogant. If it’s really driving you nuts, you can adjust the “tint” knob on your screen until it looks right. That’s what I did.

Anyhow, over there on the right I’ve neatly organized all my past posts in an Archive entitled “Old News” using a neat little plug-in called “Fancy Archives.” Thanks to Andy over at Nymbus (cool domain, dood) for developing it and using the word “fancy” to describe it.

I’ve also updated the Zong? page to include the true origins of the word, as I’ve been lambasted over and over for not giving EZ his due propers. Sorry it took so long for that, EZ, but rest assured that civilization thanks you for your contribution to the New Language Math.

One other thing. I’ve started a page with some wire headlines on it that I will add to, called the “Headline Hall of Fame.” Catchy, right? I’ll be adding one every single time I see a worthy inductee, and I’ll definitely listen to nominations.

Courtesy of one Matthew “All Hat” Rebholz, here’s some hilarity from the cover of last month’s Texas Monthly.

For what it’s worth, the New York Observer has a neat little piece that gives me hope beyond hope that Al Gore is going to make a hero-style late entry into the 2008 race to Clean Up Bush’s Shit. There’s a quote in here that makes me long for the fall:

According to one influential Democratic insider, close associates of the former Vice President have communicated to him and other prominent fund-raisers who are uncommitted to the other ’08 candidates that Mr. Gore will consider entering the race—if an opening presents itself—in September.

This is like seeing a movie trailer around Christmas for some movie that you want to see so badly that you wish they’d just play it when the trailer’s over already because you can’t believe you paid to see “The Black Dahlia.” Then, after what seems like a half-hour of incredible snippets that make you think the movie’s almost done, the trailer ends, and what do you see?

“September, 2007″

What’s the tagline for the Gore campaign/movie posters?  “Gore 2008: Just You Fucking Wait.”

Because when you are, you can decide not to adhere to your own policies. Remember when your president said that you “don’t give timelines to dictators”? So does the New York Times.

Mr. Bush’s big worry now is that Mr. Kim is playing the administration for time. Many experts think he is betting that by the time the first big deliveries of oil and aid are depleted, America will be distracted by a presidential election.

But Mr. Bush could also end up with a diplomatic triumph, one he needs desperately. To get there, he appears to have changed course. Asked in 2004 about North Korea, he said, “I don’t think you give timelines to dictators and tyrants.”

Now he appears to have concluded that sometimes the United States has to negotiate with dictators and odious rulers, because the other options — military force, sanctions or watching an unpredictable nation gain a nuclear arsenal — seem even worse.

This isn’t really much of a gotcha, I suppose, but it seems that a lot of critics — John “Grumpy/Frumpy” Bolton among them — are not all that thrilled about the deal with North Korea, or the Country Formerly Known as a Member of the Axis of Evil. Elements of the “new” deal were brokered by President Clinton, elements that the Bush Administration actually rejected in the past.

As the White House took credit on Tuesday for what it called a “first step,” it found itself pilloried by conservatives who attacked the administration for folding in negotiations with a charter member of what Mr. Bush called the “axis of evil,” and for replicating key elements of Mr. Clinton’s agreement with North Korea.

At the same time, Mr. Bush’s advisers were being confronted by barbs from veterans of the Clinton administration, who argued that the same deal struck Tuesday had been within reach several years and a half-dozen weapons ago, had only Mr. Bush chosen to negotiate with the North rather than fixate on upending its government.

So Bush was against the deal before he was for it? I’m really glad Americans didn’t elect a goddamn flip-flopper!