Herd of Cats Forced to Watch Endless Baseball; Hairball Gacking All Around

It's baseball playoff season again. This means that in our family, the wives who are not baseball fans (that's most of us) become nearly suicidal. The Powell boys have to watch every #$%2#%&% game as if it was the last, most exciting thing on earth. "Oh, this is a great game!" was my greeting tonight as I slogged through the door after a particularly and nearly cripplingly bracing day at the office.

I could probably tolerate it better if it was announced by our wonderfully relaxing and gently entertaining Texas Rangers announcers, but instead, tonight the Yankee game was announced by a team that includes Joe Morgan. Joe Morgan doesn't do "color." He lectures. Endlessly, almost without taking a breath. He turns baseball into an educational course with all the endless serious detail of the most boring professor you ever saw. I'm sure the endless lecture might be great if you are a ten year old who enrolled or someone in umpire school or something. But if you're just trapped in a room with a baseball nut who is willing to put up with Morgan, it's murder.

I remember one year that one love affair in our family nearly didn't survive October because of the high priority placed on baseball by one partner. I'm not thinking of divorcing Au Contraire. I'm just thinking that if Joe Morgan is going to be with us all the way through the playoffs and the series, I'm just going to get a long knitting needle and pierce my own eardrums.

Or give in and buy an Ipod, maybe.

Anyway, it sure screwed up my knitting nerves tonight. I'm working on a cabled poncho knit on giant needles. This is my first cable project. I'm learning as I go along. And now I have knit and unraveled and re-knit the same five rows twice. I think maybe I've got the hang of it, and it has given me an opportunity to really begin to understand the structure of the knit and purl stitch and how to fix mistakes.

So I finally put that down and went to the net.

Here is what I found:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, looks askance at the $250 billion request from the thirsty, crooked Democrat machine in Louisiana:

Barbour said he hoped the federal government would pay 90% of the tab for repairing public infrastructure in Mississippi, but estimated the total federal costs for relief, recovery and rebuilding in his state would be under $50 billion and might not be much more than $30 billion.  The $250 billion aid package being recommended for nearby Louisiana by that state’s U.S. senators, Barbour said, “seems to me very excessive.”

P.J. O'Rourke's take is pretty good:

CHIEF AMONG THE MARVELOUS QUALITIES of liberalism is its ability to see the good in human suffering--and make a good thing of it. How like the early Christians, if the early Christians had been in politics. Hurricane Katrina was a blessing to liberals, a consecrated opportunity to make advocates of small government look small, to enlarge largess with a public dole of private goods, to expand the elemental purview of politics to include earth, water, air, and (with gas at $3) fire, and to shrink the reputation of a despised president. Hurricane Rita, with its sensible actions by state and city officials, orderly evacuations, lack of looting and minimal loss of life, was not a blessing. One's heart went out to liberals, watching their disappointment as Rita failed to destroy Galveston, flood Houston, or wipe Crawford off the map. How can liberals make sure that America never experiences another Rita?

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Thomas Sowell has some words of wisdom about the Miers nomination:

The very fact that Harriet Miers is a member of an evangelical church suggests that she is not dying to be accepted by the beautiful people, and is unlikely to sell out the Constitution of the United States in order to be the toast of Georgetown cocktail parties or praised in the New York Times. Considering some of the turkeys that Republicans have put on the Supreme Court in the past, she could be a big improvement.

We don't know. But President Bush says he has known Harriet Miers long enough that he feels sure.

For the rest of us, she is a stealth nominee. Not since The Invisible Man has there been so much stealth.

That's not ideal by a long shot. But ideal was probably never in the cards, given the weak sisters among the Republicans' Senate "majority."

And of course if she's disqualified in some people's minds because of her Evangelical religion, that's what we call discrimination. If she was a Muslim or a Jew suspicion and stereotyping wouldn't be allowed, and that's just a statewide fact.

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The New York Times is playing its same old games. Here, too. If you didn't think Tom Friedman had jumped the shark yet, this ought to convince you.

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Sir David Frost has joined al-Jazeera.

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Ever feel bad about not being in the Nobel Prize winner pipeline? Don't.

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This tickles me, mon petite poulet.

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Dan Rather is still wallowing in delusions of grandeur.

Over at ABC, it's much worse than that. They've had some of those rubber band bracelets made up for the news staff. Now here's hubris, folks. Remember the WWJC "What Would Jesus Do: bracelets that have been popular the last few years? The ABC News bracelets say, "What Would Peter Do?"

Now I know I've been busy the last couple of weeks and have missed some big stories, but do these bracelets mean that I missed the story about how after Peter Jennings had been dead three days he rose again and retook the anchor chair on the evening news?

I didn't think so...