Lindsay's nail polish

Hard to believe that Lindsay Lohan would paint a profane message on her fingernail before going into a court hearing that would determine whether she was sent to jail. It's obvious that she has no sense at all and a sense of entitlement as big as California. I hate to feel sorry for a sleazy rich actress, but (to borrow a movie line) "[s]he don't have one brain in [her] poor old head."

Now come the Alps

The Tour de France heads into the Alps beginning tomorrow, and both of the next two legs finish at ski stations after uphill runs. If RadioShack is going to make use of its powerful team, those two stages would be a good place to start.

I still can't believe that there are four U.S. teams in the race.

James Lebron?

So I keep reading these stories about some bozo named James Lebron, who wants to spend the next few years living the high life in South Beach. Why is that news?

OK, OK, I kid. I know who LeBron James is. But I still don't understand why all news had to stop for him to announce his NBA vacation plans. I saw him in this year's playoffs, and he was clearly thinking "vacation" even before the Cavaliers were eliminated.

He does gain a huge monetary edge by picking Miami as his new NBA home, since Florida doesn't have any income tax. But I have to think that he went to Miami so that the pressure on him would ramp down, since some of the pressure would be transferred to Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. Boy, was he wrong.

Dinner Bell Mel dies

Mel Turpin, the former Cleveland Cavaliers center nicknamed "Dinner Bell Mel" during his disappointing (and ofter overweight) NBA career, committed suicide. After his NBA career, in which he was the 6th player chosen in the draft (what we would today refer to as a "lottery pick"), he ended up as a security guard.

Lord only knows what role all of the abuse that he received as a pro played in his decision. All I know is that, growing up in Cleveland, I can't remember anyone who had to take more abuse from the home fans, not even the Cavs' infamous owner Ted Stepien (nicknamed "Stupien" by fans, but not by the media, who needed to keep on his good side until after he sold the team to the Gund brothers).

Heat wave

Holland-Dozier-Holland have nothing on Boston over the last week. It officially hit 100 yesterday, although it was 103 in Lexington.

I'm amazed that businesses were allowed to open, considering the demand on the power grid for air conditioning. Then again, in Texas, this would be a cool spell.

Birthday

My younger daughter turned 13 yesterday. Now I have two teenaged girls in the house. As the old saying goes, time flies.

World Cup novice winner

Through Sunday, only seven different countries have won the FIFA World Cup (what we Americans would call the world championship of soccer, even though it's technically called "association football") in its 18 competitions. Four are from Europe (Italy, 4 times; Germany, 3; England, 1; France, 1), and three are from South America (Brazil, 5; Uruguay, 2; Argentina, 2). More interestingly, no European team has ever won outside of Europe (in 8 such Cups), and only one non-European team has ever won in Europe (Brazil, 1958 in Sweden, in 10 such Cups).

That will all change Sunday, July 11, when two European non-winners (the Netherlands and Spain) face off for this year's Cup in South Africa.

This isn't the place for me to discuss how I bleed orange (OK, not really, but the Dutch will know what I mean). Instead, I want to discuss whether the shift of worldwide power away from Europe has stopped.

FIFA has been consistently reducing the number of European sides in the Cup, supposedly in recognition of the growing strength of non-European nations. This year, only 6 European sides survived the first round and made the final 16, which was supposed to be a sign of parity. More problematic for the Europeans was that all of those teams faced other European teams in the round of 16, meaning that no more than 3 European clubs could make the final 8. But all three of those clubs then made the final 4, and two of them made the final 2, and they knocked off every one of the former South American winners along the way (Netherlands took out Brazil and Uruguay; Germany took out Argentina). Four years before, in Germany, when European teams took every spot in the final 4, most of us thought it was a fluke tied to the continent hosting the tournament. But two straight Cups of European success argues for more than a fluke -- it augurs a power shift.

We'll see just how far the power in soccer has shifted in 2014, when Brazil hosts the Cup for the first time since 1950. Meanwhile, we can say conclusively that Africa clearly didn't deserve its six spots in the Cup, and also that the U.S. team really shot itself in the foot by losing to Ghana, the only African team to (marginally) survive the first round.

Tour de France

We're now four days into the Tour de France, and the bike race has resembled demolition derby over the last three of them. Day 1 was a short prologue, unsurprisingly won by Fabian Cancellara, a Swiss time trial specialist and reigning Olympic and world champion in the time trial nicknamed "Spartacus" for his strength. More interestingly, Lance Armstrong managed to finish fourth, just slightly ahead of Alberto Contador and Levi Leipheimer, both of whom defeated him decisively in last year's final time trial.

One of the interesting things about the Tour this year is that there are four American-based teams competing in it. Last year there were two American teams, Garmin and HTC-Columbia, although the Kazakhstani team Astana, which included Armstrong and Leipheimer and was managed by former US Postal Service/Discovery Channel manager Johann Bruyneel, was a de facto American team at the time.

This year, Garmin and HTC-Columbia are back. Eight of the nine riders from Astana last year, with the lone exception of Contador, moved to the new American team RadioShack. The fourth American team is BMC Racing Team, which is owned by the legendary (in the U.S., at least) Jim Ochowitz, the former cyclist who led the legendary 7-Eleven Cycling Team, which became the first U.S. team in the Tour de France in 1986 and once featured a young Lance Armstrong.

However, the abundance of American teams hasn't created a surge in American riders. There are only eight Americans among the 36 riders on these teams, and one of the teams, HTC-Columbia, doesn't include any Americans. Garmin has three (Christian Vande Velde, David Zabriskie, Tyler Farrar), two of whom used to ride for USPS; RadioShack also has three (Armstrong, Leipheimer, Chris Horner), two of whom also used to ride for USPS; BMC has two (George Hincapie, Brent Bookwalter), one of whom also used to ride for USPS. In other words, of the eight Americans in the Tour, five of them date back to the USPS team, which was replaced by Discovery Channel at the end of 2004. That doesn't say much for young American cycling talent.

RadioShack is also a fascinating team talent-wise. There are five riders on the team who are potential team leaders -- Armstrong, Leipheimer, Janez Brajkovic (Slovenia), Andreas Kloeden (Germany) and Horner -- and only four "true" domesticques -- Yaroslav Popovych (Ukraine), Gregory Rast (Switzerland), Sergio Paulinho (Portugal) and Dmitriy Muravyev (Kazakhstan). In part, that may have accounted for the team's chaos on the cobbles today, as Popovych had to help Armstrong after he flatted, and the team's other contenders were on their own (including with their own flat problems).

But the fact that Saxo Bank was able to establish a break and time gap when Frank Schleck of that team broke his collarbone is a sort of good news-bad news scenario for the team. This is very early in the race for Andy Schleck to lose his brother, the champion of the Tour of Switzerland and a strong contender in his own right. Last year, the big break of the race came when Andy and Frank broke away with Astana teammates Contador and Kloeden ... and then Contador foolishly dropped Kloeden to knock him off the podium. There won't be a repeat of that this year.

And Thomas Frei's revelations about EPO microdosing probably mean that this year's Tour will be the cleanest yet in terms of doping. Frei also revealed something that I've assumed was obvious, although the Wall Street Journal, for one, hasn't caught on, with its gullible and foolish parroting of Floyd Landis claiming that Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel organized team-wide doping: the riders dope on their own, without their teams knowing.

That's why there is such a wall of silence -- a doping rider who tells the truth about doping is just hurting other riders (generally ones who helped him learn how to dope), not the team that dropped him. It's exactly the same as it was during the past decade in baseball and track.

But inevitably, this raises the question: did Lance Armstrong do something not permitted by the rules during his string of Tour victories? Well, obviously, he did. Why else would he have been involved with the EPO/blood transfusing Dr. Ferrari? He may have used EPO in 1999, and he may have received blood transfusions through 2004, when he broke off relations with Dr. Ferrari. But I doubt that we'll ever know for sure. One thing that I do know is that Landis' story about a fake bus breakdown id obviously false. Why? Because the bus driver would have sold the story to L'Equipe for a fortune long before now. It's not possible for a "conspiracy of silence" to extend to these non-riders, because their reward for telling is so disproportionate to the risk.

Basically, any stories that involve people other than Armstrong and perhaps Hincapie participating in Armstrong's doping program seem inherently phony. You'd think a business publication would recognize that.

Oil spill

I'll have to talk about the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico at some point. For now, it just seems like the Iranian hostage crisis, in that it drags on for day after day, and there's always some excuse for not doing anything.

Mel Gibson -- who cares?

Is there anyone in the world (other than Mel Gibson, his ex-wife, his ex-girlfriend, his children, and all of their lawyers) who actually cares what Mel Gibson has to say? Haven't we already established that he's nuts?

We could ask the question that if you get involved with someone that the whole world knows is nuts, are you entitled to whine about how awful he was to you afterward, or should you just have to suck it up because you took an open and obvious risk?

But I don't even care enough to ask that question. Go away, celebrity gossip.

Death of Robert Byrd

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) died. Byrd was probably the last card-carrying Klansman to ever serve in the Senate, although that little inconvenient truth has been buried in the articles, probably because the liberal media loves him so much for rolling in on his wheelchair to vote for ObamaCare during the winter.

I do love the headline of the AP article on his death: "Bird to lie in Senate chamber where he served"

Makes sense. Now that he's dead, there's no reason for him to stop lying.

Former TV commentator Alan Colmes, who wrote this stupidity about the late Senator:

Byrd, unlike Thurmond ..., changed his views over time. By the late 1970s, Byrd was speaking in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Eventually, he regarded his vote in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the Vietnam War a sin. In fact, Byrd became a liberal lion who stood up to the Bush administration, invoking the rules of the Senate he knew like no one else to point out that it is illegal to fight without a declaration of war.

http://www.aolnews.com/article/opinion-robert-byrd-evolved-unlike-many-of-his-critics/19534279

Fascinating assertion. The way I read it, Colmes has asserted that the fact that Byrd bacame a left-winer should absolve him of his "youthful" racism, while the fact that Thurmond became a right-winger should cause him to remain tainted. Maybe I'm misreading it, but I doubt it.

Perhaps I'm alone in finding that the posthumous revelation of Thurmond's half-black daughter, whom he fathered in 1925, revealed his racism to be more a matter of political opportunism than personal belief. Probably like Colmes, I think Thurmond was an opportunist and a bozo. But I see no reason not to tar Byrd with the same brush.

And the assertion that Byrd somehow uniquely understood the rules of the Senate is nothing more than gibberish. Ever since Korea, Americans have been arguing about fighting wars without a declaration of war (which have been dubbed by both Democratic and Republican administrations as "police actions" to avoid the necessity of a vote for war). In this case, Colmes conveniently forgets (assuming he has enough brainpower to even remember) to point out the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, which both Republicans and Democrats of the time felt gave G.W. Bush sufficient authority to act in Iraq. In fact, Byrd's attempts to limit the grant of authority were voted down by bipartisan margins, with the majority of Democrats voting with the Republicans against his proposed limitations.

But let the Byrd hagiography roll on among the far left. He was, after all, their champion (when he wasn't busy grabbing pork for West Virginia, that is).

Hello again?

Why do I only intermittently feel like blogging? Perhaps because this year has been a total trade-off of good news and bad news? The good news of the Scott Brown election being tempered by the bad news of the bloated health care bill being passed with only Democratic support using the reconciliation gambit? Or the mixed news of the death of the estate tax (a stupid, if temporary and perhaps still to be rescinded, loss of revenue) and the continuing stall of the tax extenders bill? And the continuing stalemates on the "doc fix" and the so-called "financial reform" bill? And the foolishness on carried interest? Why don't I want to blog about this nonsense?

Perhaps I have caught Obama's pernicious indifference to what happens to America. Anyway, even if that's the cause, maybe I can find a cure.

41st Vote

If Scott Brown wins the race for Massachusetts Senate, he can thank Al Franken.

For as much as I like Brown, he's been pretty much a nonentity in the State Senate ... not for any lack of vision or intelligent positions, but because the Republicans don't even have enough votes to uphold a veto. Massachusetts is a classic one-party state, even despite the widespread corruption among the Democrats here. As a result, Brown has largely been speaking to an audience of party sympathizers that isn't large enough to fill a classroom.

But when Franken won the U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota in 2008, he gave the Democrats in Congress exactly 60 votes, which is a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, because it takes 41 votes to uphold a filibuster and the Republicans only have 40. That's what "inspired" the Democrats to pass a health-care plan without any popular support. But, the entire fate of this plan rests on the Democrats retaining this Massachusetts Senate seat, since Brown's vote by itself would be enough to permit a filibuster to stop the plan.

Having been the minority leader of a one-party Senate, Brown has skillfully played his role as the potential swing vote to the hilt. Never mind the fact that he is a far, far better candidate than the deceitful Martha Coakley -- his appeal is his role as the potential "budget-buster killer." None of that would have been possible if he were the 39th or 42nd vote for the Republicans in the Senate.

Cold weather

The bitter-cold weather that the U.S. has been experiencing says nothing about the reality of global warming, let alone the possibility of man-made global warming. But I have to admit to finding myself stunned when a Washington Post weather column cited a left-wing advocacy group in discussing it:

So what, then, should the press be doing differently today? In my view, journalists should make an effort to include the broader climate context whenever it is scientifically justified. That means that it might be unnecessary to mention climate change in a story about a short-term cold snap, but could be integral to a story on heavy snowfall.

For perspective on how this might be done, I turned to Joe Romm of the liberal Center for American Progress, who has been pushing for more coverage of the links between extreme weather and climate events and global climate change.

I have to admit, I love people who refuse to let logic or scientific integrity stand in the way of a good story. In this case, discuss global warming theory when it's consistent with the weather event and ignore it when it's inconsistent.

Science has survived worse blunders, of course -- although most of those, like the current rush toward man-made global warming theory, were both politically and religiously motivated. The only good point that the global warmists make, and one which cannot be denied, is that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has to have an impact. No one can deny that. We can dispute whether it would produce global warming (I happen to doubt it), but it has to have an impact, just like any other chamical shift would. This is why we should be trying to reduce our CO2 output, not the overblown panic bleats from Luddites whose real objective is to return us to a secular version of the 19th Century.

More nukes!

Patriots in the playoffs

You know, end-of-the-year football games were cold enough back when the season ended in early January. Ask Dan Fouts about playing in the Freeze Bowl in Cincinnati. Or Don Meredith about the Ice Bowl in Green Bay. But now that the NFL season goes on until February, we all but guarantee awful weather for the playoffs.

All that is a polite way of saying that the New England Patriots and the Baltimore Ravens are going to freeze their butts off this Sunday in the wild card game in Foxborough.

Health care bill

I don't have the heart to complain about the piece of crap that is being foisted on America in the health care bill. Democrats have to take the lion's share of the blame, because they're trying to pass a bill on a straight party-line vote instead of negotiating a bill that fixes the fundamental issues in U.S. health care. But Republicans come in for some blame too, although their weakness in the Senate (only 40 votes) means that they really can't do anything about the Democrats' desire for a party-line bill.

Maybe Republican Scott Brown will upset Democrat Martha Coakley for the open Massachusetts Senate seat that used to be held as a personal fiefdom by the Kennedy family. That one vote change would make all the difference, as it would require that a bill actually be negotiated between the parties instead of being imposed as a test of party discipline.

All I know is that I'm contributing to Brown, and I intend to vote for him. Not only is he the leader of the tiny Republican contingent in Massachusetts, but his daughter Ayla was on American Idol. It's about time for us to elect someone who actually understands reality TV instead of railing about its evils.

Is blogging boring?

Yes. That's why I can't do it more often. But I'll try.