Wow ... nobody elected to #Cooperstown

Wow. Now I can write a more complete post, with the BBWAA votes posted at its website.

And here's a list of vote returns from writers who went public.

And, I have emailed or tweeted every voter with a public ballot, for whom I could find an email address, who voted FOR Jack Morris. If sabermetrics fans had a campaign FOR Blyleven, there can be one against Morris, right?

First, aside from the vote, for the roiders, they have a new enemy, who may reflect many writers' thoughts.  Ken Burns calls them "motherfuckers," as reported via Yahoo. 

That would be you, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, et al. Here's my thoughts on likely roiders. 

Related to that, Jayson Stark asks some of the right rhetorical questions (along with some of the wrong ones, being "big Hall" voter). But it's a start.

And at right, we see the BBWAA thoughts. Both the Bobbsey Twins were below 40 percent. 

Contra Stark, I don't have a problem with that, if the folks in Cooperstown and Bug Selig don't. If they do, and Michael Weiner of the players union does, too, then, it's their problem to start fixing. The writers have spoken about the roiders. Already had on a few.

That said, I think Stark is probably full of crap if he thinks we've already elected a roider. Even Rickey Henderson, thought by some to "fit the profile" on Boswell's comment on Ken Burns' "10th Inning," doesn't. His career takes pretty much a normal non-roider decline, starting at age 34. Eddie Murray had a one-year spike at age 39, but, that is a clear outlier. I've gone back more than a decade and don't see any roiders in the HOF. More ESPN "big Hall" BS.

But, I thought for sure that Craig Biggio, as a hon-roiding "message man" had a good shot this year. I even thought teammate Jeff Bagwell might join him. Why, why is he still waiting? He shouldn't be.

Now, as to that vote?

Biggio is close. He could get in next year, but that stacked 2014 ballot could spell trouble.

At least Jack Morris, the antimatter to Bert Blyleven among sabermetrically smart, didn't get in. He's not close to deserving. With just a 1 percent gain from last year, I don't see him getting in next year, but, we need to keep up a campaign against him.

Tim Raines: Can he get in soon or not? His modest jump may not spell "soon," but should keep him hopeful.

Alan Trammell: Can he step out from Cal Ripken's shadow and get in or not? Wow, he fell. Not good news at all for his last three years on the ballot.

Curt Schilling: His sabermetric stats parallel Bagwell, but  what did voters think of low career counting stats? At nearly 40 percent, and crabbed voters, he did OK, I guess. I want to see 2014, with its ace pitchers on the ballot, and how his numbers do then.

Mike Piazza: Besides "bacne," is catcher durability the biggest PEDs allegation shadow for him? Apparently not that much. I'd venture he gets in by 2016 if not earlier.

More thoughts as I update.

First, readers agree with me. Biggio and Bagwell both crossed 75 percent in the poll here.

Second, will either the Hall, the head of the BBWAA, or Selig make a statement? I doubt it.  Unless, per ESPN, the town of Cooperstown starts to feel the loss of tourist dollars.

Selig? Per another ESPN story, will either he or Michael Weiner/the union listen to Schiling?

"I think as a player, a group, this is one of the first times that we've been publicly called out," Schilling said. "I think it's fitting. ... If there was ever a ballot and a year to make a statement about what we didn't do as players -- which is we didn't actively push to get the game clean -- this is it."

Selig's not crying, not so far:

"Next year, I think you'll have a rather large class and this year, for whatever reasons, you had a couple of guys come really close," Commissioner Bud Selig said at the owners' meetings in Paradise Valley, Ariz. "This is not to be voted to make sure that somebody gets in every year. It's to be voted on to make sure that they're deserving. I respect the writers as well as the Hall itself. This idea that this somehow diminishes the Hall of baseball is just ridiculous in my opinion."

But union head Weiner sure is:

"To ignore the historic accomplishments of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, for example, is hard to justify. Moreover, to penalize players exonerated in legal proceedings -- and others never even implicated -- is simply unfair. The Hall of Fame is supposed to be for the best players to have ever played the game. Several such players were denied access to the Hall today. Hopefully this will be rectified by future voting."

Well, boo hoo. If you want it fixed by future voting, then you and/or your predecessor, Don Fehr, have to be part of the solution.

And, so do writers themselves. I'll take a look at a few, then offer a wrap-up, below the fold:

Stop it with the #Krugman for Treasury nonsense, please

First, the neoliberal president who appointed the Catfood Commission and who 10 days ago made Social Security cuts part of "fiscal cliff" talks is not going to nominate Paul Krugman to be his next Treasury Secretary to replace Little Timmy Geithner. In fact, Beltway rumor  is solidifying that the Compromiser in Chief will nominate his chief of staff, Jack Lew.

Second, Krugman wouldn't take it if offered. Besides leaving both academia and the New York Times, he knows that Obama would geld him somehow, like by moving the real action to the Council of Economic Advisors, plus nominating Geithner to replace Ben Bernanke at the Fed next year.

Yeah, yeah, Obama said almost four full years ago that he wanted to be pressured from the left. Don't tell me you still actually believe that.

This is just the surface of the issue.

Unless I'm in full idealism mode, I prefer online petition drives that are:
1. Relatively realistic;
2. Not in some way connected to fundraising efforts.

The Krugman petition does, as far as I know (especially if it's a White House site one) theoretically cross the second bar. But, it doesn't cross the first.

That's why I don't do global warming petitions to Obama. They're unrealistic, not just because of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, but also because of Barack Obama. And, they're usually connected to fundraising, especially by Gang Green enviros.

Democrats wade into "dark money" cesspool, too

A new story, done by ProPublica in conjunction with High Country News, details how "off books" liberal groups WAY outspent conservative ones in the Montana Senate race between Democratic incumbent John Tester and challenger Denny Rehberg.

A few takeaways.

First, liberals (and a guy in the White House) will play hardball, as the story shows. (Which makes me wonder where that "hardball" is when dealing with the House GOP?)

Liberal groups set up field offices, knocked on doors, featured "Montana" in their names or put horses in their TV ads. Many of them, including Montana Hunters and Anglers, were tied to a consultancy firm where a good friend of Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's campaign manager, is a partner.

The end result? Tester beat Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg by a narrow margin. And the libertarian Cox, who had so little money he didn't even have to report to federal election authorities, picked up more votes than any other libertarian in a competitive race on the Montana ballot.

Related to that ... people who claim Greens are hypocritical for allegedly taking GOP money? Even if true, Democrats-only types obviously don't have much ground to stand on. 

Second, after a few years of grumbling about Citizens United, many national-level Democrats, like Tester, will "move on" if Round 2 of a deliberate test case from Montana, or something else, doesn't get SCOTUS to modify its ruling. That's because Congress, even if Democrats have congrol of both houses with a filibuster-proof Senate, aren't revisiting campaign finance issues any time soon.

In fact, they're probably hoping you will "move on," too, accept today's Democratic Party as it is and that's that.

That's not to say that Republicans aren't worse. It is to say, per ZZ Top, that Dems are about as pure as the driven slush.

Fourth, per the story, expect the blizzard of names to be even more obfuscating in the future. I normally associate "patriotic" in a name as signifying wingnuts. Well, one liberal-leaning "dark group" put "patriotic" in its name for that reason.

Fifth, something I"ve mentioned to friends before. Expect more paid commenters to hit the webpages of stories like this and try to spin, spin, spin, the moment they come out.  In fact, I suspect that happened already in the 2012 elections. Journalism analysis sites like Columbia Journalism Review, in the last weeks before the election, were routinely having political stories hit by wingnut spam commenters.

Sixth, if this does continue to happen, there's a couple of more specific takeaways. The first is "know your audience." Ads misspelling Tester's name, not being Montana-specific, etc., were likely to carry less water. The second is timing. An early blitz runs the risk of losing attention later, or having to be repeated more and more, which then risks numbing out watchers/listeners. 

Don't trust the banks? Financial pros don't either

An in-depth article in the Atlantic says that Dodd-Frank (why is he overrated, anyway?) and other financial measures of the past four years have done almost nothing to make banks more transparent or more trustworthy.

And, that financial world experts know that, and that's why bank stocks remain depressed and more. Here's a good selection:

More and more, the people in the know don’t trust big banks either. .... Some four years after the crisis, big banks’ shares remain depressed. Even after a run-up in the price of bank stocks this fall, many remain below “book value,” which means that the banks are worth less than the stated value of the assets on their books. This indicates that investors don’t believe the stated value, or don’t believe the banks will be profitable in the future—or both. Several financial executives told us that they see the large banks as “complete black boxes,” and have no interest in investing in their stocks.

And, this issue is scary. Scary indeed, as a look at Wells Fargo shows:

Like other banks, Wells Fargo uses a three-level hierarchy to report the fair value of its securities. Level 1 includes securities traded in active, public markets; it isn’t too scary. At Level 1, fair value simply means the reported price of a security. If Wells Fargo owned a stock or bond traded on the New York Stock Exchange, fair value would be the closing price each day. 

Level 3 is hair-raising. The bank’s Level 3 estimates are “generated primarily from model-based techniques that use significant assumptions not observable in the market.” In other words, not only are there no data about the prices at which these types of assets have recently traded, but there are no observable data to inform the assumptions one might use to generate prices.  

Even worse, Wells Fargo has significant "exposure" to Enron-type Special Purpose Vehicles. But, because of the opacity of its reporting, you, I and even the best of journalists don't know how dangerous this "exposure" is.

First, the roots are bipartisan, going back to Larry Summers and other neolib Democrats leading the charge in the late 1990s to repeal Glass-Steagall. (Frank, though voting against the repeal, in his words was at best equivocal in his opposition.)

Second, that bipartisanship has increased through campaign finance corruption.

Third, there would be one way to stop it. FORCE Congressional pensions to be invested with these deceitful banksters.

Fourth, per the article's authors, we could make the rules much fewer, but much more broadly written. It was that way at one time, they note, and courts gave regulators more leeway.

The Jamie Dimons of today who complain about "overregulation"? They like it that way.

Natural gas — the bridge fuel to more global warming?

A good new article from High Country News notes two basic facts:

1. To truly be a "bridge fuel" that is less creative of climate change than coal as an electric power plant fuel, total leakage from natural gas production must be under 3 percent or so, due to methane's own greenhouse gas effect.

2. In Utah's natural gas fields, currently under intense development, that leakage is reportedly as high as 9 percent.

Go read the full story for more about leakage rates, measurement issues and more. That includes a link to a study that says the leakage is worse from fracked gas wells. Here's the level of the problem:

Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years.

Not close to a "bridge fuel" in that case.

Anchor babies DO exist

Sorry, fellow liberals, but conservatives are sometimes right. Even wingnuts are occasionally right. And, per this story out of Los Angeles, anchor babies do exist.

How much of an issue is it? I don't know. It almost surely is less, maybe even far less, than wingnuts play it up to be. But, if there is/was an entire "maternity hotel" in suburban LA for Chinese women to fly here on tourist visas (and, don't forget Bobby Jindal's parents wanting to make sure he was born in the US), isn't it just possible that similar facilities, if lower key, exist for Mexican illegal immigrants along the southern border?

The story says that there's a whole "industry" for this, apparently Chinese-specific, though the story is not quite clear, in LA's San Gabriel Valley. That would seem to underscore that something similar could indeed exist for Mexican and/or other Hispanic immigrants, whether illegal or legal.

Is the answer to revoke birthright citizenship, as wingnuts want to do? Probably not. That said, what answers short of a greater police crackdown on, and dragnet for, maternity hotels, is there?