I didn’t find there to be anything particularly earth-shattering about the revelation that George W. Bush questioned Sarah Palin’s qualifications:
This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for. She hasn’t spent one day on the national level.
Her candidacy was, at the very least, an improbable rise to national politics and at the very most a product of irresponsible selection procedures and a disturbing game of politics. The general consensus among political insiders a year later is that Palin’s nomination was more of the latter. That conservative pundits like George Will and Charles Krauthammer so publicly expressed doubt about Palin merely affirmed as much. Just imagine what Republican colleagues said behind closed doors, in company of one another instead of the media…which is what Bush thought he was doing. It’s just too bad for him that among his company happened also to be an opportunistic speechwriter looking to cash in on just these types of ‘gotcha’ sound bites from the Bush Administration.
That Bush kept his private skepticism as civil as he did is what is notable.
Me Talk Presidential One Day [Men Style]
Another somewhat counterintuitive opinion that came across the whereIstand desk today was Bill O’Reilly’s apparent support for a public option:
But you know, I want that, Ms. Owcharenko. I want that. I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don’t like their health insurance, if it’s too expensive, they can’t afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.
O’Reilly gets unfairly grouped in with the other clowns at Fox News. Yes, he is a clown; yes, he is a jerk but can be agreeable on a number of liberal issues. He supports same-sex marriage and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and believes government should regulate fuel-efficiency standards. He also supported Obama releasing the CIA torture memos and criticized John McCain’s mid-campaign call for suspension of a gas tax.
O’Reilly endorses the public option, which he previously called ‘socialism.’[Think Progress]
It’s always fun to see a public figure step out from his realm of expertise and offer opinions elsewhere. On Tuesday, Joe Paterno, the 82 year-old head coach of Penn State football, responded to a press conference question and rambled his way into a couple of poignant thoughts on print journalism and media consolidation:
On media consolidation:
You’re influenced by what people are after you to say something because you’re competing. It’s like I don’t even turn on the television set anymore, because one television station is anti-Obama. You like somebody [to] have an impartial view of some things because they studied it and they know about it. And they’re not being influenced by the guy that owns the paper or the guy that owns the radio station so it’s a different world and it’s not the kind of world that I’m comfortable with.
On internet’s effect on journalism:
I read the newspapers. I feel bad about the way things have gone with the newspaper business, with the guys, with the whatever they call it, computers, getting all that stuff on. Because it’s taking away some of the guys…who set a standard for writing. People don’t realize guys, they were all sports writers first. Grant Rice and those guys, and I don’t know, it’s a different world. And I’m not part of that world. I’m really not. I love to read the newspapers. I’d love to read the sports page, but to be very frank with you, I don’t because so much of it you guys base on what you are getting in an e-mail.
With exception to that last part about e-mail not being a reliable source of information, JoePa makes some insightful commentary and it isn’t far off from what other, more tech-savvy media commentators have echoed.
themorningcall.com [via The Big Lead]
Here are the prediction rankings heading into the final few weeks of the MLB regular season. Baseball scribes should be ashamed to have let a NFL writer into the top ranking. King picked five of six teams (Yankees, Angels, Phillies, Cardinals, and Dodgers) while, like so many others, missing entirely on the Indians in the AL Central.
Elsewhere anyone picking the Cubs, who’ve dropped 9.5 games to the Cardinals since 8/10, probably moved down considerably in the rankings. The complete list after the break. Read more…
The list of running backs is updated from August 18th and reflect the rankings before this weekend’s games. Several new lists of rankings were added, and you can see the complete list of sources below.
RB1, First Tier
1.25 Adrian Peterson (Last week: 1.11)
RB1, Second Tier
3.59 Michael Turner (Last week: 3.77)
3.59 Maurice Jones-Drew (Last week: 3.31)
4.06 Matt Forte (Last week: 4.31)
RB1, Third Tier
6.35DeAngelo Williams (Last week: 6.54)
6.41 Steven Jackson (Last week: 6.77)
6.88 LaDainian Tomlinson (Last week: 7.31)
Read more…
This weekend was probably the most popular weekend for fantasy football drafts, but there are still two more weeks until the season starts and that means player rankings are bound to fluctuate. The list below are updated from August 18th and reflect the rankings before this weekend’s games. Several new lists of rankings were added, and you can see the complete list after the rankings.
QB1, First Tier
Brees and Brady distinguished themselves from Manning as interchangeable #1 QBs, which earns them their own tier; notably Walter Football dropped Brees to the fourth overall QB in his rankings.
1.6 Drew Brees (Last week: 1.5)
2.2 Tom Brady (Last week: 2.58)
QB1, Second Tier
Rodgers emerges as the consensus pick after the Big 3 (Brees, Brady, Manning). For this distinction he joins Manning, who should still be the 3rd QB taken off the board.
3.8 Peyton Manning (Last week: 3)
4.13 Aaron Rodgers (Last week:4.25) Read more…
RealClearPolitics and its less popular sister site, RealClearSports, does a lot of cool things with aggregating commentary. Each morning, when you visit either site, editors have neatly presented a balanced perspective of opinions from the previous day’s news. They linksource to blogs, op-eds, newspaper editorials, show transcripts, etc. For my job as editor on whereIstand, it’s been an indispensible tool for researching the opinions of public figures and posting them to under our structured issues.
Anyway, as I was browsing the site today I remembered their sports site has been doing a Power Rankings Average for while now. It uses the power rankings of seven reputable sports sites to form averages.
It’s neither earth-shattering or necessarily valuable insight, however. Power rankings are more a reflection of what already happened, and not what’s going to happen. In the most recent MLB Power Ranking averages, there’s nothing particularly shocking about the New York Yankees and Anaheim Angels being ranked as the top two teams in the league. The sports sites unanimously agrees, as they rank the teams in unison as #1 and #2.
I think it’s much more interesting to preemptively track predictions and projections and then, in real time as the results are being played out “on the field,” see how those prognostications have panned out. Which is at least one reason I’m very psyched for the upcoming NFL season.
Quarterbacks on Tuesday, Running backs on Wednesday and wide receivers today. Friends from various fantasy football leagues believe I’m tipping my strategic hand for upcoming drafts but they still don’t understand how these rankings were compiled. Read this for more of a background. See links below to the various sources I pulled from to make these.
*The number in parenthesis is the difference between a player’s highest and lowest rank (or range).
WR1, First Tier
1.23 Larry Fitzgerald (Range: 2nd – 1st = 1 )
WR1, Second Tier
2.46 Andre Johnson (Range: 5th – 1st = 4 )
2.92 Randy Moss (Range: 4th – 1 = 3)
WR1 Third Tier
4.62 Calvin Johnson (Range: 11th – 2nd = 9) Read more…
Although not all lists have inserted Brett Favre into their rankings, he’s beginning to pop up on most, and despite coming out of retirement just a couple days ago, he’s getting some veteran respect. Of 9 lists, his average rank is exactly 20th overall, with Fantasy Football Challenge ranking him highest, at 12th, and Walter Football and FFToday each ranking him the lowest, at 24th.
Last year he finished in the top 20 (16th in my league), so there’s no reason to believe that with a more familiar offense and better weapons surrounding him, he can’t at least repeat that performance.
Wide receiver rankings will be up later this evening.
Quarterback rankings were yesterday. Today: running backs. Who’s too high? Who’s too low? Whatever you do, don’t over think it: Draft Adrian Peterson if you have the #1 pick, ok?
RB1, First Tier
1.11 Adrian Peterson (Range: 3rd- 1st = 2)
RB1, Second Tier
3.31 Maurice Jones-Drew (Range: 11th – 1st = 10)
3.77 Michael Turner (Range: 9th – 2nd = 7)
4.31 Matt Forte (Range: 9th – 2nd = 7)
RB1, Third Tier
6.54 DeAngelo Williams (Range: 13th – 1st = 12)
6.77 Steven Jackson (Range: 10th – 3rd = 7)
7.31 LaDainian Tomlinson (Range: 13th – 3rd = 10) Read more…
