Mid-July Roundup

At this point, I think we can conclusively say that getting engaged and buying regular tickets for a major league baseball team is bad news for a blog. Tough luck, but the blog’s just going to have to deal — or, as I said in a comment on this site a few months ago, “Priorities, m’boy, priorities.”

But let’s do a quick tour, just to see what interesting stuff has gone on while I laid down on the job.

• Several of my co-workers are native Chinese speakers, and their cube-to-cube chatter exhibits a fascinating linguistic phenomenon called code switching. A conversation that starts in Chinese might shift into English for a sentence or two, then (apparently) seamlessly back and forth again several times in the span of 90 seconds.
  I could tell more if I understood Chinese, but even with my complete lack of knowledge in that arena, it seems to me that work-related segments — and not just technical terms, but talk about work hours, time off etc. — come out in English, while parts that I would expect to be personal (just by contextual positioning, tone of voice etc.) are usually in Chinese. It’s quite interesting to listen to as an amateur linguist.
• Bret is on a roll these days (though it’s said so for a while on the hot dog cart). He’s blogging up a storm during his last summer of freedom before he joins the Metro-riding masses. Pay him a visit, read the comments, and check out his Flickr photostream as well.
• Amy has also been in high gear recently, despite (or perhaps because of) her pregnancy and move from Paris to Arizona by way of the East Coast. I’m still weighing my bets for the baby birth stats pool.
• A few weeks ago, Eric at Off Wing and Ryan at Distinguished Senators took note of the Nats’ high no-show rate — people buy tickets and then fail to show up for the game. I’ve contributed to this problem several times myself, and I suspect the size and inflexibility of the Nats’ ticket packages are the main causes. Almost all MLB teams offer fixed packages down to as few as 7 or 8 games, while this season the Nats only offered one set of 41 games or two different sets of 20 games. In addition, several other teams offer “make-your-own” packages — essentially bulk tickets, where you could buy ten at a particular price level and use them any way you like, whether it be ten seats at one game or a single seat for ten games. The Nats offered nothing of the sort. Hopefully, this can be attributed to the rushed nature of the move from Montreal, rather than a deliberate attempt to force buy-up; if so, next year should offer more options (and I’ll be more likely to purchase a package again). My fondest wish? Trade-in, where if I knew in advance that I’d miss a game, I could trade my tickets in for equal value on a game I could attend. With lower-deck patrons taking advantage as well as upper-deck customers like me, the Nats would then have the opportunity to resell expensive seats to walk-up fans, who right now must buy seats at my level or cheaper due to the full-season lower-deck sellout. Win-win, right?
• While I still don’t drink coffee or any of its derivatives, I’ll second Monday’s D103.com endorsement of the Starbucks Mint Mocha Chip Frappucino by adding a BTN endorsement of its coffeeless counterpart, the Mint Chocolate Chip creme-based Frappucino. Like Daryl, I have trouble with Starbucks’ pretentious sizing scheme. But now that I rattle off a fourteen-syllable drink order (at 29 cents per syllable!) without blinking, it seems that emphasizing “medium” over “grande” crosses the line between principled and passive-aggressive.
• Karl Rove / Valerie Plame / Joe Wilson: yawn. Lileks is right on this one — even I can’t make myself care, and I both follow politics and work inside the Beltway.

I’d promise more content soon, but you wouldn’t believe it if I did. So you’ll have to be satisfied that photos from Lake J and Baltimore are coming… sometime. Hopefully “sometime” will be before next month, when Cleveland/Cedar Point, Roanoke and western Maryland will join the photo queue in successive weekends.

What's Wrong With Howard Dean

Lack of timeliness can be the death of a blog. But whatever. If you’re still reading, you’re a die-hard, so you’ll put up with it, I hope. ;-)

Howard Dean’s references a couple weeks back to the Republican Party as a “white Christian party” caused reactions ranging from outrage on the right to mild embarrassment at center-left to cheerleading on the far left. I’m a bit irritated with it, not least because if you swap in any other ethnicity or religion into his comments, he’d be hounded out of political life.

It’s really symptomatic of a bigger problem, though, and one I expected when Dean was chosen to head the Democratic National Committee. His reputation as a loose cannon and presidential backing by far-left groups like MoveOn.org pointed to an event like this, and to some extent the reaction.

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Bolling over Connaughton: Bad Sign for Republican NoVA

I’ve got a few quick thoughts on the Virginia Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor, where state Sen. Bill Bolling from Hanover (suburban Richmond) put a significant hurting on the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, Sean Connaughton.

Despite significant endorsements on Connaughton’s side from downstate politicians, Bolling absolutely slaughtered him in every Congressional district outside the Northern Virginia commuting zone. Bolling ran an effective negative campaign, capitalizing on the traditional downstate image of Northern Virginia as a liberal haven.

The reason this race was important is that if the Republicans retake the top two spots in the state (which seems likely, with the Dems running liberal LtGov and former Richmond mayor Tim Kaine), the sitting LtGov will be the prohibitive frontrunner for the 2009 gubernatorial nomination. Meanwhile, Connaughton’s defeat leaves no one with Northern Virginia ties on the state-level party escalator, at a time when Fairfax County has begun trending majority-blue for the first time.

Transportation makes this area lean toward slightly higher spending across the board; Republican or Democrat, you simply can’t get elected up here without trying to address traffic concerns, whether it be by road or rail. Anti-spending conservative ideologues may give the statewide party warm fuzzies, but they need our votes to win. Those votes get less and less likely to go Republican the longer the state party avoids realistically addressing NoVA issues, and running a moderate with regional credibility out of the party lineup is a bad sign.

Comparative Government 101: Iraq

Gerritt posted Tuesday regarding this week’s drama in Iraq, where a meeting of the newly elected National Assembly failed to yield a prime minister:

Iraq the Vote: Election? Democracy? [I think not!](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9275-2005Mar29.html)

Nothing personal, Gerritt, but what’s going on in Iraq actually is democracy, and isn’t even that uncommon in parliamentary systems of government.

Remember that in a parliamentary system, the prime minister (head of government) is usually the leader of the majority party in the main legislative body; the PM then picks other legislators to serve as cabinet ministers (US: secretaries). “The government” in parliamentary politics refers to the PM and the slate of ministers, not the entire structure as it does in the US. In turn, the government can be taken down by a majority vote of the legislature at any time, called a “vote of no confidence.” When Americans hear “the government falls,” we think rioting, chaos, civil war; when people in countries parliamentary systems hear that their government has fallen, they think “oh great, a new election in six weeks.”

If no one party gets a majority of the seats in the legislature, you get one of two things. You could have a minority government, where the party with a plurality of the seats forms a government on its own, with unspoken acceptance by enough other parties to keep the government from falling. Canada’s Liberals did this last year with just 36.71% of their vote. Or you can have a coalition government where two or more parties make a formal alliance, with cabinet ministers named from most or all of the parties involved. One variant of this is the “grand coalition” or “national unity government” where both of the country’s leading parties participate; this is the case in Israel right now, where both right-wing Likud and left-wing Labor are allied in a coalition led by Likud PM Ariel Sharon. Both of these types of government are rather unstable, because all it usually takes to tear the whole thing down is one or two parties deciding they could gain position in a new election.

Even countries with a stable, mature political culture have parties flake out of coalitions at the last second. The problem is exacerbated in Iraq because Saddam-era dictatorship didn’t encourage the development of competent legislators, but the system is democratic in nature.

Tom Davis: Smarter Than Tony Kornheiser

If you’ve been watching the news, you know the House Committee on Government Reform held hearings Thursday on the Major League Baseball steroid scandal, subpoenaing several current and retired players plus Commissioner Bud Selig and players’ union head Donald Fehr. The committee chairman is Republican Rep. Thomas Davis of Virginia’s 11th District, covering the central-southern half of Fairfax and most of Prince William County.

Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post and ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption has been adamant over the past few days that Davis instigated these hearings purely out of spite for baseball choosing DC over Northern Virginia as the Expos’ new home. For anyone with knowledge of DC-area baseball politics, this is a patently stupid theory on its face, and it’s rather surprising that a local writer would even consider it. But let’s take a moment to knock it down comprehensively, just for fun.

• First: Davis represents neither of the proposed stadium locations in Virginia.
  The early preferred sites for Northern Virginia baseball were clearly in the Arlington/Alexandria corridor, well inside the Beltway on Metro lines. Almost all of inside-the-Beltway VA is part of the 8th District, represented by Democrat Jim Moran. After those sites were rejected, baseball promoters proposed a stadium north of Dulles Airport in Loudoun County, part of Republican Frank Wolf’s 10th District. That location was the one actually rejected last fall in favor of the District of Columbia proposal.
• Second: Virginia probably didn’t want the stadium, and certainly didn’t want to pay for it.
  The Arlington/Alexandria proposal died very early in the game, due to (a) property owners’ disinterest in selling and (b) NIMBYs. Out at Dulles, people questioned both the traffic load (20,000 more cars on the westbound Toll Road during rush hour?) and the difficulty Maryland residents/potential fans would have just reaching the stadium. On the financial side, VA Gov. Mark Warner (D) stated in September that DC was offering baseball more money than Virginia was willing to give. I think this guy’s view is rather representative of ground-level support for a publicly-funded stadium in 703-land.
• Third: Davis doesn’t hate the District!
  Matter of fact, Davis is sponsoring a bill to grant DC voting representation in the House. He’s not a kneejerk hard-right, small-government guy; that kind of politician simply can’t get elected in this area with several hundred thousand federal and fed-contract workers. There’s no political hay to be made here in screwing the District.

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