Deregulator: Alive since '85!

I'm in National Review! The online edition, that is, with this piece about Nevada's constitutional crisis and its implications for both state politics (meaning the future of Harry Reid) and on the initiative process nationwide. Check it out, and tell your friends.

Nerds rule! The New Yorker profiles Bill James, the "Sultan of Stats," the statistical guru who has changed the way a lot of fans (including me) -- and now front-office executives -- think about baseball. (From what I've heard, James is also an important minor character in Michael Lewis' recent best-seller Moneyball.) Two decades ago, I started buying James' annual Baseball Abstracts and later his Baseball Books. I still have a few of them on my bookshelf, and was delighted with his descriptive writing (Wally Backman, the great offensive second baseman of the hated Mets of the mid-80s "plays second base about as well as Tip O'Neill") and the way he looked at the game. I just finished James' 1993 book about the Hall of Fame, originally titled "The Politics of Glory," but now called "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?" And I've let Lola know I'd really like to get the new edition of the Historical Baseball Abstract ...

I wuz wrong: Nothing in the Sun today about the manufactured (should I instead say, brewing?) Beers "scandal." Perhaps there are some adults over there who recognize the story was invented and, if Beers wanted to be truly mischievous, could provide fodder for a defamation suit. He's a public figure, but it might not be difficult to prove actual malice among the management and staff at the Sun. Also in the Sunday papers ... Dueling legislative postmortems by my colleague Steve Sebelius in the RJ and the Sun's Jon Ralston , who was the RJ's poltical columnist for more than a decade before joining the Evil Empire. Both pieces are instructive in their way. Both writers are big government guys; their measure of "progress" is the size of the state's public sector, nevermind the fact that the schools (including the university system) are wretched; elected officials are in the hip pockets of gamers, developers and the public employee unions; law enforcement...