Dean must be stoked. At this point, I’m rooting for the Sox to win tomorrow night, too. That way, my Angels will get at least some sort of bragging rights consolation prize for being the only team to beat the White Sox in the 2005 post-season – at all. Go White Sox!

For years I’ve been telling you I’m a corporate attorney named Jeff who works for a large company and routinely ignores his clients while pounding away at a modern computer. In fact, I’m a middle-aged Chinese guy named Quienn who owns a kitschy souvenir shop and routinely ignores his customers while pounding away on an antiquated computer. Tom has the scoop.

One of the fringe benefits of going a week with almost no Internet access is that it leaves you with nothing better to do than read that book you’ve been meaning to read forever. For me those books were South Park Conservatives by Brian Anderson and Blog by Hugh Hewitt. South Park Conservatives had precious little to say about South Park, and a few easily avoidable factual errors, but it’s a pretty good book overall; a solid B+. I’d give a somewhat higher grade to Blog, but with the caveat that it’s aimed at those who barely know what a blog is, so the average reader of this blog may not get so much out of it.

Following Hewitt’s book, I’ve just committed the cardinal sin of burying the lead/lede/whatever. Blog quotes (or at least references) a good number of blogs. All the heavy hitters are there, as is to be expected. I’m not. No big surprise there. But what really gets under my skin is that Dick Cabeza is quoted in the book. That hurts.

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, Mrs. X and I just got back from a week’s vacation on the opposite coast, with limited Internet access on one day and none at all for the rest of the trip. I did announce my absence in advance, but apparently I buried it a little too deep under my bellyaching over the Angels. Quin at ConfirmSomeOfThem.COM took advantage of my virtual incapacity by listing me as a right of center blogger opposed to the Miers nomination (h/t: Patterico). In fact, I have yet to take a stand for or against Miers’ nomination, and am now all but convinced I will not have a position before the hearings. So to answer the call, I am neutral on the Miers nomination.

Regular blogging will resume soon.

All those conservatives who got so worked up about Laura Bush acknowledging the very possibility that some of Harriet Miers’s opposition might have been motivated by sexism will just love this:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she remained open to voting to confirm Miers, citing in part the conservative criticism.

“The way she’s being beaten up by the far right is very sexist. People should hold their fire and give people an opportunity to come before a hearing,” Feinstein, D-Calif., said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Will someone please remind me why Sen. Feinstein is supposed to be the more reasonable of the two?

It could have been worse. It could have been raining. Oh, crap, I almost forgot; it was raining. Never mind. Anyway, as of tomorrow morning my Angels are on vacation now and so am I. See all y’all next week. And go White Sox, if only to preserve the illusion that the Halos were at least the second best team in baseball, and to continue the fine tradition of curse-breaking (Angels in ’02, Bosox in ’04).

While conservatives on the right are asked to let Harriet Miers’s nomination be pushed through fast and hard for Bush, others are asking the President to pull out. In response, columnist Steve Blow of the Dallas Morning News asks his readers for any dirt on Harriet Miers. Apparently he and his own paper have been unable to find any, observing that “We’ve got great confidence expressed by those who know her best and grave doubts expressed by those who know her least,” and wondering aloud if Harry Reid privately opposes Miers and punk’d us all by pretending to support her. Me, I’m sticking with my original theory about Reid, which is that he’s too dumb not to pull a boner were he attempt to turn any Rove-of-the-left trick like that. But maybe playing dumb all those years was another punk on me, a clever ploy to suck off some of the opposition that would have stood firm if a more articulate Democrat had said the same thing? I don’t know.

Former Reason head Virginia Postrel is not amused by Blow’s request. Neither, I suspect, are those who’ve been handed jobs on the rim of the Beltway. Charles’ krauthammer is more agitated over this than by anything else in years, save only our big, strong forces’ penetration into Iraq. So far no one’s been able to jerk Jack off the plantation, but this seems to be more the exception that the rule. Watch for similar dissention from conservatives Los Angeles, CA and Champaign, IL, two jurisidictions where, as in Nevada, prosecution is legal. Or go down to some local pub and eat out with any right-leaning attorney and you’re bound to hear the same arguments there. What to do? Many people on the right have been pretty hard on Miers, who has been widely criticized for sucking up, and much of that opposition has been pretty stiff. If she’s going to be confirmed, all that opposition has to be beaten off somehow, and handing Blow’s job to his readers seems like as sound an approach as any. If it works, it may just be the stroke of luck we conservatives need to pull through these hard times. While some conservatives worry that the acrimony of the Miers nomination to the Supreme Court may do to Bush’s legacy what Monica Lewinsky did to Clinton’s, I say close, but no cigar.

Tonight was my first and worst post-season baseball game. From the stands, it looked like the Halos just did not have their act together at all. Sure, there were a few close decisions here and there, but nothing egregious, and certainly nothing to account for the Sox winning by such a huge margin, right? Wrong. The first three Sox runs came in the first inning, when Paul Konerko homered after he had struck out, but the home base ump had mistakenly ruled he had checked his swing in time. A fourth came in the top of the fifth, when Scot Shields picked off Scott Podsednik on first base, Darin Erstad tagged him, and the ump ruled that he didn’t. That brings the score down to 4-2, still a Sox victory, but not by such an embarassing margin, but I’m not done yet. A third (logically, not temporally) bonehead call went against the Angels in the bottom of the second, converting what should have been a walk into a double play resulting in bases loaded and no outs. Maybe the Angels would have choked anyway and none of those runners – or at most one – would have scored. Or maybe not.

Right now, the Sox lead the ALCS 3-1 and are on the brink of winning the pennant. In an AL with umpires worthy of John Roberts’s analogy, I’d put the score at 1 to 1, with two games vacated.

On the off chance anyone actually (1) cares how I’m voting next month and (2) hasn’t figured it out, here’s how I’m voting, and urge others to do likewise.

Statewide Measures:

• Proposition 73 (Abortion Notification) – Yes. Abortion may or may not be the moral equivalent of first-degree infanticide, but it isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, either, and certainly not so lovely that the state should allow teens to get them behind their parents’ backs. The only odd thing about this initiative is that it is a constitutional amendment, which seems a little odd. Not a big deal, though, as California’s Constitution is almost as easy to amend as any voter initiative; it just takes more signatures to get it on the ballot. [UPDATE: Actually, it is a big deal, as the California Supreme Court ruled in American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lungren, 16 Cal.4th 307 (1997) that a prior parental notice statute was unconstitutional.] Unsurprisingly, the L.A. Times disagrees.
• Proposition 74 (Teacher Tenure) – Yes. If you work in just about any field other than education, chances you don’t have tenure. Neither should school teachers. Unfortunately, that reform is not on the ballot. Raising the tenure period from 2 to 5 years is a baby step in the right direction, so modest even the L.A. Times doesn’t have a problem with it. This is a small reform where we need a big reform, so let’s take what we can get.
• Proposition 75 (Paycheck Protection) – Yes. No one has a right to dip into anyone else’s paycheck and force them to “contribute” to political campaigns they may not support, and in any event have never consented to have their money spent on. Why is this even controversial? [UPDATE: Or is it?]
• Proposition 76 (Spending Limits) – Yes. Opponents cleverly call this a “power grab” by the governor. Well, of course it is. If the buck is going to stop there (and it should), then dontcha think we ought to give the governor enough power to actually do what voters expect of him? Besides, these nefariously “grabbed” powers only kick in when the fiscal year is half over and over budget. If you support balanced budgets, vote yes. If you oppose them and favor runaway entitlements instead, vote no. It’s really that simple – unless you write for the L.A. Times.
• Proposition 77 (Legislative Redistricting) – Yes. If the California voter initiative process allowed cumulative voting, I’d encourage you to cast all eight votes on this one. As important as the rest of the initiatives are, there’s at least a decent chance that they ought to be left to a democratically elected Legislature accountable to the people, and not by the people directly, by initiative. But that argument only works if you have a democratically elected Legislature, which we don’t. As long as Legislators get to choose their voters rather than vice-versa, the Legislature remains accountable to nobody, save to itself. How bad are the current districts, you ask? This bad. Or, for Times watchers, this bad.
• Proposition 78 (Prescription Drugs Trojan) – Maybe. This is a dumb law, but not nearly as dumb as Prop 79, which it is intended to defeat. If both initiatives pass, only the one that passes by a greater margin will take effect, so be sure to check the polls right before Election Day. If Prop 79 is going down, vote no on Prop 78. If Prop 79 has a realistic chance of passage, vote yes on Prop 78. L.A. Times says no to both intiatives, a tempting alternative.
• Proposition 79 (Socialized Prescriptive Medicine) – No. This one is bad all around. Even the L.A. Times doesn’t like it. Vote no.
• Proposition 80 (Ban on Energy Deregulation) – No. The theory behind this initiative seems to be that if Steve Peace, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis were able to find a way to do energy deregulation wrong, no future administration – even one the L.A. Times might approve of – should be allowed to even try to do it right. If that argument makes sense to you, consider moving to Cuba. If it doesn’t, vote no on Prop 80.

The rest relate to local (Orange County) measures. If you live anywhere else, move along people, nothing to see here.

• Measure D – Money Grab by Fire Dept. No. This would force 100% of Orange County taxpayers to pay taxes to an authority that services only 43% of us (and I’m saying this as part of the 43% that would benefit from it), whether they need it or not, at the expense of police and other public safety agencies that don’t get the same dedicated property tax revenue that the fire authority does. If you are a firefighter who cares only about your own salary, pensions, etc., vote yes. If you are anybody else, vote no.
• Measures B,- Measure C, Measure E – None of these are really necessary, but any of them would make a decent tactical vote against Measure D, so why not?

Oddly enough, the L.A. Times agrees with me on all of the Orange County measures, all but one of the Ahnold Amendments, Props 79 and 80, and disagrees with me only tactically on Prop 78. In a typical election cycle, the average conservative voter could do worse than to simply take the L.A. Times voter guide with him to the polls, and vote the opposite. Don’t do that this time, or you’ll end up voting right on two initiatives (Props 73 and 76) and wrong on everything else. If you must based your vote on the recommendations of any newspaper, don’t vote anti-Times this time around. Instead, pick up a copy of the Orange County Register and vote their recommendations on everything, except maybe 78 for purely political reasons (i.e., to help ensure 79′s defeat).

UPDATE: The version of my voter guide you are viewing is here for archival purposes only, and will not be updated. The updated version is here.

During his confirmation hearings, John Roberts likened the role of the courts to that of baseball umpires, noting that umpires play a limited role to ensure that everyone else plays by the rules, adding that “[n]obody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” As a judicial conservative (albeit a proud non-member of the Coalition of the Illin’, at least for now), I thought that analogy made a lot of sense … until last night, when a real baseball umpire, Doug Eddings, proved himself to be the Lewis Powell of baseball, legislating from the field to break a 1-1 impasse in the bottom of the 9th and declare Chicago the winner by umpirical fiat. Between the call itself, and the fact that all of his fellow umpires reflexively joined his unsupportable opinion without dissent, I’m not so sure I like Chief Justice’s umpire analogy after all. If more umps were as bumbling and incompetent as Eddings, people probably would pay money to go watch the ump make an ass of himself. I know I would. In fact, I know I will be watching this ump closely when I attend Games 4 and 5 later this week, and I don’t think I’ll be alone in that.

Meanwhile, sportscaster/blogger Brooks Melchior (h/t: Kevin Roderick) offers evidence that Edding got his job as a result of cronyism rather than merit. He doesn’t blame George Bush for this particular appointment, which is nice, but it did get me to thinking: if I were a Miers basher rather than a fence-sitter in the present controversy, I’d skip all that boring inside “baseball” about Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Harry Blackmun, Earl Warren Burger and the rest, and really go inside baseball by comparing her to Doug Eddings, instead. There’s only one problem with the analogy: Eddings may have moved up in the ranks too far or too quickly, but unlike Miers, he did begin his career in the usual monestary, the minor leagues, before being promoted to the Supreme Soviet of Baseball.