Five Reasons to Doubt the Existence of God or any Benevolent Supreme Being, starring:

1. Our new insect overlords
2. Painful sores and skin rashes
3. Hillary Clinton
4. The Chicago White Sox, and
5. Mike Erickson, GOP candidate for Congress in OR-05, caught stealing

Prepare to test your faith below.

(Cross posted from Launch Exhaust.)

It's really easy, at first blush, to be flippant over the results from yesterday's Kentucky Derby.  There's a sport for ya!  We'll kill the first loser!  HAHAHA!  Somewhere, I know, there are television execs and horse racing officials thinking that Eight Belles euthanasia after the race just might produce an uptick in ratings and income for the sport.

After thinking about it for a bit, that tragic ending only illustrates the horror of horse racing.

Here's some mind-numbing irony from the far right.

I had intended to write my third and final diary about an alleged hate crime that took place recently in Champaign, Illinois, after the case had been adjudicated.  The defendant, Brett Vanasdlen, 18, of Minooka, Illinois, goes to Court on May 6th.  However, since last night when I posted part two of my series of diaries on the April 12, 2008 incident, the Brett Vanasdlen case has spread further around the blogosphere with increasing vitriol directed at the victim, Steven Velasquez, a gay man who suffered some head trauma in the alleged hate crime that took place near his school, the University of Illinois. (And if you don't want to read my diary, but I hope you take a short break from all the election-focused diaries and check it out, then please take the poll).

We know from examining the FBI's hate crime statistics from 2006 that hate crimes based on hatred toward non-heterosexuals accounted for 1,387 of all 9,080 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2006.  Over nine hundred gay men were the victims of reported hate crimes that year; they constituted 9.46% of all reported hate crime victims.  That percentage is totally out of proportion to the estimated percent of gay men that make up the population of the United States which is about 2.8%, according to a reputable study from the National Health and Social Life Survey by Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels titled "The Social organization of sexuality in the United States".  In other words in 2006 gay men were 3.38 times more likely to be the victim of a reported hate crime (often genteelly called a bias-motivated crime) than would be expected.  

My ballot arrived today.  Just to be double safe this year, I reaffirmed my registration with my drivers license renewal.  Quick 'n easy.

In Oregon, and some other places, we get voter info and ballots mailed out to us.  This means voting season is long, and I think that has seriously positive implications.

Come on, you know you want to JUMP!

Last Friday night my wife and kids were all occupied, and weren't going to miss me much, so I decided to walk the two Vegas sized blocks from my office to Safeco Field and take in a Mariners game.

I grabbed my camera with no particular agenda, but on the way there, it occured to me that as far as facility and setting goes, a Mariners game is as good as it gets.

See what I'm talking about?

Yet another sports analogy.  Were not moving the goal posts or going into overtime or even extra innings.  This is a game of old school little league baseball.  Nine innings with a seven run limit per inning including the ninth.  I don’t even think we’ve reached the ninth inning yet but it is already clear that the senator from New York cannot score enough runs to tie Barack Obama little on surpass him.  I assume her only hope is a DQ from the party or for Obama to forfeit.  Neither of which are very likely.  So why not call the game early?

I've been thinking about this for days now. Ever since my nephew told me he thought that winning was the reason one plays baseball.

And I thought::: has our obsession with winning turned us into losers? Our family routines, our learning curves, and just plain old having fun all seem to take a beating from the prevailing ends justify the means American mindset.

Is winning market share or baseball games or presidential races more important than how one plays the game, the quality/efficacy of products one puts on the market, or the policies/integrity of candidates?

Winning is only an outcome, isn't it? What happens to all the stuff that needs to happen to get to the winning? Isn't all the in-between stuff, those small moments, where we get our life lessons?

Baltimore Orioles Press Release October 19, 2007:

Going into the 2007 World Series next week, some people believe the Boston Red Sox deserve to represent the American League because they won a bunch of games in the playoffs.  Others point to Boston's regular season wins, ERA and run differential--all tops in the league--to suggest Boston is the strongest team going forward.  

But one needs only to consult the 1889 AL Charter to see that it's really up to the AL owners to decide who should represent their league in (what's now called) the World Series.  An obscure clause clearly states that a three-fourths supermajority of AL owners may strip a team of its credentials (including, for example, an AL Championship) in the event of "criminal misconduct or extreme impropriety [...] including blatant and repeated cheating."

While Boston has not cheated, as far as we know, the last few weeks have raised serious questions about their viability in the World Series.  In light of these events we, the Baltimore Orioles, believe the owners should appoint us in their stead to face the honorable and patriotic Colorado Rockies.

Yesterday was an big day for Hillary supporters, and they may have been so swept up in the excitement of the primary that they missed all the baseball action. So I thought I might just run down some of the scores for their benefit.

We'll start with the Cardinals/Brewers game which went 12 innings. St. Louis won that game pretty clearly, with 16 hits versus Milwaukee's 15. Also the Cards gave up 8 walks and the Brewers only 6.

The Yankees played a good game in Chicago, but the White Sox came out on top with 13 hits to New York's 11. Despite Bobby Abreu's grand slam, the Yankees could only score in the first couple of innings, and also the 7th and 8th innings, whereas the White Sox scored in the 2nd, 5th, 7th, and 9th innings, demonstrating their ability to score throughout the game.

Understandably, there was national outrage and sadness about last year's very probable hate crime murder of a young gay man from South Carolina, Sean William Kennedy, 20, of Greenville.   A stranger with hatred in his heart and homophobia swirling in his mind is said to have thrown a single, fatal punch at Kennedy--a college student with a life's worth of promise--on a sidewalk in downtown Greenville in May, 2007.  Less than two months later in early July, a west coast picnic outing with friends similarly ended in a violent, homophobia-fueled death.  The single-punch hate crime murder of 26 year old Satendar Singh outside Sacramento, California, will be another tic-mark in the "Murder and non-negligent manslaughter" column of the FBI's annual report of hate crime statistics for 2007 to be released later this year. Whether or not the FBI chooses to bring Mr. Singh's alleged killer to justice is another story; Andrey Vusik, 29, fled to his native Russia and there seems to be no political will to have him returned to the United States to face a murder charge, although he has been charged with manslaughter.  

Next on Faux News:  WHEN AGING BASEBALL PLAYERS ATTACK!

    Former Boston Red Sox outfielder/first baseman and current TV broadcast announcer for the Chicago White Sox Ken "Hawk" Harrelson was visiting Fenway Park Thursday when he overheard a giggling clandestine spy gathering led by ARod, the NY Yankees' star 3rd baseman.

When I saw this on TV, ESPN, it looked and sounded like this:

Cross-posted at Bugs and Cranks

Well, I was going to write a Royals preview, but a) no one cares, even me, and b) I was spending much of my morning canceling my bulk order of "Free Jose Guillen" t-shirts. Instead, I’ve decided to preview the American League, attempting to compare each team to a major political campaign (to have enough, I included Ron Paul and Mike Gravel’s , which were under no circumstances major campaigns). For the purposes of articulating my disdain, I also included the President.  Enjoy:

Tonight's North American Home Open for Major League Baseball Was Marred By A Multi-Inning Love-Fest, An On-Air Menage-A-Trois...

I know, I know never blog after finishing off a nice bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc but man, oh man I flipped to catch the Nationals home opener and wow.  The boo birds were out and no ESPN didn't even bother to filter out the crowd noise. They must have known ahead of time that it would be boos right? Wow again 'cause you blink and you would have missed it too -- President Bush ran out onto the field, threw out that first pitch and ran like a coward back to the bullpen to a rather loud chorus of those boo-birds.

Of course though the announcers did not note the elephant in the room -- they ignored the booing and began to um actually talk about BASEBALL.
Hahahahahahaha.

I am pleased to report that George Bush received a hearty number of "boos" just now as he tossed out the first pitch at Nationals stadium.  There were enough boos to hear over the ass-kissing of the announcers, who said, "well, many Presidents have done it, but none so well as this one!"

Thanks Al Rodgers for the vid-
Boo!!!
BOOOO!!!

Update:   9:04 ET:  I am watching Bush in the booth right now, talking with the announcers, and he seems drugged, or something.  He is very slow to speak and kind of staring out of the booth.  Whassup with that?

Update #2:  Congrats to the Nationals, at the end of the game, after a walkoff homer by Ryan Zimmerman, you can hear what a stadium full of cheering sounds like.

Nice.  W throws out the first pitch to a chorus of boos.  The smile painted so painfully on his face.  Maybe a nice slug of Jack and Coke helped plaster it on there.  To his credit, he threw a nice pitch.

"He's got a million dollar arm and a ten cent head."

Yeah, Nuke LaLoosh is our president.