All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

Wandering aimlessly with The Americans: Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 5, “COMINT”

Film/TV, , , , , ,

Sam: This will be somewhat interesting, given that we just watched this episode together a few hours ago. Perhaps it was because I was watching it at your place, but I actually didn’t think the episode was too bad. It was certainly confusing, and it took me a bit to piece things together (that’s perhaps what I get from hating on the show so much that I forget to keep track of who’s who). But, overall, it was an ehh episode. That, on my The Americans rating scale, is pretty good.

To the details: if the KGB director at the Soviet embassy couldn’t talk to his guy at the Defense Department, but Elizabeth could just walk right in and question him (and Elizabeth can connect with the KGB director, I assume), why doesn’t the director just pass a message to the guy through Elizabeth? I suppose, if they did that, we wouldn’t have this episode, would we?

elizabethI didn’t feel like that storyline was told or developed very well as far as the Defense Department guy’s wife dying and its impact on him. In hindsight, they did say it clearly, but it got so lost in the confusing details of who’s who that I was left wondering who his wife was and why that was important. This probably betrays my lack of paying close attention to previous episodes, but I was just lost for a few sequences in this episode.

One aspect I particularly enjoy, though, is the costumes Phil and Elizabeth change into when they go on their missions. They’re so clearly fake that it’s funny. Phil’s fake hair is the best. Oh, and as I mentioned when we watched the episode during Elizabeth’s little romp in the hotel room with the encryptor dude, how did her wig not just fall off?

Admittedly, given that this episode confused me a bit because of the details, I read up on it, and I really thought Karen Fratti’s recap was spot on, particularly her very last question (why does Beeman insist on studying Russian instead of going to bed with his wife??). What were your thoughts on this episode? Continue reading Wandering aimlessly with The Americans: Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 5, “COMINT” →

The topsy-turvy American League East

Sports, , , , , , , , ,
The topsy-turvy American League East.
Over the past 15 years, the American League East has become decreasingly predictable. Above: win totals from 1998 to 2012 by team.

Matthew Leach, writing for MLB.com, notes the recently emerging unpredictability of the American League East:

The division that set the standard for sameness is virtually unrecognizable these days.

Just a decade ago, the American League East race was the most predictable competition in sports. From 1998 through 2003, the five East teams finished in exactly the same order, every single year. Six straight seasons with the Yankees on top, the (Devil) Rays on the bottom, and the Red Sox, Blue Jays and Orioles in order in between. It was baseball’s version of a caste system…

As the 2013 campaign approaches, though, that predictability is gone. Last year offered a taste, but this year might bring full-on chaos. And that’s great news — unless you’re a Yankees fan.

All five teams could finish in different positions than they did a year ago. Every club in the division has reason to think it can finish first. Every team in the division has reason to fear a flop. You want wide-open? You’ve got it.

Chris Lund, who wrote about this same phenomenon last December for The Hardball Times, was on the same page:

The Yankees and Red Sox both appear to be very expensive, mortal teams. The Tampa Bay Rays have several question marks on their roster. The Toronto Blue Jays have completely overhauled their roster, though how it will play out on the field remains to be seen. The Baltimore Orioles have stood pat thus far after a dream season one year ago.

The AL East seems as wide open as ever. Five teams are roughly capable of competing with one another, though many would score the Rays, Jays and Yankees as the favorites to come away with the division crown. Yet, with so much parity in the “toughest division in sports”, there has never been more reason to feel that the AL East has wandered into vulnerability.

The graph above tells the story. The biggest season-over-season improvement for any one team in the AL East over that 15-year period was that of the Tampa Bay Rays from 2007 to 2008. Not only did they improve from 66 to 97 wins — an astounding 31-win jump — but they literally changed their name as well. (In 2007, they were the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The next year they became the Tampa Bay Rays.)

As for the single biggest drop, that dubious distinction belongs to my beloved Boston Red Sox, whose collapse this past year — 69 wins, versus 90 in 2011 — was really just a continuation of the disaster begun in September 2011.

Zooming out to include all Major League Baseball teams, I’ve analyzed every year-over-year win differential since 1996/1997. (Although the current divisional format began in 1994, both that season and the subsequent one were shortened by the infamous strike.) The largest change in win total from one year to the next took place from 1997 to 1998, when the Florida Marlins’ record plummeted from 92-70 in their sophomore year to 54-108 the next season. Going in the other direction, the 1999 Arizona Diamondbacks improved on their 1998 total by 35 wins, jumping from an abysmal 65-97 record in their inaugural year to 100-62 in the followup.

The 2007/2008 jump of 31 wins for the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays is second only to that leap by the Diamondbacks, going all the way back to 1996/1997 (a period that encompasses 506 entire team-seasons). Conversely, it provides me only a modicum of relief to note that the 2012 Red Sox’ 21-win dip is only bad enough to tie for 16th-worst year-over-year decline in that period — along with the 2002 Chicago Cubs (2001: 88-74; 2002: 67-95) and 2012 Philadelphia Phillies (2011: 102-60; 2012: 81-81).

Let’s just say I’m looking forward to putting all of this behind us for 2013. Oh, and go Red Sox.

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The thrill of human flight?

Miscellaneous, , , , ,
airfare
Graph courtesy of Boston.com, TheAtlantic.com, and AEI-Ideas.org. Take your pick.

Patrick Smith, a pilot, flags the above chart — which has been floating around the Internet today — as a means to illustrate his point that flying is actually, on balance, a much better experience now than it was in the past:

Whenever I take the time to remind people of just how inexpensive flying has become, my inbox gets socked with hate mail. People simply hate flying, and the level of anti-airline contempt is so high that it has become almost impossible to say anything positive about the experience without being called a shill, a lackey, or worse.

It’s only in the past 30 years or so that flying as we know it — as an affordable form of mass transit — has come to exist.

I’ll remind you too that roughly 83 percent of flights arrive on time.

However, this last sentence is not entirely accurate. As the Times of India and others have reported, airlines routinely engage in “schedule padding:”

Industry insiders are aware that airlines often fudge flight block timings to show a good on-time performance record. This is why the journey time on tickets varies even if the sector (Mumbai-Jaipur, for instance) is the same. For instance, the actual flying time-or block time-from Mumbai to Jaipur is an hour and 30 minutes. However, one airline may give the block time as an hour and 35 minutes, while another may have a more inflated schedule of an hour and 50 minutes.

“Airlines do this to create a buffer for delays. So, even if they are delayed, a higher block time on paper gives them room to land a bit late and still be on time,” an airport official said. “However, most of them arrive early and ask for landing when other scheduled flights are already waiting,” he added.

The result (at least in this case)?

Early arrival of flights at Mumbai is causing massive congestion. What’s equally worrying is that though the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has issued a standardised block time for all flights, airlines continue to manipulate timings to maintain an untainted on-time performance record.

Data submitted to the civil aviation ministry shows that in October [2011], 1,435 flights arrived more than 15 minutes before the scheduled time. In November [2011], 1,239 flights arrived early.

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Old American dignitaries speaking French

French, Humor, Politics, , , , ,

The series continues tonight with shiny new Secretary of State — and longtime francophile — John Kerry in Paris:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVcI50YBnLg]

New York Magazine explains more:

In Paris today, Kerry chose to speak in French unprompted, but the press conference in which he refused a direct request to speak in French took place in Washington. Kerry was famously mocked for his Francophilia during the 2004 presidential race, and perhaps, in his mind, speaking French in the Treaty Room of the White House — the very seat of American power — would open him up to the same kind of right-wing derision more so than would speaking French in France, which is really just good manners. It’s a theory based on a small sample size, admittedly.

The other possibility is that Kerry, justifiably, just hates Canada.

And here is the video of Kerry refusing to speak French in Washington:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3AF_8w1VsQ]
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A win for gun control, perhaps not for democracy

Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Robin Kelly, a Democratic candidate in the Illinois special election to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. in Congress, just won her primary today — and is now a shoe-in to win the seat. The Times explains part of how this happened:

Riding a wave of “super PAC” spending that helped catapult her to the front of a crowded Democratic field, Robin Kelly, whose campaign called for tougher national gun laws, clinched her party’s nomination Tuesday in a special primary election for the House seat vacated by Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

The outcome of the contest, which had been unexpectedly cast into the center of the national gun debate, was welcome news for Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York and a staunch gun-control advocate. He poured more than $2.2 million into attacking Ms. Kelly’s chief opponent, Debbie Halvorson, this month.

Flooding Chicago airwaves, Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA, ran a series of advertisements criticizing Ms. Halvorson for opposing certain gun control measures and endorsing Ms. Kelly as the alternative candidate.

The advertising campaign, a huge amount for a single House race, set up Ms. Halvorson’s defeat on Tuesday as a shot across the bow to other Democrats supporting gun rights, a sign of what could await future candidates who do not align with Mr. Bloomberg’s quest to change firearm laws across the country.

Last October, I examined Bloomberg’s strategy and came away disappointed:

In the face of this frontal assault on our democratic ideal of “one person, one vote,” Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to launch political moderates back into the halls of power amounts to little more than a bandage. And it is the worst kind, because it confuses the symptom for the underlying illness: by using the very same funding tactics that helped drive the fringe into the mainstream American political landscape in the first place, Bloomberg’s efforts constitute an implicit endorsement of the post-Citizens United world. But accelerating the funding arms race is not the right long-term approach.

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Baseball Prospectus figure of the day

Sports, , , ,

From Baseball Prospectus 2013, page 53:

[The 2012 Boston Red Sox] missed 1,587 man-games to injury, second most of any team since 2007, as far back as our data goes. We estimate those injuries cost Boston 7.9 WARP [Wins Above Replacement Player], the most in baseball by 1.4.

Over at the web site, guest writer John Paschal takes a crack at why baseball players get injured so often, and in such bizarre fashion:

So, given the fact that objective math provides only an incomplete answer, we must turn to the subtle art of subjective guessing, with each of us hazarding a sound hypothesis as to why baseball players seem to suffer a disproportionate number of very odd mishaps—the sort that saw former infielder Chris Brown miss time because he “slept on (his) eye funny” and former infielder Geoff Blum land on the DL with an elbow injury he sustained while putting on a shirt. And let’s not forget the time All-Star Ron Gant, just a week after signing the largest single-season contract in history, broke a leg in an off-season motorcycle accident, or the day All-Star Larry Walker separated his shoulder while fishing.

“I’d say the reason baseball players injure themselves in weird ways is because they (a) have a lot of free time; and (b) they have a lot of money,” posits baseball writer Craig Calcaterra, of the NBC Sports website Hardball Talk, in an emailed response. “This allows them to fill that free time with all manner of fun and, occasionally, dangerous activities. Helping things along is that, as elite athletes, they have never had a particularly hard time doing things most people can’t do. I have this feeling a lot of them think they’re going to be immediately and effortlessly successful in other pursuits as well. Which, unfortunately, isn’t always the case.”

John Thorn, the Official Historian of Major League Baseball, is considerably more succinct.

“Randomness,” he writes.

Yes, it’s that time of year: I’m geeking out about baseball again.

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This is bad reporting.

Media, Politics, , , , , ,

Let’s assume you’re a normal person. And let’s propose a scenario in which, after years of gridlock between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, the GOP finally seems to be willing to give a little — now that they’ve definitively lost the last two presidential elections and polling appears to be mostly on the side of Democratic policies.

In such a situation, you’d probably welcome the prospect of a Republican thaw and assume it may help produce actual bipartisan legislation for once, no?

Well, no. Not if you’re the New York Times:

But the politics of one core dispute between Democrats and Republicans — what to do about Medicare — are changing. And some of those changes complicate President Obama’s agenda, even as he continues to flex his postelection muscle.

One shift is the shrinking magnitude of the Medicare spending problem — a consequence, at least for now, of a recent slowdown in the rise of health care costs. That diminishes the willingness of Congressional Democrats, and perhaps the administration, too, to accept the sort of Medicare curbs that Mr. Obama has indicated that he favors.

Another is a moderation in the public stance of Republican leaders. In recent weeks, they have advocated smaller changes to Medicare than the “premium support” or voucher plan that Mitt Romney advocated and that Mr. Obama denounced in last year’s presidential campaign.

As a result, Mr. Obama’s ability to deliver a bipartisan compromise on entitlement spending may be waning even as Republicans edge closer to one.

That’s right: Republican moderation is partly why President Obama may be unable to “deliver a bipartisan compromise.” If that sounds ridiculously counterintuitive, it’s because it is.

Yes, I realize the point of the article: that Obama and the Democrats now feel they have the upper hand, which might make them likelier to press their advantage while they have it — thus derailing the hope of a deal. (Never mind the fact that there is virtually no historical/empirical basis to support the notion that the Democrats have taken, or will ever take, advantage of whatever leverage they have.)

But this contorted logic only makes any sense in the context of the conventional wisdom that major media players like the New York Times help create. Mainstream journalists love to mock bloggy sites like Politico for their seeming giddiness in reporting on Washington insider politics, and yet this article — appearing in the Paper of Record, no less — is Beltway cynicism at its worst.

Maybe if the Times focused less on creating counter-incentives that don’t yet exist and exerted more effort instead on sensible reporting of actual political developments, we wouldn’t have so many of these manufactured crises in the first place.

Delusion of the day

Media, Politics, , , ,

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded the alarm that Iran was approaching “a red line.” Did the U.S. president even mention any of this? No, he was running around the country crying wolf and catastrophizing about an invented crisis. The real international threats go unremarked upon. For all intents and purposes Netanyahu is now the West’s protector.

What they said:

http://twitter.com/ggreenwald/statuses/305764175563591681

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