I recently started playing poker tournaments around Vegas again. So far, no success, but it goes that way sometimes. The thing that's been bothering me is that I haven't been playing my best, but I suppose that's not all that unusual after taking several months away from tournaments.

Tonight, I finally played a good tournament, start to finish. Unfortunately, luck wasn't on my side -- I flopped two pair three times and lost each time.

Brian Williams should be our poet laureate. He brings his unique creative genius to NBC every evening, eager to share with us the matters of fact.

For example, his take on the Fort Dix six. (You have to sit through an ad, but it's worth it.) Here's a snippet of what he had to say:

Good evening. A lot of government officials from the president on down have hinted over the years that if we ever really knew about all the unsubstantiated national security threats that are out there, we'd never leave our homes in the morning.  Of course most of those threats pass without us ever knowing about them, but this morning as millions of Americans were leaving home for work they heard about this story...six young men in their twenties, accused of planning to shoot up...Fort Dix in New Jersey. The FBI says this was a case of home grown terrorism inspired by the internet and thankfully foiled.

Man, he's good. Bush and Cheney should take lessons.

But you really appreciate what a spectacular artist Williams is when you learn that the Fort Dix six were pretty much in the same league as the Seas of David cult, who, armed with a blackjack, a knife, and paintball guns, plotted to take over the entire world.

Steven Levitt, who might not be as great a poet as Williams, makes a lot more sense:

If your goal is to kill people other than yourselves, I cannot think of a worse plan than having six people conduct an armed assault against a military base.

Williams would have been wise to begin his newscast with a bit less poetry, and a bit more thought.

Then again, maybe he's just trying to scare us into watching NBC Nightly News more often. That's how he pays his bills, after all.

Cox Communications (cable) disables fast-forward for some on-demand programming. Cox is effectively using a sledgehammer to punish its paying customers and save broadcasters from developing new business models for new technology. How many other industries are able to get away with threating their customers like criminals?

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/pterosauria.html:

Ranging from the size of a sparrow to the size of an airplane, the pterosaurs (Greek for "wing lizards") ruled the skies in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and included the largest vertebrate ever known to fly: the late Cretaceous Quetzalcoatlus.

I get a kick out of watching morons get excited about silly issues. Maybe they realized that our immigration problems have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism it would actually be possible to have a rational discussion.

Going into the season, I didn't have high hopes for Mariners starting pitcher Jeff Weaver. After all, his career ERA was 4.72 and with a record of 86-107. He had a great post-season last year though, so Bill Bavasi ponied up $8.3 million for a one year deal. Even though it was obvious Bavasi had overpaid, more attention in Seattle was focused on Gil Meche's multi-year contract from the Royals which averages $11 million. The consensus was: we'll take Weaver for one year and the Royals can have Meche for five.

Well, no one could have imagined Weaver would be as bad as he has been this year.

He's pitched 22 innings, allowing 35 earned runs and 57 hits and walks. His ERA is 14.32. He is 0-6 and is averaging under four innings per start. He gave up 6 earned runs and pitched 5.2 innings in his best start of the year.

Opponents are hitting .581 against Jeff Weaver. Their OPS is 1.510, higher than Babe Ruth's career best.

Meanwhile, former Mariner Gil Meche is having a great season in Kansas City. He's 3-1 with a 2.15 ERA, holding opponents a to .656 OPS. Weaver has better control, though, giving up walks at half the rate as Meche. But all that proves is that a hit is better than a walk (but a walk is still much better than an out).

I hope Meche continues to do well. I've pretty much lost hope with Weaver -- the Mariners should release him when Felix Hernandez returns to the rotation, if not sooner.

As I posted yesterday, the law firm representing Congressman Jerry Lewis hired the U.S. attorney responsible for investigating and possibly prosecuting corruption charges against the powerful Republican. The firm, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, reportedly offered U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang a $1.5 million signing bonus.

It starts to get really interesting when you learn that Yang wasn't the only attorney from her office hired by Gibson Dunn. There were two others: Douglas Fuchs, the Deputy Chief of Major Frauds, and Maurice Suh, who had served as the Deputy Chief of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section during President Bush's first term.

I did some digging, and it turns out that these three lawyers were the only government lawyers hired by Gibson Dunn in the past five years who did not have a prior employment relationship with the firm. That fact should set your alarm bells ringing. (I do not think that this has been reported before. It is based on my research, explained below.)

You already know that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was fired after putting Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham behind bars. Last fall, White House counsel Harriet Miers also considered firing Yang, who was conducting a similar probe into Lewis. Instead, Yang was offered $1.5 million to join the law firm representing Lewis, and within months a former colleage from the Public Corruption section (Suh had taken a job with the city of Los Angeles) and the Deputy Chief of the Major Frauds section were hired by the same firm.

Now that smells really fishy. But it gets worse when you start thinking about how unusual it must be for a major firm like Gibson Dunn to hire three government attorneys within four months?

I thought it seemed strange. But I haven't seen much media coverage of this angle on the U.S. attorney's scandal, so I had to do some digging on my own.

What I found shocked me. Gibson Dunn has announced hiring 58 attorneys on its web site over the past five years (there is nothing more boring than reading five years of press releases from a law firm). Of these 58 attorneys:

• Yang, Suh, and Fuchs were the only government attorneys hired by Gibson Dunn with no prior relationship to the firm
• Every single other attorney either came from another firm (51) or were returning to the firm after public service (4, including Ted Olson and Eugene Scalia)

This bears repeating. Other than these three hires, over a five year period, Gibson Dunn has not announced the hiring of a single government attorney, let alone one from a U.S. Attorney's office, with the exception of the four lawyers who had previously worked for the firm.

Another way of putting it:

The only government lawyers Gibson Dunn have hired in the past five years worked in the very same U.S. Attorney's office investigating one of their highest profile clients.

I do not think these facts have been reported anywhere by any media outlet.

But so far as I can tell, they are true facts. And I think they are quite important.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

It's time for some real reporters to get their act in gear. If I can figure this out in an evening of web surfing, imagine what someone who does this for a living could do.

(Here's a summary of what we know.)

The law firm of Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher is close to the White House and represents a Congressman being investigated for corruption. Last fall, Gibsun Dunn hired the U.S. attorney investigating the corruption case, paying her a $1.5 million signing bonus. Here's what we know:

(1) Gibson Dunn has close ties to the Bush Administration

• Ted Olson, Bush's lawyer in the 2000 recount battle and was Solicitor General during Bush's first term, is a Gibson Dunn partner

(2) Gibson Dunn represents embattled Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis who is under investigation for public corruption

• As of last October, Lewis' legal bills had surpassed $800,000

(3) Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of California who successfully prosecuted a similar case against Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, was fired in January

(4) Last fall, before Lam was fired, White House Counsel Harriet Miers considered firing Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California responsible for the investigation into Congressman Lewis. Lam ended up being fired.

(5) Debra Wong Yang resigned from the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office in October, 2006

• Gibson Dunn hired Yang immediately, offering her a reported $1.5 million signing bonus
• Yang promised to recuse herself from any involvement in the Lewis probe because her new employer represented the target of her investigation

(6) During the past seven months, Gibson Dunn hired three attorneys from the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office, including Yang

• Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, responsible for the investigation into Congressman Lewis
• Douglas Fuchs, the Deputy Chief of Major Frauds for the Central District of California
• Maurice Suh, who had served as the Deputy Chief of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section during President Bush's first term

(7) Gibson Dunn's decision to hire three lawyers from the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office is remarkably unusual. During the past five years, according to press releases on Gibson Dunn's web site, the firm has announced hiring 58 attorneys. Of these:

• 95% of the attorneys Gibson Dunn announced hiring were either hired from directly from other private sector jobs (88%) or had previously worked for the firm (7%)
• Yang, Suh, and Fuchs were the only government attorneys hired by Gibson Dunn with no prior relationship to the firm
• The four attorneys who had worked previously for Gibson Dunn were hired from a government agency were Ted Olson, Bush's 2000 recount lawyer and Solicitor General, Eugene Scalia who was Solicitor General for the Department of Labor, M. Sean Royall who worked for the FTC, and James C. Ho, a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former counsel for Senator John Cornyn of Texas
• The remaining 51 attorneys were hired from private firms

This weekend, The New York Times included a cute story entitled "The U.S. Attorney, the G.O.P. Congressman and the Timely Job Offer" on its opinion pages.

The story is about Debra Wong Yang, a U.S. Attorney from California who resigned last October. Prior to her resignation, Yang was leading the corruption investigation of U.S. Congressman Jerry Lewis, a powerful California Republican.

Through last October, Lewis' legal fees had already reached $800,000 -- and he hadn't even been indicted yet. In other words, the investigation was a big deal. His friend, former U.S. Congressman Duke Cunningham, was already in jail.

So what law firm does a guy like Lewis turn to? A powerful one with ties to the Bush administration: Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher.

Now remember Ms. Yang, mentioned at the top of this post? She was the U.S. Attorney leading the Lewis investigation. Who do you think hired immediately after her resignation?

That's right. Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher. The same law firm representing Jerry Lewis, the guy who she had been investigating. And they are paying her a $1.5 million signing bonus.

Guess who Yang's working for at Gibson? Theodore Olson, the lawyer who represented President Bush in Florida and served in his administration as Solicitor General.

Now why is it that a story like this is buried on the opinion pages of the New York Times? Everything that I've written up until now are facts, not opinions. There was a time when a scandal much less important than this would qualify as news!

It's outrageous that the New York Times considers a story like this a matter of opinion.

It's even worse that no other major media outlet has covered the story since the Times published its piece.

It's exactly what's wrong with our nation's media.

The Washington Monthly has a fantastic article on the DC power couple phenomenon. It's great insight into to the people who run our country, the culture that they have created in our nation's capitol, and how that culture functions as dead weight on our democracy.

I wonder if they would continue to thrive if we reformed our political system, beginning with term limits and public financing of political campaigns.

By the way, I support public financing because the only thing I hate more than paying taxes to fund political campaigns is paying taxes to pay for the favors politicians owe their corporate contributors. And I support term limits because I can't think of a politician who has served in Congress longer than 18 years who I'd truly miss.

The LVRJ has an article about the American Gaming Association's 2007 State of the States gaming survey. Americans wagered $32.4 billion in non-tribal casinos, which employed about 365,000 people. In other words, about 1 out of 400 workers in the civilian labor force work at a casino. Wow.

Interesting numbers about poker:

• The rake totaled $238 million in Nevada and New Jersey, a 15% increase over 2006 (and about 150% over the pre-poker boom levels)
• 15% is still solid growth, but it is a big drop in the rate of growth. In Nevada, growth rates for the past few years:
  • 2003: 18%
  • 2004: 45% (first full year after Moneymaker's WSOP win)
  • 2005: 42%
  • 2006: 15%
• The four states that track annual card room revenues reported $1.1 billion in 2006, up 7.8% from 2005

I don't think there's any question that the poker boom is over. The question is whether poker is maturing and will sustain its current levels with smaller but steady growth or whether it will contract.

According to the survey, fewer American adults are playing poker:

• 2003: 12%
• 2004: 18%
• 2005: 18%
• 2006: 14%

Since that data is based on a poll, it could just be random variance, but it's extremely unlikely the numbers of poker players are growing faster than the population.

I think we'll learn a lot from the upcoming World Series of Poker, but probably even more from how much the media – and the public –  likes whoever wins. Poker's popularity is TV driven, but TV can't control who wins. Some years they can get lucky with a great story (Chris Moneymaker) and other years they get lucky with a great ambassador (Greg Raymer). In more recent years, TV hasn't gotten quite as lucky.

I suspect the question about how many players enter the main event this year won't be whether there will be more than last year's 8,000+, but how much smaller. I haven't been following it closely enough to venture an educated guess, but maybe I'll take a stab at one soon. Here's the yearly entry totals for the $25,000 WPT Championship:

• 2003: 111
• 2004: 343
• 2005: 452
• 2006: 605
• 2007: 639

What about the circuit tournaments? Take the L.A. Poker Classic $10k buy-in WPT event:

• 2003: 136
• 2004: 382
• 2005: 538
• 2006: 692
• 2007: 791 (even though the rake quadrupled!)

It will be interesting to see what the coming couple of years have in store for poker. Hopefully poker will be able to sustain its growth – and casinos won't keep on increasing the rake.

Think Progress has video of WJLA's investigation revealing that the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has not hired a single black attorney in four years. Only two of their 50 lawyers are black.

What's hilarious about this? Obviously, nothing, at least not directly. But it reminds me of Bill Maher's extremely funny riff a month or so ago on Regent University, the Pat Robertson / Christian Broadcast Network school that has placed 150 of its graduates in the Bush Administration, including Monica Goodling.

I've been following the web sites of some extreme right wingers recently. It's scary -- I had no idea that that the white nationalist movement was as sophisticated as it is. And when you see what's happened with the Bush Administration's DOJ you realize that these guys are serious about winning the battle.

With such intense stuff, it's nice to have comic relief, and Maher's monologue provides it.

(Note: Coming soon, I'll post a longer, more complete analysis of Sailer's freeslinging theory.)

Steve Sailer has been beating the drum, shouting from the rooftop, screaming at anyone who will listen: baseball has a hidden ethnic bias. And you'll never guess who the victims are! As he writes:

The most numerous victims of baseball's traditional statistical myths have been white American players.

How could that possibly be? Well, he summarized his theory quite nice in a comment on Matthew Yglesias' blog:

The much bigger example of ethnic bias in sports is how baseball managements were long biased against black and white American players and in favor of Latin American players because -- before the Bill James / Billy Beane / Moneyball statistical analysis revolution -- they overrated batting average and underrated on-base percentage, and thus statistically overrated Latins on average.

This biased baseball in favor of Latin-born players, he says, because they have a "patience gap" (his words, not mine) that is reflected in a decreased tendency to walk. He offers statistics to defend his claim that Latin-born players are "freeswinging Latins" (again, his words, not mine):

In 2002, Hispanics had a combined batting average of .264, while everyone else together hit .260. On the other hand, the Hispanic "walk average" was 0.060, while the non-Hispanics' bases on balls ratio was 0.069, a significant 14 percent higher, leaving the non-Latinos with a better on-base percentage.

Now hold on a minute there Stevie-boy. Why aren't you giving us the actual on-base percentage? Instead, you're just telling us it's higher, and citing a "walk average" statistic which nobody ever uses.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to figure out the on-base percentage from Sailer's numbers.

Hispanic OBP is (264 + 60) / 1060 = .306

Non-Hispanic OBP is (260 + 69) / 1069 = .308

An OBP of .308 is just 0.7% higher than .306, a meaningless difference, especially when you consider that two-thirds of shortstops – historically a weak hitting position – are Latin-born. Even more importantly, the standard deviation for the entire league's OBP was .006 between 2000 and 2006. A variation of .002 of a subpopulation is just random.

In other words, by his own numbers, Steve Sailer is full of shit.

By the way, taking Sailer's thinking to absurd levels, in 2006, the average Hispanic shortstop walked 8 additional times per 162 games than the average white non-Hispanic shortstop. Meanwhile, the average black non-Hispanic shortstop walked eleven times additional times than Hispanics. But does that mean GMs should give up on white non-Hispanic shortstops? Hell no. They should get whoever can play the position the best. Sailer's way of slicing and dicing up humanity based on race, ethnicity, and place of birth is complete bullshit.

You just gotta' love Jordan Babineaux if you're a Seahawks fan, from his interception of Drew Bledsoe in 2005 to his tackle of Tony Romo in the playoffs last year and everything in between. He's playing in the NFL even though the experts overlooked him in the NFL draft and this year he showed up for mini-camp without a contract, although he has now signed a tender offer.

For all the attention paid to the 2007 NFL Draft last month, it's easy to forget that some great NFL players have emerged from the ranks of the undrafted, including Antonio Gates, Priest Holmes, Kurt Warner, and Rod Smith. I wouldn't recommend that teams withdraw from the draft, but it would be just as dumb for them to eschew the rookie free agent market. Just a little reminder for those who think that predicting human potential is a precise science.

From "A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin" in the New York Times:

Evolution has long generated bitter fights between the left and the right about whether God or science better explains the origins of life. But now a dispute has cropped up within conservative circles, not over science, but over political ideology: Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of religion and morality or does it actually support conservative philosophy?

Well, I guess anything that gets our friends on the religious right to move in the general direction of science isn't a bad thing. Unsurprisingly, they seem mostly interested in applying evolutionary theory to morality and other social constructs. I'll bet my bottom dollar that if creationists embrace evolution, it will only be because they decide that natural selection controls abstract thought, in the process denying our capacity to think (which apparently they don't do much of anyway). Perhaps soon we'll read about the evolutionary theory of the anti-gay marriage amendment, or the evolutionary theory of why women should not have the right to choose. I'd like to hear President Bush's theory on the evolutionary roots of the Iraq War. (Okay, fine. Lingering high levels of testosterone and too much cocaine in his youth made President Bush especially susceptible to launching a war that has made him the biggest moral failure in Presidential history. But he still could and should have known better.)

The most sensible comment of the entire article was in the last paragraph:

As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”

True, that.