It’s amazing how they get religion at election time, how Republicans like John McCain who presided over the busting of the Clinton balanced budget now, with arch sanctimony, call for a balanced budget. The Republican Congress under the heel of their beloved Republican president, George W. Bush, threw the balance out the window.

Now McCain promises to bring it back.

Right.

Of course, commited to a century of war, the McCain budget will be military-heavy forever. The war in Iraq and the war on Iran that his Svengali, Joe Lieberman, demands will keep our troops in trouble for all time to come. We are not allowed to consider the military as anything but purely perfect, beyond comment no matter how they bungle their money, so there will be not a red cent cut from the Pentagon’s gargantuan feast.

So how will he balance the budget? By cutting hundreds of billions from everything else. And what will Republicans say should be cut? The boodle that flows to the rich or the corporations? Of course not.

No, to “balance” the budget McCain & co. will cut from the human services which are aimed at helping mere people, from the protective services of the environment and assistance to the poor and the undereducated and the ones society has left behind.

To balance the budget, people will pay in a century of class warfare.

If that’s balance, we don’t want it. People do not lead balanced lives, generally. We do not buy our cars and houses with cash. We take out mortgages and loans — and it is illuminating that the rich Republicans alone call for some fantastical pay-as-you-go lifestyle such as the rich alone can sustain.

If they want to have a quick balanced budget, get the hell out of Iraq and stay the hell out of Iran.

Well, surely the Obama people need to be gracious in victory and to be diplomatic and to understand the truth that there are losers in the world and then there are poor losers.

There are Clinton people, we are advised in the Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, who still huff and puff that their candidate, who lost, deserves to be treated as if she had won. And they will take their money elsewhere because in the doily-delicate world of their politics Mrs. Clinton was not univerally fawned over by the media. The media. They will “punish” Barack Obama for what someone else did to the archly fragile Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Clinton, of course, isn’t playing the game but she has so much more class than those around her, those with merely cash.

The moneybaggers may well take their dough and sit this one out — totally aware that they will be remembered for that when the reasons for cash contributions are doled out later. That’s their call. But maybe they could dial down the whining.

Crying into their towels that the media may have had sexist pockets and Obama is such a big bad man for not having snapped its fingers to make it all go away, they seem to forget that the campaign they financed dipped mighty low itself. Formally. Officially. As a matter of tactics and policy and procedure. They “kitchen sinked” the guy. They played the race card over and over and then squeeked with mock pain when they were caught, claiming the race card was being played on them. They insulted Obama’s patriotism, his honesty, his intelligence, his record, his wife, his slightest remarks. They lost, of course, but imagine that the rest of the world will forget that they played in the gutter while they command and demand still.

The Obama forces seem content to look the other way, expecrting that the cry-babies will be ignored and fade away. What is being heard from the Clinton people is not being heard from any other campaign — Democratic or Republican in which dozens of candidates didn’t get to go all the way. For Clinton alone we have to hear this. That says a lot.

It’s a small thing but illuminating. Well, maybe not a small thing at all.

“The Rays are 20 games over .500 for the first time in franchise history (52-32). Last season after 84 games, they were 18 under .500.” So says the Boston Globe. So says everyone. They’re wrong, of course.

The Rays are not at all 20 games over .500. They are 10 games over .500. But we always confuse “over .500″ with “won XX more games than they lost.” The Rays have played 84 games. Forty-two games would be .500 or to have won 62 would be “20 games over .500.” But winning 52 games of 82 is not. They have won 20 more games than they have lost, not 20 games above .500.

But there wil never be a changing of the shorthand by which writers measure the math, badly.

When you read in the paper that Dustin Pedroia is hitting .311 you nod sagely and say, “Yes, Dustin is doing well, hitting .311.” But do you think for a second that the sports scribe covering the team has sat down and figured out that Pedroia is hitting .311 because he has 109 hits in 359 at official bats and that his on base percentage is .354 because if you divide the …?

Not a chance.

They are handed the information and relay it faithfully and without question. If they were told that Pedroia was hitting .302 they would relay that as well. Or .331. A smart sports agent would bribe the team’s statistician to add 20 points to his guy’s average making him automatically a better player by, well, 20 points. No one would know. The sports writers are too busy, too frazzled and usually too drunk to check. It could be worth millions.

Which, of course, brings me to basketball players. The New York Times recently wrote a piece that notes that basketball players, like Latin athletes with their birthdates, play pretty loose with the numbers. Casually, high school players or their coaches add an inch to their height, jazzing their prospects; in college, another inch or so is larded on making the player look better on paper. This, as they say, can add up.

The Times’ story triumphantly vindicates me: a pioneer in pursuing the tall truth, I have long argued that there are simply no seven-foot-tall basketball players and that the myth of the seven-footer was created to artificially bolster interest in an otherwise boring game where big lugs run back and forth and pretty much score points at will.

No, I have not gone out with my yard stick and measured basketball players. What a thought. No, I use common sense — which distinguishes me entirely from sports writers. If you are the silly sort that believes all you read, you would imagine that college basketball and the NBA are awash in seven-foot-tall players. Where a few decades ago there were none at all, now every team has several. 

How could that happen? You can fatten up to NFL weight and steroid up to MLB stardom, but what can cause a person to grow a foot taller? Nothing. Also, look around you at the movies or at church or on the bus. Do you see scads of seven-foot-tall people? No, you do not. They would have you believe, then, that there are indeed seven-footers but they are all playing ball, are each such great athletes, they never go old to be seen hanging around the Rotary Club or the town green.

So how to explain that seven-footers are reported in such abundance, playing 20 games over .500?

How? They lie.

My theory, now bolstered by the sainted NYTimes, is that the teams simply announce that Mr. Jones is seven feet tall, when he is actually only six feet tall. The fans sit too far back to know the difference. The television distorts things as it is and the sportswriters, well, are sportswriters. Told that Jones is a skyscraper, they do not begin to doubt it, even when they ride up in the elevator eye-to-eye with him.

Seeing that game was faltering, the moguls conspired to shrink the court by ten feet, lower the baskets by two feet and eclared an extra foot for all the players to mask the perplexity that an outsider might bring, seeing such dunking going on when to dunk at a 10-foot basket is nearly impossible and while anyone can dunk into an eight-foot rim.

Small courts. Low baskets. More excitement. All they had to is to shrink the game while expanding the tape measure.  

You read it here first.

Woof, woof.

What’s the beef with performance enhancing substances?

Oh, we hear of the deeeeeep concern for the health of the athletes. We hear, too, about the true anxiety over youngsters polluting their bodies with harsh consequences exactly as if they were adults. We hear, as well, that such things just aren’t natural.

Mostly, we hear and believe that it is not right for one person to achieve an unfair advantage over another based on something superimposed on the natural order,  that gives a special benefit to the user over the non-user. 

OK.

Why then are we so happy that new bathing suits are available which enhance the performance of swimmers enormously? Records are falling like sparrows in the Beijing smog and the new suits are credited for the new accomplishments. Why is that OK?

A Speedo LZR Racer will run over $500 when the usual requirements for the tea-bag bathing suits of yore was about $1.50, so little fabric being expended on the item. Maybe I can afford a $500 bathing suit. But what if I cannot? If my performance is enhanced by the wearing of the thing over that of a poorer athlete, can that be right? What of the athlete that doesn’t not have such money?

People take pills and creams and fluids to make themselves perform better than the sap who is without the boost. The world howls in outrage. Yet an athlete who invests in sneakers which cost what small automobiles used to cost, in technologically juiced tools and, now, even the clothes they wear, this person is considered to be a better athlete because the enhancements allow for better performance than he could accomplish otherwise.

Doesn’t seem right to me.

What kind of chump state do I live in?

The Drug Enforcement Administration has to show us up as a bunch of pip-squeaks. Here we are the richest state in the Union and all they can come up with is a few measly bucks!

The DEA publishes today in the Wall Street Journal a vast list of things it has confiscated. Expecting that drug dealers read the Journal, apparently the new preferred demo for Rupert Murdoch and the WSJ, the list goes on for page after page in tiny little type. These guys have been busy and they publish the list in case some drug dealer wants to make a fuss about his property and come claim it — and likely get arrested on the spot.

So what did the DEA collect in Connecticut, the wealthy Nutmeg State? Bupkis is what.

“$5,680.00 U.S. Currency, New Haven, Ct. …” “$3,000.00 U.S. Currency, West Haven, Ct.” and like that. Peanuts. Just a few items. One car, a 2004 Ford Explorer.

But in southern California it’s $69,500 here and in Maryland it’s $75,247.00 there. The list goes on by the foot of the major league confiscations in state after state, cash and goodies adding up to the sky. 

Nebraska –Nebraska!! — yields up boodle you’d need a moving van to collect. Did you know that the Nebraskan druggies collect baseball cards? And sports cards of all sorts? Of course you didn’t. But the DEA list goes on for columns with  confiscation of “… 1959 Topps #325 Ken Boyer” and “1970 Topps Joe Namath” and “(1) 1967 Topps24 Jack Kemp, Ser. No. 729163.’ There’s hundreds of cards, some likely to be valued at millions. And old coins and new coins. Tons of coins.

And automobiles and gold bars and watches and jewelry and rifles and pistols and limos and …. well, the list goes on.

Couldn’t Connecticut do better? How are we supposed to hold up our heads in other locales when our drug dealers shown to be penny ante players compared to hillbilly states and the great empty ones west of Albany? This is very embarrassing.

Here’s a tip of the hat to President Bush for pulling off the North Korea nuclear success.

Bush did it right: he was firm yet not provocative; he used diplomacy rather than brute force; he worked with others to get things done rather than resorting the failed Cowboy Diplomacy that so seldom works; he was patient rather than impulsive; he listened to the cautions of others, allies and opponents alike, to get actual success.

He deserves credit and, deserving it, get it from here.

Just wondering: Why do we care what the Founders thought?

Not at all in any offfense at the Supreme Court’s ruling on guns, but I wonder why a Constitution written 200 years ago must be so faithfully followed as if there had been no changes, no developments, no new wisdoms whatever since those ancients penned things.

We have our lives decided for us today based on attitudes that are no more relevant now than are the rules of whaling or the etiquettes of stage coach riding. Because the Founders said so in 1791, in 2008 and forever into the future guns will play a part because of what is perceived to be the thinking two centuries earlier.

I don’t know what to think about guns anymore. No rules seem to protect us from the people who do not follow the rules; and no laws or regulations will protect us from the mistakes and mad urges of those for trigger happy types for whom guns are more to worship than the Deity himself. But I do wonder about the strict constructionalist following that there can be no deviating from the wisdom of the 18th century.

Yes, they were absolutely right on some things — religion, speech, liberties and so much more so often under assault today. But these self-same Founders were exactly wrong on other things like slavery and the freedom of women and other matters that have had to be attended to, so to speak, as the society evolved.

No one in his right mind is offended that the sacred Constitution is corrected on such things as refining the gifts of liberties enshrined in the spirit of the Founders if not always their works. And we turn to a Supreme Court rich with Catholics and Jews and women and blacks — people who would have had no such place at all on such a body in the Founders’ time.

Yet we are told that we must let guns flow like water because the Founders wrote the Second Amendment in a certain way hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Should we ban electricity from the Supreme Court halls? The Founders did not have that. Nor air conditioning. Nor television or the Internet or hula hoops or airplanes or …

What most astonishes me about the Founing Fathers was that, unlike any other revolutionaries in the history of time, they gave back the power after they won it. No other such collection of victorious rebels has ever given more power to the people than the people had before. And when they wrote their Constitution and it was discovered that the government had too much power the government gave it back in the Bill of Rights. That is so a mazing as to make the knees wobble in gratitude.

But are they absolutely, literally fault-free on everything else? Like guns?

I wonder.

Seeing that Monet’s dismal “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” has just sold for $80.4 million, I figure it’s finally time for me to sell my own Monet, “La Maison du Chat.”  

It’s been in the family for years. Monet used to come around and offer to paint ceilings and things for my grandparents. He was a sad drunkard, scruffy, squinty-eyed and paint splattered, mumbling curses in French and generally being a pain in the neck. My grandparents, caring souls, used to give him scraps to eat but were usually rewarded by Monet’s painting foolish looking landscapes on the side of the house after dark. They’d wash away those daubings but Monet always came back.

One day he painted Maison du Chat on the side of a paper box he’d been using for a bathroom/toilet.  It was during his famed, “Orange Period” when his skin had unfortunately turned bright orange from lacing his wine with paint thinner. The masterwork, as it has since been adjudged by me, is also notable for the evocative blue windows and door — “You can see a lot of life through the windows,” Monet was fond of saying, or something like that — and the bold, two-tone attic. This latter touch is meant to reflect the eternal divisions that mark man’s struggle with contending urges, and the fact that Monet ran low on yellow.

Clearly this work is worth $100 million, if that insipid landscape is going for $80 million.

At first you could think, “So what else is new?”

The Bush “Justice” department is exposed as an anti-American, anti-justice assemblage of hacks and ideologues.

What’s new, in what we already knew, is that it is the Justice Department itself which decries the abandonment of justice by the conservatives who threw out the window the laws, rules and policies that the department is obliged to enforce as well as follow.

Qualified attorneys and officials were rejected because they weren’t political enough, ideological enough or just for the fun of it.

“Applications that contained what were seen as ‘leftist commentary’ or ‘buzz words’ like environmental and social justice were often grounds for rejecting applicants, according to e-mails reviewed by the inspector general’s office,” according to the Times’ account.

Well, exactly so. In the era of Bush and his followers “environmental” is leftist commentary” and “social justice” is a concept to be scorned and destroyed. This, from “conservatives” so quick to lecture the rest of us — and punish us, too — on how badly we behave and how we do not follow the rules. Their rules.

Corruption and failure will be the hallmark of this administration and the stain on the spirits of everyone who supports it. These people worked to undermine the concepts of liberty, law and justice that distinguishes us from those who oppose us. In that, as in so much, they are Fifth Columnists of an anti-American terrorist program aimed at the vitality of our very system.

Get them the hell out of there, and don’t let in their shadow descendants awaiting the call the next time as “conservatives” pacing for the opportunity to extend the Bush outrage for another generation.