Did the study include Hispanics in the same race category as whites, or were they a separate one? Given the number of Hispanic pitchers in MLB, this should be critical. And it should be obvious that there are more than two categories of race (if the term is to mean anything at all) in MLB.

If Hispanics were considered white, then that makes this useless study even more useless. It may be that white umps are more likely to give calls to pitchers of their own race, but I don't believe that they're any more likely to consider Hispanic pitchers to be of their own race than black pitchers.

And let's not kid ourselves into thinking that white umps look at an Asian pitcher as one of their own, either, but there are fewer of them.

That headline is unforgivably cheap and dishonest. It's not even well written, because instead of just sensationalizing the contents of the article in order to grab attention, which would probably be acceptable for an article like this, it misrepresents the article completely, as though it were a dumb mistake.

There's a term for what you're doing: It's called "bad editing." Christ, hire some editors with skills.

... is that it represents a sort of abuse of the system. There has to be some limit on the number of people involved in the union, or theoretically one person could be in a civil union with hundreds or even thousands of others in order to share whatever benefits are conferred. So if there has to a be a limit set, there's really no better number for that limit than two.

Further up, I said that Hillary is the only candidate who stands out in terms of experience. I meant the only candidate among the three front-runners, which are the only ones this article paid any damn attention to.

I hate it when I fall into that trap.

That post from mattwa33186 was exactly right, unfortunately. Powell probably isn't struggling with this much and the Bush administration probably isn't as afraid of him as Blumenthal suggests because all indications are that it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference if Powell spills his guts. Republicans would attack him, the media would treat it all as "he said, she said," and it would quickly be forgotten. Even in the long view of history, it would just be one more testimony added to a large pile of them that already make the situation clear, and haven't made much difference.

Seriously, what effect would Powell's revelations have? Would they force Bush to change course? Would they force Congress to actually do something? Would they significantly affect the '08 election? None of this seems possible to me.

As a response to those who think abundant experience is a critical factor for a presidential canididate, I'll point out that the last two people elected president are GW Bush and Bill Clinton. I think voters have proven pretty clearly that they don't care that much about experience. And I don't think average voters consider a governor more experienced than a senator, anyway.

I like Edwards, but you can't tell me that anybody who's not a Washington pundit or a serious political junkie considers Edwards to be more "experienced" than Obama. Hillary is the only candidate who stands out in those terms.

Also, as other posters have suggested, this article is pretty representative of the horse-race, conventional-wisdom-dependent, Beltway-insider, issue-free reporting that we can get anywhere, and that happens to be crushing our representative democracy.

Honestly, I'm not playing dumb here ... What I'm saying is there's no proof that the cause of his success has been steroid use ... He started using steroids and his home run totals went up. Also, 9/11 happened. Correlation does not equal causation.

Respectfully, King, I think you are playing dumb, because that's a terrible arguement. Yes, 9/11 (and plenty of other things) correlated with Bonds' surge, but the terrorists didn't fly the planes into the buildings in order to improve Barry Bonds' performance. Yet that's the exact specific reason that Bonds took steriods. The "correlation doesn't equal causation" argument isn't worth much when the suspected cause was undertaken deliberately for the purpose of creating the effect, and when it's reasonable to believe that the two are related. (This isn't praying for rain, after all.) It may be true that steriods have never been scientifically proven to improve performance, but players wouldn't have continually put so much of that crap in their bodies if they hadn't seen some pretty persuasive evidence that it works. That's not conclusive proof, but this isn't a criminal court, and you'd have to have a pretty big stick up your ass not to give it a lot of weight.

The only strong reason I can see for doubting the effectiveness of steriods is that other players may have taken just as much and not seen the same improvement in performance. But that inconsistency, if it exists, isn't nearly as persuasive to me as what we know of Canseco, McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, etc.

for career walks issued is a monster, too. Aside from different-era type records like Cy Young's 511 wins, the ones that seem the most daunting are these freakish ones where the distance between #1 and #2 is just astronomical.

Rickey Henderson's 1406 career stolen bases. No other player has even reached 1,000, and that's what's so amazing: The gap between him and every other player ever is a whole career's worth of stolen bases for even an above-average leadoff hitter. I suppose that record will be broken someday, but I'd love to know how.