What I don't need is another stupid ass, dead on arrival health care plan. That's Congress's job.

What I do need is a list, a comprehensive list, of the presidential proclamations and executive orders of your soon-to-be predecessor that you plan to toss in the garbage on the afternoon of January 20, 2009.

I want a pledge never to use the sneaky right to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation, and an agreement to sign its repeal into law.

I want to hear that the words "unitary executive" have been purged from the White House vocabulary.

I want to hear that all White House staff have been informed that they will communicate on official business only on official government email accounts, and that anything they do on any other email account will never be subject to any claim of executive privilege.

I want a list of all the international agreements this administration has abrogated, ignored, trashed or scuttled that you will revive and honor.

I want you expressly to agree that the Constitution does not give you sole power in the event of war, and that we are not, in a Constitutional sense, at war.

I want to know how you will reassure me that I live in a country that does not torture, that believes that the safety of its citizens and soldiers is best-assured by complying with international agreements against torture, and that the words of such agreements will not be parsed to find loopholes, but rather to ensure that this country comports with the spirit and not just the letter of those rules (the parsing done by the current occupant makes what used to be called Clintonesque seem so, so petty).

I want to know that on January 20, 2009, there will be no distinction between the laws applicable to persons in Guantanamo Bay and in Bay City.

I want to know that our country will not be operating secret prisons, let alone using the prisons that we Americans used to fear behind the Iron Curtain for illegal activities we would never tolerate when done to our own citizens.

I wish I could say I saw a candidate, short of Mike Gravel, who might have the slightest chance of meeting these standards, but that is what I think our country needs. The rest are far too afraid of upsetting the right-wing media machinery by saying anything they believe, and I think they would, in office, be as lily-livered as they have been in their government service to date.

If you think of the Presidents who have accomplished something, that we honor, they were not cautious men. Lincoln spent a decade standing for the end of something that was expressly contemplated by the Constitution. Franklin Roosevelt spent the first Hundred Days of his administration saving us from chaos or communism, and then placed us in a position to win World War II against the protests of the America Firsters. Lyndon Johnson (no one likes to talk about this) sacrificed the Democratic Party's chances in the South for more than a generation to put into place laws that saved the South, not that they would ever acknowledge it.

So the onus is on them. I'm waiting.

Major League Baseball had a huge popularity problem after the 1994 labor stoppage. Major League Baseball used the surge in home run hitting, and in particular the McGwire-Sosa battle in 1998, to get itself back into the national consciousness. Major League Baseball was entirely complicit in the charade, up to and including knowing Palmeiro had flunked his drug test before he got his 3000th hit. Every dime of ticket sales, concession sales, television revenue and merchandising involved has lined the pockets of the owners.

But baseball continues to want to have the media focus on the players and on the supposed sanctity of individual records. It is Major League Baseball that sells the product, not individual players, and if the product is adulterated, it is not the responsibility of individual players or the players union, but of the seller of the product, Major League Baseball. Yet it takes no responsibility for being complicit in the fraud and the media, keeping the focus on questions like "Should Selig attend Bonds' recordbreaking game?", plays along.

In today's USA Today, there is an article quoting John Dowd, who is a lawyer who works for Major League Baseball (e.g., the various Dowd Reports) claiming that Selig should suspend players who don't cooperate with the Mitchell investigation, and that the union has too much power. This is a dog bites man story, but there it is in the paper in all its glory.

I'm not saying that anyone who used steroids is a victim or shouldn't take responsibility for their own actions. But so long as the results of the games they played are still the same, as far as I'm concerned, the records are the records. Hoss Radbourne might not be able to make a good college team, for all we know, but he still won 60 games in a season for a major league team, and no one is taking his records away either.