Ever since Casey & Baker made their deal with Iran in 1980, their mullahs & ours have growled at each other. They ramp it up when its convenient, cool it down when it suits them & generally have had a long and productive relationship based on common goals & shared ideals.

My unwillingness to accept the likelihood of an attack on Iran is simply based on the expectation that they - the theocrats in both countries - will continue the relationship on its old terms, and have no real beef. Sure there's a history of phony wars blowing up into real ones, and to some extent we do become what we pretend to be, but for now the utter absurdity & pointlessness of initiating a fresh disaster against a large & powerful country inclines me to place my worries elsewhere.

Also, with regard to Cheney, you have to consider what the oil industry wants. The oil industry is very happy with things as they are.

What's Julia Roberts, chopped liver?

In 1987 the ball was juiced & everybody in the majors had a power jump. Wade Boggs had 24 HR.

Pendleton hit .230 with an OPS of 601 in 1990. St Louis let him go so they could play Todd Ziele. He hooked on with Atlanta & won the batting title & MVP.

Still the all-time shocker season.

Dwight Evans was 29 when he suddenly became a top slugger. From 1972-1980 he was a middling hitter with a good arm; from 1981-1989 he had patience, power and one of the strangest stances ever.

I can't think of anybody else before the 1990s with a career like that. Since 1990, there've been lots: Terry Pendleton & Tony Phillips were both defensive specialists who turned into offensive forces after changing teams. I suppose you have to have serious defensive value to stay in the majors as a weak hitter until you're 30. I used to think it was coaching, & remembered Lloyd Moseby & Willie Upshaw improving years after making the majors - but those 2 were 23 & 26 when they had their breakthrough years, and faded quickly.

Condoleeza Rice is the only person in the world still using the phrase "Noone could have predicted". For this, & other good reasons, we should all raise our middle fingers in salute every time she manifests.

If I make 10,000 predictions some of them will come true. Then I can make a living as a seer by only telling people about those that worked out. And if we we make a million guesses, more will work out.

But sure, there will still be unpredicted events. Just not unimaginable, simply because nobody predicted that say, ARod would be called to Scientology like Michael Jordan was called to baseball. Or that gorillas could be taught to throw sliders, or horse-human hybrids to play outfield. After all, Frances the talking mule was out there 50 years ago.

So I'll make a short term & serious prediction: The fun drain on baseball will start to affect attendance within 2 years. Fancy stadiums, nostalgia & pseudoparticipation through stats and chat can't support a boring, ethically compromised game forever. Another prediction: David Ortiz will wreck his knee, retire, and replace David Letterman.

The pattern over the last 6 years has been that the crazies in the Bush Administration do whatever they want & then the Establishment convinces itself that it's being listened to by getting even crazier itself. Their epic work last year was the Baker-Hamilton report, which, though ignored in practice, provides a very clear map to Establishment thought. What got my attention was the huge level of often self contradictory detail. The first point about the oil industry was that we should convince the Iraqis that we don't want to control their oil. This was followed by 6 very detailed points about how the Iraqis should run their oil industry & distribute its revenues.

Yeah, they're eejits.

You're wrong that we can't imagine future controversies. Heck, there's an entire genre based on imagining the future. Just off the top of my head, I can imagine:

Artificial eyes

Cat gene treatments

Mormon team owners

Robot umpires

Elbow replacement surgery

Cyborgs

Telepathic signals broadcast into the heads of visiting players

Sure, none of these might happen, and the only controversy will involve teams that go to 3 infielders & naked ballgirls dancing between innings, but that's been imagined too.

Mostly, though, I imagine that baseball will continue to decline as fewer & fewer boys have the time, space, or inclination to play the game.

One part of the mortgage industry that will probably die a well deserved death soon is Mortgage Brokering. These storefront operators have operated for years with a central conflict of interest - the lenders pay them more for originating a bad loan than a good loan. About half of the people with toxic loans could have qualified for better terms, but they went to brokers who simply screwed them over for the YSPs.

The system needs more light shined on it - in particular the lenders who pay the YSPs (at least those that haven't already folded).

Sabathia would be unique - the first 300 pounder to win 300 games.

Nahgunnahappen.

I followed the links to Brookings to see if O'Hanlon was as bad as you make him seem. The first hit was some truly dimwitted congressional testimony. The second was even worse : He put his name on a book advocating a limited missile shield.

While advocating war in Iraq & then pretending not to have should disqualify you from ever talking about war and peace again, pushing that insane boondoogle should result in 10 years in a clown nose & "Kick Me" sign.