More Thoughts: Alabama Governor Move For Tax Reform, strong man idea, humorous look at CA Recall, Bush's speech on Iraq, and campaign finance orals.

Mets Futility: The Mets are in the midst of a seven game losing streak, which basically helped the Phillies a bit more than the Marlins in their Wild Card Race because the former played four, to the Marlins three. The starting pitching was actually pretty good with several games tied (or one run difference) in the eighth or ninth, but the Mets kept on blowing it. Today's game was a true exercise in futility. The Mets brought up eight men in the first inning ... and got two runs, which is some feat. The Mets soon enough gave up the lead via two errors, so it was 4-2 (three unearned), giving Seo another game where he lasted only five. A rookie (the regs aren't doing much these days either, including Piazza, who is stuck on needing about four home runs to break the record as a catcher) got his first home run, and it was 4-3 in the eighth. The Mets lost 7-3.

A post linked above discusses it in more detail, but I want to underline my support of the fact that the audio of the oral arguments in the campaign finance law case were release by the Supreme Court, and immediately aired by C-SPAN. Why this is not done more often, at least for important cases, is unclear to me. Audio alone retains the "dignity" of the Court, and it is quite helpful that the questioners from the bench were labelled, unlike it is done in transcripts found on the SC website. I hope the use twice this year (the other being the college affirmative action case) points to a slight trend. It was educational and informative.