Another day of interviews and calls, and my overwhelming sense is that the immigration bill as drafted is as dead as dead can be.  The president's speech on Tuesday had the effect of throwing gas on the flames, and the anger has multiplied, and it isn't nativist in the least.

Could the bill be saved?  Only if the Republican leadership comes back with a package of amendments which it announces beforehand and insists be voted on serially and all of which must be adopted if cloture is to be invoked on the final amended version.  The choice before the Democrats is whether they will accept genuine enforcement (the whole fence first, big hikes in federal law enforcement beyond the Border Patrol, a burden of proof requirement on non-Spanish speaking immigrants from countries with jihadist networks and perhaps even for gang-age Spanish speakers etc.)  What happened over the past ten days was a huge shift against the bill so that the amendment package must be real reform of the reform or the dead end will be reached. John McCain knew what he was doing when he demanded a jam down --the bill has lost support with every day of scrutiny.

Quick: Name one person who went from undecided or opposed to supporting since the bill was unveiled.  Proponents have produced such a bad bill and marshalled such bad arguments that they have brought no one to their cause.

Expect more and more Democrats to try and keep the bill as it is because of the inferno on the right.  Even lefties pushing for more family member migrations etc have got to see that unity in pushing the present version forward will splinter the GOP as surely as the Corn Laws did Peel's Tories or as Ireland did Gladstone's Liberals.  If the GOP doesn't get its amendment package out and adopted, the Republican Leader has got to call a halt to the meltdown.  See this story for a clue on the deep damage done to the GOP over the past few days. 

At this point I take out my Harriet Miers Fan Club charter membership card and put it on the table:  This push for this bill is a disaster, Mr. President.  Much much worse than the Miers nomination on which you had many good arguments, or the ports deal, on which you had fewer.  On this issue there is no place to stand, and you are asking your friends in the Senate to go down fighting for a bad bill.  It is a bad bill because no one believes the government can conduct millions of background checks (many spokesmen for the bill don't even pretend to know where the paperwork will go!).  No one believes the bill will halt the next 12 million.  No one believes you are going to assure the fence gets built.  No one believes that the employer verification system will get done or work when some half-assed version of it does get done. No one believes that the probationary visas don't automatically convert illegal aliens with few if any rights into Due Process Clause covered legal migrants, with a Ninth Circuit ready and waiting to keep them here for decades.

No one believes passing the bill will help catch the jihadist sleepers already in the country. The constituency that has always been with you except on the ports deal --the security voter-- has left the room.  If you want them back, act quickly.

This isn't a talk radio fueled shout from the far right.  It isn't the Minutemen or the Tancredo people.  It is the GOP faithful who don't want it, nor anything like it.

Huddle up, D.C. GOPers, and unveil a new and very different, very improved version.  Couple it with the argument that Hillary is coming and this is the best we will get if we lose the White House.  But the deal has to be one worth taking, not the same deal we'd get under a second President Clinton.  That's why the political rebelion is here: This looks like a bill that Hillary would have sold as tough on enforcement.  We can wait two years for that.

Time's awasting.

It is just not believable.  Fix it or kill it

The author of thgis week's Letter from Washington charting stresses within the GOP joined me in the first hour.  The transcript of the interview will be up here later, as will those of my interviews with Mark Steyn and James Lileks.

And in a Don King-like moment, I'll be conducting separate interviews with National Review's Rich Lowry and the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley on the immigration bill.  Trash talking and taunting will no doubt mark these two sit-downs, as both jockey for position in the upcoming showdown debate (which the Journal has yet to accept.)

I would say they’re rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic, but a more apt analogy would be they’re throwing deck chairs off the Titanic. Admittedly that doesn’t make any sense, but since when has the McCain campaign been about making sense?

According to this report on a website that I’ve never heard of but seems really reliable since it has a lot of alcohol-related imagery, the McCain campaign has parted ways with its South Carolina political director Brad Henry and three other field operatives. And this in spite of the great progress reported by that one outlier poll!

All of which reminds me – have you entered the pool yet?

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

Gabriel Schoenfeld has some thoughts on next Tuesday's decision.

The judge will finally get his say on the charade.

They dislike him!  They really dislike him!

Time Magazines’ Joe Klein has an article on Mitt Romney today that isn’t particularly favorable. Actually, it’s downright hostile. Before continuing, I must confess to liking Joe Klein. I enjoyed “Primary Colors,” and have always thought him a far more entertaining media presence than the leftwing bloggers do. Those guys hate him.

The point of Klein’s article is that Mitt Romney rubs him the wrong way. There’s really nothing more substantive there, or certainly nothing more substantive that you haven’t already heard 8 million times before. As required by the Time Magazine style-book, Klein hits the flip-flop thing (breathtaking originality!) and misstates Romney’s past immigration positions which are the same as they are today, but big deal. Such things are all in a day’s work for a media Bigfoot. Fresh insights and reporting accuracy aren’t job requirements at dinosaurs like Time Magazine. No newsflash there.

But check out the way Mitt Romney obviously makes Joe Klein’s flesh crawl, and the way Klein makes no effort to disguise that fact:

Mitt Romney is the fastest-talking presidential candidate I have ever seen. He dashes through his stump speech like a racehorse in full gallop — he even looks a bit equine… But his speed of delivery also has an element of sleight of hand… When Romney slowed down and focused on a single issue — immigration — at a press conference in Dover, N.H., the brazen cynicism of his candidacy became almost embarrassing… Romney takes postures, not positions…

"You know," he often says, very Reagan, "there are people out there who actually believe America is great because of its government." Gasps and groans. "Well, we have a great system of government, but America is great because of" — pause for effect, cue passion — "its people."

There is something slightly anachronistic about all this. Romney is the most perfect iteration I've seen of the television-era candidate. At one point, I squinted a bit and saw him in the middle distance: blue suit, white shirt, red tie, high forehead, slick black hair, tan, tall and ramrod straight — he could have been an exhibit in some future Museum of Natural History: Politicianus americanus… His success or failure will be a reflection of how serious the electorate is in 2008.

Battle-hardened conservatives will recognize this tired media meme. As with the rest of Klein’s piece, it’s breathtakingly clichéd. In the eyes of super-smart reporters like Joe Klein, successful Republicans have only succeeded because they were so skilled at hoodwinking the unwashed masses who couldn’t recognize hokiness and “sleight of hand” when they stared them right in the eye.

Ronald Reagan got the same kind of relentless criticism from enlightened lefties for decades. Oh, how his purportedly empty platitudes about the greatness of America and the American people maddened the media. He, too, was labeled an anachronism, one that came straight out of the 1950’s. Why, the simpleton Reagan even selected “Family Ties” as his favorite TV show, a program that was frighteningly redolent of anachronistic 1950’s family values.

The fact that Romney has emerged as the candidate who most irritates the left is an unmistakably good sign for his campaign. Liberals by nature loathe their opponents. (Conservatives, on the other hand, mock their opponents.) The fact that Romney so angers adversaries like Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein, and the Boston Globe is a good thing; for whatever reason, the only Republicans who ever get into the Oval Office are the ones who really rub lefties the wrong way.

The Klein article also reveals a fundamental divide between the liberal media and a guy like Romney. Romney really does believe in the greatness of America and her people. That’s why, even though we face such enormous challenges, he’s still honestly optimistic. He radiates this optimism, and it drives some people nuts. Shouldn’t he be despondent about Gitmo like everyone else?

Also, like Ronald Reagan, Romney effortlessly gets under his critics’ skin for having the audacity to be smarter and more insightful than they are. The media routinely dismissed Reagan as a senile dunderhead. Reagan was in good company there. Eisenhower had the same reputation a generation earlier. It never dawned on the gluttons at the press buffet to wonder how such dopes habitually ran circles around them. And how it must have shocked them when it turned out that Reagan was a more skilled and lucid writer than all of the knights of the keyboard who so vainly hounded him.

While Romney will be tougher to dismiss as an intellectual lightweight than Reagan was because of his impressive resume, his “simple” faith in America is sure to madden the media. It’s also telling that Klein attacks Romney for his “speed of delivery” and “sleight of hand.” One of the things that drove the liberal Boston media nuts about Romney is that they were convinced he had something up his sleeve, but could never find it. For four years the local media unloaded haymakers in Romney’s direction, and never laid a glove on him. Drove them nuts.

I got a glimpse into exactly how deep this frustration ran when I appeared on a local chat-fest with Boston Globe columnist and longtime Romney nemesis Joan Vennochi last week. I mentioned that Romney had balanced a wildly out of whack budget without raising taxes. Joan countered that he had balanced the budget only by raising fees and – I hope you’re sitting down for this – closing corporate loopholes! Since every Democrat since Woodrow Wilson has had “closing corporate loopholes” as the lynchpin of his economic plan, this was an odd attack for a liberal to make.

But such is the effect that Mitt Romney has on the liberal media. He has brought his message directly to the rubes, and it has resonated. Curses! No wonder why Joe Klein is so frustrated.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

The editors of the National Review have challenged the editors of the Wall Street Journal to debate the merits of the immigration bill.

I offer an entire show, pretaped if necessary for the convenience of the east coasters.  Next Wednesday or Thursday anyone?

(I am the perfect moderator as I have actually read the bill, interviewed the key players about it, and would support it but for the flaws on the enforcement side.  If it could be made to work --we'd have to pretape before his show, or conduct the debate live from 6 to 9 PM-- I'd also invite Michael Medved to pose questions, and he's a supporter of the bill as written.)

RSVPs to hugh@hughhewitt.com.

Sheesh.  That wasn't very bright.  From the Boston Globe:

As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.

Was Lindeman Flea?

Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day.

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed.

1) As an avowed Romney supporter, you must be ready to jump out the window because Fred entered the race. Admit it – you’re despondent!

Not at all. The stronger the field, the stronger the ultimate nominee will be. Besides, I wasn’t kidding about the McCain campaign being over. I truly believe he’ll drop out before the leaves change, probably some time between Ames and Labor Day. And a two man race at such an early date would be unhealthy.

2) At the risk of veering off subject, don’t you give any credence to those polls that show McCain doing well?

The ARG ones? The ones that have Fred at 6%? No, I don’t. And honestly, I don’t believe the McCain campaign does either.

3) Okay – back on subject. If you want Romney to win, why do you welcome Fred into the race? Are you insane?

Insane like a fox! To date, it’s been too easy for Mitt. McCain knocked himself out. And, I might as well predict this for the record, but before I do let me reiterate that if Rudy gets the nomination I will support him enthusiastically. I believe that sometime between now and the end of the road, Rudy will commit a campaign blunder that will be bigger than the Dean Scream, “Stop Lying About my Record”, Ed Muskie crying on the back of a truck and George Romney’s “brainwashed” comment combined. I think Rudy will establish the gold standard for all future campaigning boners.

4) Why?

He’s an undisciplined campaigner, and the candidates are in the spotlight for 15 hours a day, 6 days a week. Rudy’s style makes for a ticking time-bomb in this age of the YouTube.

5) How will Fred be as a candidate?

He’s formidable. But he’ll obviously have the problem of living up to the hype.

6) Could anyone live up to the hype he’s received?

No. The Republican Party views him as the potential savior for a field that it considers somewhat unsatisfactory. But Republicans are never wholly satisfied with their candidates. We’re not like Democrats who can somehow become true-blue believers for every Tom, Dick and Kerry that heads their ticket. We’re at the other end of the spectrum.

7) How so?

Time for a history lesson! In 1980, Ronald Reagan was too old and not quick enough on his feet. Republicans were so uneasy with his assumed ascendancy that they even flirted with the then-unknown George H.W. Bush. Hard as it may be to believe, Bush stunned Reagan in Iowa. In 1988, Bush 41 wrestled with the English language and came across as a wimp. In 1992, Pat Buchanan almost won New Hampshire, showing just how unpopular the incumbent had become in his own party. In ’96, Dole was too old, too tongue-tied and not conservative enough. And in 2000, of course, we nominated a man with a flimsy résumé who every time he spoke wrestled with the English language like it was a rabid alligator. Mind you, this is how we viewed our own nominees.

8) So how will the bloom come off the rose that is Fred?

Fred’s a Howard Baker moderate, or at least he was. He’s also supposed to be not particularly inspiring on the retail campaigning level. He’s also a little old-ish. Even though he’s only a few years older than Mitt and Rudy, that doesn’t look like the case.

9) Ha! A Romney supporter accusing Fred of being a closet moderate. That’s rich.

I offer that not as a critique, but rather as an illustration of how Fred’s golden veneer will get tarnished once he jumps in the ring. And, as is the case with Romney, it’s not that big a deal. Voters care a lot more about where politicians stand than where they used to stand in 1994.

10) So who gets hurt most by Thompson’s entry?

Well, McCain was toast anyway, so he doesn’t count. Rudy and Mitt will feel some pressure and lose some supporters. I would assume the real heart-broken ones are the second tier candidates who were hoping that one of the frontrunners would falter and they would have a chance to move up. McCain faltered, and now his spot will be filled by Fred.

11) How about Fred’s health?

I have to disagree with my mentor. I think this is a complete non-issue. All the candidates are presumed mortal and vulnerable. There are literally billions of people who wouldn’t mind taking out the American president. In 1984, the country re-elected a very old-looking and old-sounding Ronald Reagan who had barely survived an assassination attempt and would soon face cancer, something that by the way didn’t phase the nation at all. The only way a candidate’s health becomes an issue is if his running mate is seen as not ready for primetime.

12) So how does Fred win?

This is where things get dicey for Fred – the actual roadmap to victory. Retail campaigning isn’t his strength. If he loses Iowa and New Hampshire, he would have to score an overwhelming victory in South Carolina to get back on track. And, as an additional problem, because of his late start his campaign is likely to be money starved from the git-go. If he survives the initial primaries but in a weakened state, it’s unlikely he’ll have the money to compete seriously on Mega-Tuesday.

13) I asked how he wins. You told me how he would lose. Let me try again – how does he win?

By having Fred-mania sweep the party starting before Labor Day and continuing through Iowa. It could happen. But my money’s still on Mitt. But, as with Rudy, if Fred’s the nominee I will support him enthusiastically.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

From yesterday's New York Times story on Lou Dobbs:

The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago.

The segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing background research for it, a “60 Minutes” producer came across a 2005 news report from Mr. Dobbs’s CNN program on contagious diseases. In the report, one of Mr. Dobbs’s correspondents said there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country over the previous three years, far more than in the past.

When Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down to interview Mr. Dobbs on camera, she mentioned the report and told him that there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”...

To sort through all this, I called James L. Krahenbuhl, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, an arm of the federal government. Leprosy in the United States is indeed largely a disease of immigrants who have come from Asia and Latin America. And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.

The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. After that, reported cases dropped steadily, falling to just 76 in 2000. Last year, there were 137.

“It is not a public health problem — that’s the bottom line,” Mr. Krahenbuhl told me. “You’ve got a country of 300 million people. This is not something for the public to get alarmed about.” Much about the disease remains unknown, but researchers think people get it through prolonged close contact with someone who already has it.

The reporter, David Leonart, nailed Lou.  Fine.  It happens, and when you do five hours a week, it will happen more than once.  Hopefully Lou made a correction last night.

But Leonart wasn't finished.  He threw in this line, from a New York Times reporter no ess:

The most common complaint about [Dobbs], at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing.

No mention of who those other journalists are.  No notice of the fact Leonart was mixing factual reporting with editorializing. 

I don't think Leonart was aware of the irony.  Not in the least.

How I love the MSM.

Ed Morrissey is traveling with the Romney campaign in Iowa today.  His conclusion:

So far, I have to admit that the Romney campaign and Romney himself is impressive. He has the same ability to hold an audience as Rudy Giuliani, and also the same grasp of detail in his speaking. He's even better off the cuff than with prepared remarks.

Politico.com's Mike Allen joins me int he second hour today to talk about his article on Fred Thompson's decision to enter the campaign.  I have two key questions.

First, Allen reports that Thompson might skip the Ames Straw Poll on August 11 where Giuliani, McCain, and Romney have been preparing to test their respective organizational strengths A decision by Fred to skip the showdown would be very surprising as (1)you don't win elections by skipping contests, and (2)the folks in Iowa like their straw poll, so you don't win a lot of friends in the state by thumbing your nose at their summer fun.

I also will follow up on the questions I posed to Jim VandeHei a few weeks ago about Thompson's indolent lymphoma:  What is the rate of recurrence of the disease, and in those cases in which it recurs, how often are those recurrences debilitating?  While not a candidate, Thompson was spared having to discuss the health issue very much, but Republicans have a right to know the odds that their nominee could find himself in chemo or some other form of treatment after the nomination has been secured and before the general election campaign has been fought.  If the very thin reporting on the specifics of his illness is correct, it has been about three years since the first diagnosis of the cancer, and thus a couple of years away from the five year mark which typically signals "full recovery" for a cancer patient. 

Fred Thompson is going to make an already fascinating race even more compelling as he is a very different candidate than the other big three.  He deals the harshest blow to McCain whose shaky start has left a lot of major players uneasy at having backed the wrong horse. Whereas the Rudy and Mitt people knew exactly what they were signing up for  --an against-the-grain of the GOP's ideological base run by Rudy or a catapult campaign by Mitt that would use early success in Iowa and New Hampshire and superior fundraising and organizational skills to march through the bunched up r=primaries that follow.

McCain's people thought they were teaming up with a front runner in the mold of W in '00 or Dole in '96.  They were banking on the GOP's long standing predilection to send the nomination to the "next-in-line," which by their count meant McCain.

But Senator McCain isn't going to benefit from a party tradition when he hasn't been a traditional party guy in any sense of the word.  Senator McCain's been an anti-party guy, and his plummeting support shows what happens when that record is matched against fresh faces and better energy.

So Thompson gives every McCain staffer and money backer a chance at a do-over.  If the exodus from McCain to Thompson gets started, it could burgeon very quickly.

UPDATE: Just interviewed Stephen Hayes of the WeeklyStandard.com about Thompson.  Hayes also has a piece up on the Fred's decision to get in, but thinks McCain-Feingold may be more of a problem for the former senator than is generally thought.  The transcript of my interviews with both Hayes and Allen will be up here later.

One more thought about Fred Thompson's momentum and why it may not be as great or as sustainable as some pundits speculate.

There is a great fear in the GOP that Hillary is approaching with Bill in the sidecar and Senator Obama on the bottom of the ticket, MoveOn and Kosputin whipping the fever swamp into a frenzy and Soros pouring his last cent into his last play.  Thompson as Reagan meant for a lot of these people not Thompson as a conservative's conservative, but Thompson as a powerful candidate capable of summoning a huge outpouring of energy and enthusiasm from the base and the old Reagan Democrats alike leading to a big win as in 1980 and 1984.  Couldn't we please have a candidate who could establish and keep a lead like the Gipper.

Except, of course, Ronald Reagan did not establish and keep a lead in 1980. Until the last few days of the race, President Carter and Governor Reagan were viewed as neck-and-neck in a race too close to call. There isn't any reason to believe that Fred would have any easier a go of it than Rudy or Mitt, and as that becomes obvious in the days and weeks and months after his entry, the folks hoping for an easy win are going to drop that enthusiasm and start looking hard again at all three, asking which one is the best candidate.

These are the Al Davis Republicans --"Just win, baby"-- and their support will be decisive in 1Q08.  One reason I suspect the Fred boom may be over before it has even really begun is the recognition that on the stump Fred will be seen as the southerner he is --slow, folksy, plain spoken.  In a year when an anti-Bush may be needed, a Brookyln-born Mob-busting tough guy, or the hyper-intelligent, hyper-eloquent investment banker turnaround executive may emerge quickly as far more likely to be the "something completely different " that Reagan was in 1980, and thus the strong prefernce of the Al Davis GOPers.

UPDATE #2: Geraghty the Indispensible has great sources inside Team Thompson.  Perhaps Jim's blog should be renamed the Hillary-Fred Spot?

This has nothing to do with nothing, but if you have 28 seconds to spare, you won’t regret spending it watching this video. Assuming you heed my counsel and watch the clip, I want you take special note of how the men react to their “accomplishment” and how the woman reacts. It offers further evidence (as if we needed any) of Amanda Marcotte’s theories on the patriarchy and its limitless evil.

Oh, one last thing:  Kids, don't try this at home.

UPDATE - Before posting this, I considered the possibility, nay likelihood, that the above is a hoax.  I even considered slowing it down Zapruder-film style, analyzing it frame by frame to determine exactly what happened.  But then I said to myself, No!  This is the most idiotic piece of performance art ever conceived, and whether the lunkheads threw the willing projectile through the hoop or just dangerously close to it was ultimately of little consequence.   

If this is a hoax, I don't want to know.  And I agree with the commenter who said let's see them do it from three point range.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

A story in the San Francisco Chronicle by Carla Marinucci details the giving of the PAC run by Rudy's law firm:

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, a prodigious fundraiser who will campaign today in California, is partner in a law firm with a generous political action committee -- one that gave nearly 40 percent of its contributions to Democrats in the 2006 midterm elections, including $5,000 to then-Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.

The 2006 donations from the political action committee of the Houston-based law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani -- known as Bracepac -- included $3,000 to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco and $500 to Jerry McNerney of Pleasanton, who defeated Republican Rep. Richard Pombo in the East Bay's hotly contested 11th Congressional District race, federal records show.

Bracepac contributed to 53 Democratic candidates and 50 Republicans in the 2006 election cycle, federal records show. In California, Bracepac donations went mostly to Democrats, although the political action committee also contributed $2,500 to Pombo and $3,500 to Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands (San Bernardino County), who was the chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee until Democrats took control of the House.

Read the whole thing, and kudos to Marinucci for running the traps and coming up with a very interesting and potentially very problematic story for Rudy.

Rudy's long ago contribution to Planned Parenthood wasn't a significant story, any more than are Ann Romney's donation to the same group or the occasional contribution by any candidate to a long time friend or business associate who happens to be a Democrat or independent.  Purity in contribution history has never been a major issue in any campaign, just one of many data points in figuring out whether or not a candidate has been a loyal Party member, which does indeed matter.

Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Giuliani's campaign, told the Chron in an e-mail Tuesday that "the PAC is not representative of the mayor's beliefs."  This is an interesting story on how a politically connected law firm operates, but it doesn't tell us much about the mayor, though he probably had some choice words today regarding the decisions of his partners on the PAC's steering committee.

The photo above was taken on July 12, 1943. The relaxed looking fellow on the left is Babe Ruth; the handsome sailor lighting his cigar is Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams who was then busying himself flying fighters in World War II, an activity that he was as good at as he was hitting a baseball.

The Babe was a spokesman for war bonds and was hosting a War Charities Game at Boston’s Braves Field that day. Teddy Ballgame, who happened to be stateside, participated in the festivities. The baseball the Babe is holding is one he personally signed for Williams; it was one of Ted’s most prized possessions until it was stolen years later. Ultimately, the ball was recovered and is now on display at the Ted Williams Museum at Tropicana Field.

I love little pieces of memorabilia like this. They are poignant on so many different levels, especially for baseball fans, and doubly so for Red Sox fans. (The Sox, by the way, are 2/3 of the way through sweeping the hapless Cleveland Indians who this week are being revealed for the sad pretenders that they are.)

The website www.I-Concepts.org sells prints like these that come from the Boston Public Library’s amazing collection at unbelievably low prices. Believe it or not, you can get the one of Ted and the Babe for $18. If you’re a baseball fan, or even heavens forbid an Indians fan, you owe it to yourself to check out their site.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.