Just came back from the live talking head gig on CNN’s Reliable Sources, chatting about the wildfires. (Additional supporting links have been added below; scroll down or click here.)

Pretty much exactly what I expected: six or seven minutes of dearly wishing that every damn thing wasn’t so frequently framed as partisan, and wishing I wasn’t contributing to it.

As I said (or tried to, anyway) on the show, science itself should be in no way partisan, and both Republican and Democratic lives and livelihoods will all clearly be in greater danger for years to come. This should never have been framed this way. Maybe if I’d been asked on in some other format or framework. I dunno. But man, nobody giving aid and shelter and food down at Qualcomm this week asked for party affiliation. Democratic and Republican firefighters work together side by side without a thought. Politicizing a huge and growing future problem this way so debases our ability to solve it together.

But how do you plead for bipartisanship when (a) you’re already tagged before you speak as being the lefty voice, and (b) the current administration, which is Republican, is actively censoring science? Just pointing out objective reality looks partisan in that context.

Still, I went on because the science on climate change and its relation to wildfires is much clearer than I think most of the media has reported (see some of the links below for starters), and I wanted to get the information out there. Southern California is my home. I care about this greatly.

I don’t naturally like to talk over people or be talked over, but the format almost demands it. The time limitations force you into this weird haiku of talking points, pushing each side to try to score points rather than just talk. Plus, even in normal conversation people often need a couple of shots at getting what they mean into words, so in this compressed environment, someone will almost inevitably say something inaccurate. (I know I did at least once, not meaning to.) So I suddenly found myself talking over the other guest a couple of times even though I was trying not to, and probably vice versa. And amid the babble I have no idea if anyone gained any useful information. I kinda doubt it.

Frankly, that there are people who actually enjoy this process baffles me. I have no idea what sort of emotional worlds professional pundits must inhabit. But I don’t think I’ve ever even visited.

I’m also saddened to notice that even people on "my" side of things were evaluating the appearance not just in terms of how much information I got out, but also in how I looked to them in comparison to the other guest, which is so dearly not the real point. (btw, I’m sure she’s quite bright, kind, and good-willed. Sincerely, I mean that. Most people are pretty wonderful, given a chance. Not fully grokking the various ecosystems in California and how they are managed differently is perfectly understandable. At a party, we probably would have had a great time, disagreed, chatted amiably, found common ground, and moved on. Instead, I kinda had to confront her in a way that would be rude in any other context, and I feel lousy about it. This does not come naturally to me.)

What I regret not saying most of all: that those chairs should be filled with real scientists and experts with direct knowledge and experience, not bloggers, including me, for gods’ sake.

Then again, TV is a business, and they have airtime to fill. Y’know, it never really occurred to me before how much the 24/7 news cycle may itself have contributed to the fracturing of America and this tragic partisanship now so pervasive that it’s frequently mistaken for patriotism on both sides. (I’m guilty of that myself a hundred times over, btw.)

Our visual window on world events is constantly being filled with this left/right thing, imposed even when it doesn’t belong. It’s great, inexpensive, entertaining TV. But we now have an entire generation of people who don’t even remember a time when extreme partisanship wasn’t a frequently televised, culturally acceptable, mainstreamed part of our discourse.

How we ever turn back from this I have no idea.

No idea what’s going to come up exactly on CNN this morning, but for viewers who bop over here after, these might be useful links:

Gotta run. If something else comes up — which it probably will — and I should post a link, I’ll do it within a couple of hours of the show.

Thanks for stopping by.

(Added later:)

How low can things go?

No real reporters were allowed in, although they were allowed to listen.

Those responsible, however, may be "reprimanded."  Nice to know that people who have this much disrespect for the public and the democratic process in the middle of a crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of lives will at least get a good stern talking-to.

For those who came in late or don’t follow baseball (in which case you may just decide to scroll down to the next post), the Indians came within one game of reaching the World Series this year… and then lost three straight, setting a new record for striking out in an AL championship series.

This matches nicely with the Cleveland Browns getting to within one game of the Super Bowl… and then losing spectacularly in the very last seconds. Twice. Or Ohio State getting to the national championship game in both football and basketball last year… and then getting killed. Or the Cleveland Cavaliers getting to the NBA Finals for the first time, then losing four straight while setting a record for the fewest points scored in a modern NBA Finals series.

I say this with no small admiration for the diehards back home: if you can handle being an Ohio sports fan, you can handle damn near anything.

Or you’d think. Lately, I have to take serious issue with a lot of crap I’ve seen that is making want to stop cheering for Cleveland teams entirely. For one, this, first and foremost:

As noted here earlier, this idiot racist garbage shames the entire city. Has to stop.

There’s also lot of bleating about curses and dumb horrible luck being to blame for the Indians not winning a championship. Rubbish. Lots of teams in every sport you can name go decade after decade without winning titles: in American baseball alone, I can think of the Cubs, the White Sox, the Red Sox themselves going 88 years until ’04 (almost 50% longer than the Indians’ current drought), the Phillies (1883-1990, over 50% longer than the Indians’ drought), and even the SF Giants, who beat the Indians in ’54 and haven’t won since, either. There are dozens and dozens in other sports. There’s only one champ, kids. Everybody else goes home. Failure is always the most common result in all sports everywhere, just like in life itself. Make your peace with that and learn to be happy. All this poor, poor me crap is pathetic. Find a way to have fun while losing or just stop watching.

I’m still getting emails from people bringing up a bad umpire call when Kenny Lofton was wrongly called out at second in the deciding game. Umm… hello? The Red Sox won that game by nine runs, and outscored the Indians 51-32 for the series, a 60% advantage. That’s not one bad break, bad luck, or a screw-up by a third base coach. Good lord.

It seems not to have occurred to many fans that maybe the Indians lost because they’re just not all that damn good yet. Late in that same game, third base coach Joel Skinner made a conservative tactical choice, holding Lofton when he might have scored, giving the Indians men on first and third with one out. On the very next pitch, Casey Blake, who was often quite awful throughout the playoffs, leapt to the rescue of a struggling pitcher by swinging at the very first pitch and serving up a ground ball double play. Inning over.

That’s not Joel Skinner’s fault. It’s Casey Blake’s. The real problem: the Indians lost because they still have several everyday players who simply aren’t very good. Championship teams rarely feature that. And it’s the front office’s fault for not keeping a vastly superior third baseman in the system.  (More on that in two paragraphs.)

Blake finished the postseason with an OPS of .668 — a full 100 points below mere major league average. Lofton, despite a strong start in the playoffs, batted .174 (4-23) in the last six games, finishing the postseason with, yes, below-average total offensive stats, including an on-base percentage ten points below the league average. This from a guy whose strength is allegedly getting on base.

And then people wonder why the team can’t win a title. Jeebus.

Incidentally, the Indians recently had a terrific 3B prospect, a guy they could have dearly used instead of Blake: Kevin Kouzmanoff, the guy who hit a grand slam in his first major league at bat. Unfortunately, the front office traded him for Josh Barfield, who wouldn’t even be in the majors right now without his father’s last name. (You may have glimpsed Barfield briefly in the playoffs, appearing once as a late-inning pinch runner.) Kouzmanoff is now a 25-year-old starting 3B in San Diego, where he went .853 OPS for the second half. There’s a good chance he’ll be a .290 30 HR 100 RBI guy for years to come, even in the hitter’s nightmare known as Petco Park. Instead, the Indians stuck with Casey Blake, an aging veteran with no upside beyond what we saw this year, and they paid for it.

They’ll keep paying for it, too. There really isn’t a 3B prospect anywhere in the organization ready to step in. Wes Hodges, maybe, in a year or two. (Don’t talk to me about Andy Marte.) If they had a hot SS prospect, they could move Peralta to third, but the farm system doesn’t seem ready for that approach, either. So, it’s either a pricey free agent (not damn likely), or a crappy one (slightly more likely), or Blake it will be for the foreseeable future.

I’ve also heard a lot of wonder about why C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona, the Indians’ two young pitching aces, suddenly couldn’t find home plate. It’s no mystery: look at number of innings they pitched. Counting the playoffs, Sabathia threw 250 innings this year, a workload that has historically ended a lot of young guys’ careers. Carmona was only slightly less overworked, and at age 23, throwing 200+ innings creates a serious fatigue and injury hazard in the coming years.

If Carmona’s arm pops next year — and he’s at heightened risk now, thanks to Indians management — it almost seems like he ought to be able to file an OSHA claim. The Indians have badly mismanaged their best young pitching prospect, and if they get away with it again (as they have thus far with Sabathia, now 27) it’s through luck and little else.

If you want to see good player management, just look across the baselines at the Red Sox dugout. I’m no Red Sox fan, but I appreciate competence. How many teams would bat a slow, chubby guy like Youkilis second? Only the ones that understand that on-base is the most important stat and that steals are surprisingly meaningless. And that’s shockingly few teams, despite clear historical evidence. Youkilis, as everyone saw, was key — and the Red Sox management deserves a lot of credit.

Speaking of the Red Sox: not only are they clearly superior to Colorado in almost every facet of the game (save fielding, where the Rockies’ rookie SS Troy Tulowitzky is so excellent that by himself he provides a clear team-stat advantage), the Red Sox also have home field advantage and massively more playoff experience. Upsets do happen, but looking at the numbers a couple of weeks ago, I picked the Red Sox over the Rockies in the World Series before the playoffs began, and I’m sticking with it.

Bottom line: if you look it up, the Sox’s run margin was 103 better than the Indians’ run margin on the season. That’s 2/3 of a run per game better, comparable to the Indians’ margin of superiority over Oakland or Minnesota this year.  That’s how the Indians really stacked up.  In almost every measurable aspect of the game, the Red Sox were a better team, and will be until the Indians get a real 3B and LF, figure out what the hell is wrong with Hafner (I almost wonder if his eyes may be going, just slightly enough to affect his reaction to pitches — there’s nothing else that I can find to explain his steep season-long drop in production), and rustle up a closer with an ERA that resembles ERAs usually found in the major leagues.  Until then, the Indians are just pretenders, and so is anyone pretending otherwise.

I don’t know why this isn’t obvious to everyone alive in Cleveland. It should be. But no, let’s blame luck, third-base coaches in nine-run games, voodoo curses, and offensive mascots.

(Then again, blame the offensive mascot all you want.)

My thanks to the Firedoglake Book Salon, which this online chat with yours truly this weekend concerning Who Hates Whom, a book you may have noticed mentioned discreetly somewhere on this site.

And my apologies for being too busy this week to blog about it properly.  Meant to.  Just swamped as usual.  Sorry if you missed it and would have enjoyed it.  My bad.