There have been 60 NBA Finals. The Boston Celtics have won 17, and the Minneapolis/Los Angeles Lakers have won 15, which amounts to those teams winning more than half of all NBA Finals. This year, they play each other in the Finals again, making it 33 champions out of 61 being either the Lakers or the Celtics.

Additionally, 39 of the 61 Finals have included either the Lakers or the Celtics. Including this year, the Celtics and Lakers have played each other in the Finals a whopping 12 times (just under one-fifth of all Finals have been these two teams).

The Celtics have made 21 total Finals appearances, so have faced the Lakers more than half of the times they've been in the Finals. The Lakers have made 30 Finals appearances, facing the Celtics in two-fifths of those.

The Celtics won nine of those against the Lakers, which accounts for more than half of all their 17 championships. The Lakers' two victories over the Celtics came after the Celtics won their first eight encounters.

The longest streak without either team in the Finals was eight years from '92-'99. The longest streak with either the Lakers or Celtics in the Finals was 10 years, done twice (from '57-'66, in which the Celtics appears all 10 years, and the Lakers five of those; and '80-'89, in which the Lakers appeared eight times, the Celtics five).

The longest streak for one team appearing in the Finals was, as noted, Boston, in the 10 years from '57-'66. Boston won nine of those 10 years, including eight in a row (the longest winning streak from any one team) from '59-'66, and also won 10 in 12 years, from '57-'69.

The Lakers' longest appearance streak is "only" four, from '82-'85, winning twice; but they have also appeared three times in a row five additional times (including the current three-year streak). In two of those, they won all three years; in one, they lost all three.

The only other team to "threepeat" was the Bulls, winning three years in a row twice in eight years ('91-'98). No other team but the Celtics and Lakers have had four consecutive appearances. The only other team to have three consecutive appearances was the Knicks, losing all three from '51-'53.

The 2010 NBA Finals begin in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Barack Obama, inaugural address: "In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame."

Nancy Pelosi, this month: "If you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care."

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Skip this if you haven't watched the finale and care.

But the final season of Lost is one of the most remarkable achievements in television history. They took one of the most popular shows of all time, in which every moment of the show had meaning and purpose toward the end ... until the final season, in which they literally wasted half the season in some afterlife that, when all was said and done, added precisely nothing to the story.

It's remarkable in its wastefulness, its gratuitousness, its decadence, and in its disrespect of its audience. I can't think of anything similar in television history, with the exception of the final moments of Newhart, except that was a comedy, and the ending was intended as a joke.

I suspect someone will, at some point, make a cut of the final season that completely obliterates this afterlife plotline, and with the exception of the Desmond episode, no one will miss it.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

When Rand Paul says it is unconstitutional for the federal government to prohibit private businesses from discriminating based on race, he's right, arguably (which I will get to in a moment).

But when he says it is not, in this day and age, necessary for government to prevent segregation of private businesses, he's undeniably right.

There is no conceivable reality where we'd see such significant racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, or "gender identity" discrimination in this country that would result in rampant segregation or loss of significant opportunities for minorities. It just isn't rational. Overwhelmingly, the people of this country are aghast at such discriminatory practices, which means businesses overwhelmignly won't do it, both because businesses are (usually) run by those same people, and because their customers are also those same people.

To say we need government for this purpose is, quite simply, denying this obvious and unassailable reality of life in America in 2010.

As to the constitutional question, we can disagree about the legitimacy of it. We cannot disagree, however, that Paul's view is well-founded in the text and history of the Constitution. My personal view -- having been born well after the Civil Rights Act was passed -- is that perhaps, at the time, the constitutional right to freedom of association, and the right of states to make their own laws on such matters, were worth bending due to the centuries of government-sponsored institutional discrimination that had left a whole race of people significantly disadvantaged throughout nearly all facets of society.

I can't make that judgment one way or another, but I can see the arguments on both sides. Living in 2010 and not in 1964, I lean toward liberty rather than government control, but I can't judge the 1964 mindset.

But again, we no longer live in such a time where -- government or not -- any group of people is significantly disadvantaged due to their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or "gender identity." That simply doesn't exist anymore. That's not to say discrimination doesn't happen: of course it does. But no group is significantly disadvantaged because of what little discrimination remains in our society.

Some people might say "that's easy for you to say, a middle class protestant white male." Shrug. I am a conservative Christian in an industry largely controlled by atheists, agnostics, and liberals. I live on the West Coast, which many project to be majority Hispanic within my lifetime, and certainly within the lifetime of my first- and second-generation descendants. If this were about ME ME ME, I'd probably be putting all the protections for ME in place that I could.

I simply believe in liberty, and that any restrictions on liberty must be backed up by a damned good reason; and that furthermore, when we add or continue restrictions without a damned good reason, we set precedents that endanger other liberties. We see this in the Civil Rights Act itself: we gave up the right to discriminate based on certain categories, and this has justified taking away our right to discriminate based on other things, like -- in Washington -- "expressions" of "gender identity." The violations of our liberty in Social Security and Medicare and growing wheat have led to justifying Obama's health insurance mandate. And so on.

I won't insult anyone's intelligence by trying to prove that the views I am expressing are not racist. Only a moron -- like Cokie Roberts, on This Week today -- could possibly think these views are racist. George Will, however, is not a moron, but he's still wrong: on the same program he expressed the view that we reasonably gave up one right (the right to discriminate in some personal affairs) for another (the right to not be discriminated against).

Setting aside that this doesn't make much sense on the face of it (taking away my actual right to give someone else a "right" that isn't an actual right isn't a reasonable tradeoff), if we think this is reasonable, then it can be used to justify almost any government theft of our rights. Imagine if in 1964 we outlawed "hate speech," and then Rand Paul in 2010 said we should allow people to say hateful things. Surely we'd have just as many people today complaining about Paul, saying how racist it is for him to suggest such a thing, and how our right to say hateful things was replaced with a right to not have hateful things said about us.

Then again, to many liberals, hate speech laws are a good thing. This boggles my mind, but so do many things that many of them believe.

Again, I can't say whether we were right or wrong in 1964. But certainly it's wrong now, simply because it is a patently unnecessary restriction on liberty. That said, there's no point in trying to repeal this particular blue law. It's not going away any time soon -- though we can hope -- and for most people, it doesn't cause us any problems (except for the lucky few who are wrongly prosecuted for false claims of discrimination). That's why many blue laws stay on the books: most people don't care enough to try to get rid of them.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

I'd like someone to try to explain how this makes financial sense. Fourteen electric cars, powering them for $32K apiece, when just plugging them into the existing electrical grid would cost, by my estimate, less than a thousand dollars a year at $0.06 per kWh. It would take more than 30 years to break even.

Realistically though, it would be a lot less, likely. At 20K miles per car, using 0.2kWh per mile, it would be $240 per year per car, taking more than 130 years to break even.

I hope there's something more to this story, like, maybe they are going to power the Comcast Arena with the solar panels, too. I fear not, however.

I wonder what Rick Larsen thinks about this?

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Inspired by various people who make dumb comparisons that sound like they make sense, solely for the purpose of making some grander insinuation, is my new song, Hitler and Obama. Enjoy!

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Initiative 1068 would legalize marijuana for all adults in Washington State.

Marijuana is a terrible product. Other than the people who use it strictly for medicinal reasons, it has no positive uses. People who use marijuana for other purposes are wasting their lives. It has no place in society, and I shun anyone who is under its destructive influence. It can ruin the lives of the people who use it, and bring down friends and family along with them.

I think I've said pretty much all of the negative things to say about it. Therefore, marijuana should be legal.

(Did I just blow your mind, man?!)

Unfortunately, it seems to me this initiative would legalize the public use of marijuana, which I cannot support. It is unacceptable to me to legalize the substance in such a way that people will be free to blow marijuana smoke into the shared air of children and adults who do not wish to breathe it in. Therefore I plan to oppose I-1068.

This is not a minor issue. I am assured by Philip Dawdy, one of the people behind I-1068, that "the legislature will be falling over themselves to regulate this kind of stuff." He says "they will and I can assure you we'd want them to," but that's not good enough. Assurances are not actual laws.

Apart from the direct potential health hazard of secondhand marijuana smoke, there's also the possibility (however unlikely) that it could trigger a positive drug test.

Not until criminal penalties are in place for public use of marijuana, can I support a law making marijuana use generally legal.

Dawdy says our laws for initiatives don't allow him to tackle both issues in one initiative. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then he should have run two initiatives.

Come back with a better way to protect the public from the direct effects of this private activity, and I'll probably support it. But I won't support this: it's bad law.

Note that I am not alone in this. I was actually planning to support this initiative until it hit me that it would not regulate public use. Then, while preparing this piece, I found that the ACLU has the same basic objections I do. When a conservative little-l libertarian and the ACLU are both against a marijuana legalization initiative, that should make you think twice if you're prone to supporting it.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Yesterday, in the final U.S. Supreme Court case heard by Justice John Paul Stevens, my good friend Larry Stickney and his group, Protect Marriage Washington, squared off against Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna in Doe #1 v. Reed to determine whether public disclosure of petition signatures is routinely allowed under the First Amendment; that is, whether such dislosure should be done only under strict scrutiny, narrowly tailored to serve a government interest, or, whether the state can simply release the signatures upon a normal request for public records.

You may recall the events that led to this case: Stickney and his group got R-71 on the ballot last year, which attempted to kill the "everything but marriage" law for gay couples. Pro-gay activists threatened him and his family, and others who publicly supported repealing that law. Some groups requested lists of the petition signators, with the obvious intent to harass and open them up to threats, which has an undoubtable "chilling effect" on whether people will sign petitions in the future.

You can make a strong case for keeping these signatures out of the public. The question is whether the First Amendment has anything to say about it, or whether states should be free to make their own policies.

Attorney James Bopp represented the John Does and Protect Marriage Washington. He drew comparisons -- and important distinctions -- to other disclosures, such as campaign finance and voter affiliation, noting that specific and overriding government interests were involved.

I won't get too far into the details, you can read the transcript itself -- which is more interesting than I thought it might be -- I think Justice Scalia sums up my view:

"And in light of the fact that for the firstcentury of our existence, even voting was public ... the fact is that running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage. And the First Amendment does not protect you from criticism or even nasty phone calls when you exercise your political rights to legislate, or to take part in the legislative process. You are asking us to enter into a whole new field where we have never gone before."

He continues: "Didn't you have some options, too? Have you started a referendum to repeal the -- the [Washington] law that requires disclosure? ... [T]he people [of] Washington evidently think that this is not too much of an imposition upon people's courage, to -- to stand up and sign something and be willing to stand behind it. Now, if you don't like that, I can see doing it another way. But -- but the people of Washington have chosen to do it this -- this way. And you are saying that the First Amendment absolutely forbids that."

I feel very badly about these terrible people who threatened the Stickney family. I think our laws do not do enough to protect them by going after mentally unstable scum like John Bisceglia who use explicitly violent and targeted rhetoric to quiet free speech. And I think maybe our laws should exempt petition signatures from the Public Records Act, and instead rely on a separate process for verification.

But I don't see how our federal Constitution has anything to do with it.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

I wonder how long it will be before people start just putting together random letters for names of companies, bands, and so on, so they can be unique in Google searches.

Your search - fobhwueufg8 - did not match any documents.

^^ my new band name

(Hm, "Did Not Match Any Documents" would be a fun band name. Or the name of the debut album of the band fobhwueufg8.)

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Liberals have put up Initiative 1077 to give us a massive new income tax for individuals earning over $200,000.

It's nominally an obvious attempt at class warfare, to increase the tax burden on "rich" people while slashing it for everyone else, since it also includes a big property tax cut.

But it's worse than that: it's really an attempt to simply distract people from the terrible job the Democrats have done, and from voting for Republicans.

The bill is obviously and blatantly unconstitutional. And due to its specific severability language, if the unconstitutional part is ruled unconstitutional, the whole thing would be thrown out. The proposed law states unqeuivocally that certain income levels are taxed at different rates, which clearly violates the constitutional prohibition on non-uniform taxes upon the same class of property. The state has found consistently for 80 years that income is property. Therefore, you can't do that.

The initiative gives lip service -- but it's nothing more than that -- to the idea that in 1933 the state Supreme Court ruling "ultimately relied on United States supreme court cases that have long since been overruled." The larger case perhaps did, but the part of the case that ruled income as property did not. That was completely specific to our own state Constitutiuon. They go on to say the ruling "treated Washington's graduated income tax, as then drafted, as a nonuniform property tax," as if to imply this tax is different, but it's clearly not: the very fact that it was graduated -- as this proposed tax is -- was the point.

There's really not much more to say here. It's so obviously unconstitutional -- in terms of the stated text of the State Constitution, and longstanding precedent -- there can really be only two reasons to try: to force a court challenge and change precedent, or to distract people from the elections.

It's most likely both. It will almost certainly fail to overturn precedent, though will waste our time and money in the attempt. Whether it succeeds in distracting us is up to us.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

I keep hearing that the health insurance reform bill will take a certain dollar from us if we don't buy insurance, or a percentage of our income, whichever is higher.

I can't find this in the original bill. It just gives a dollar amount.

I look for it in the reconciliation bill, and I see what appears to be modifying existing income tax rates, codified in Section 5000A(c)(2)(B). The problem is, in the original bill, I see no (B) in 5000A(c)(2) as created by H.R. 3590, Sec. 1501(b) ... let alone clauses i, ii, or iii. And I am sure I am in the right place, because the reconciliation bill goes on to modify 5000A(c)(3), and that's all there in the original bill.

Well, not all of it. It says in H.R. 4872 that it is changing $750 to $695, but $495 to $325. But there is no $325, it's $350. So I search on $495 and find that in Sec. 10106 -- an amendment -- $350 was changed to $495. Also, (B) was added to 5000A(c)(2), which increased the tax penalty percentage further.

Gotta love it when the text of a bill modifies an earlier section of the same bill. So even reading the bill you can't understand what the bill says unless you read the entire bill because it goes back on itself.

Speaking of going back on itself ... since this represents a very large income tax increase on families making less than $250K -- if they choose to not have health insurance -- it's also Obama going back on himself when he promised he wouldn't raise such taxes. Yes, he already violated that promise in many other ways, such as with the tobacco tax, but after election he revised his original promise to refer only to taxes on income, even though it was originally for all federal taxes, and this one is explicitly on income.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

A few days ago, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz incorrectly told her constituents, "We actually have not required in this law that you carry health insurance."

She went on to say it's a choice in how you file your taxes, not a requirement.

She either didn't read and understand the law, or she's lying. Section 1501 of the law she voted to pass amends Subtitle D of the IRS Code, adding a new Section 5000A, which is titled, "Requirement to Maintain Minimum Essential Coverage." The very first words of 5000A are, "An applicable individual shall for each month beginning after 2013 ensure that the individual, and any dependent of the individual who is an applicable
individual, is covered under minimum essential coverage for such month."

The law itself, that she voted for and supposedly read, says, unequivocally, that people (unless they are exempted, such as Indians and Amish and incarcerated prisoners) are required to have health insurance.

Ironically, Wasserman Schultz said on her Facebook page a few days earlier: "A FACT Check: Members of Congress and the health insurance reform bill? Apparently some people don't know that the health insurance reform bill we just passed REQUIRES that Members of Congress and their staff to obtain the same health insurance plans created by the law (some states might offer different plans) or through... the Exchange (market or purchasing pool) created in the law."

And, apparently, some people (ahem) don't know that the same bill REQUIRES all non-exempt people to obtain health insurance.

UPDATE: Just after I wrote this, Wasserman Schultz was on Crossfire with Chris Matthews and she repeated the same line: there is no requirement, it's simply a different way to file your taxes. She's an intelligent woman, she's had a few days to fix her error, and she's still repeating this clearly false statement, so I'm calling it: she's not merely ignorant, she's lying.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC), of which Senator Patty Murray is the fourth ranking member, and HA Seattle, run by our friend Goldy, have been spreading the inane claim that Dino Rossi has been involved in "shady" dealings and transactions.

Of course, none of it backed up by a single fact, and attorney James Rigby's letter to HA puts all of the "shady" nonsense to rest. The letter can be summed up with: "if you have evidence no one else has, then provide it; otherwise, you're simply making it up." Here's the money quote: "I know more about Maestro and Heide's shady dealings than probably anybody alive. You don't know what you are talking about when you assert that Dino Rossi has any connection to their wrongdoings. Your tactic is guilt by association plain and simple."

Rossi sent a letter to Murray asking her to ask her DSCC to pull back. She didn't respond, and chose to lie instead, saying "This is an issue between Mr. Rossi and the DSCC." If Murray were not highly ranked in the DSCC, that might fly, but she is obviously heavily invovled in what the DSCC is doing.

The DSCC also lied, saying "Significant questions remain unanswered surrounding your business deals, associates and what you have been doing since you last waged a campaign for public office." But no such questions exist, and if they do, the DSCC certainly isn't asking them. Instead they are hoping that by throwing enough insinuations against the wall, something will stick.

And the funniest part is that Rossi has not even announced whether he is running for the Senate against Murray at all, and the only real sign that he might be running is that he hasn't said he isn't. But this is enough for them to be so scared that they have to resort to manufacturing complaints against him. And that they won't back up their lies, but just keep reasserting them as if repetition makes truth, is telling.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

You've probably seen this, but I can't pass up pointing it out. Many liberals hate the rule of law -- and by this, I mean they despise the notion that we should follow the law, and instead they want us to just go by what they think is best at the time (a.k.a., the rule of man) -- but few admit it so clearly as Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL).

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Today Slashdot did a spoof of Chatroulette, that we called Slashroulette. We prerecorded videos of ourselves and others. Here's five of the six I did (the sixth was me tuning the guitar, I didn't post that one on YouTube): video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.