Keith Burgess-Jackson

Baseball

From Today's Wall Street Journal

Greg Lukianoff is right to criticize the Education Department for illegally trying to abolish the requirement that comments must be offensive to a "reasonable person" to constitute sexual harassment ("Feds to Students: You Can't Say That," op-ed, May 17). As a former Education Department lawyer, I find that simply appalling.

The "reasonable person" standard is a cornerstone of sexual-harassment law, set forth in the Supreme Court's 1993 decision in Harris v. Forklift Systems, and amplified in its 1999 Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education decision, which states that conduct must be "severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" to constitute illegal sexual harassment in the educational setting.

The Education Department's demand that the University of Montana define harassment as "any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature," including speech about sexual issues that offends a single hypersensitive member of an audience, defines sexual harassment even more broadly than the harassment codes struck down by the courts on First Amendment grounds in DeJohn v. Temple University (2008) and Saxe v. State College Area School District (2001).

Hans Bader

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Washington

The juxtaposition of your editorial "Those AP Subpoenas" and Greg Lukianoff's op-ed on campus speech is a stark reminder of how narrow-minded, ideologically driven bureaucrats flaunt First Amendment constitutional rights, forcing the regulated to engage in lengthy, expensive resistance, which in turn increases the costs of doing business and picks the pockets of the American public.

As a retired co-founder of the Coalition for Healthcare Communications (which this week announced its support for the latest Washington Legal Foundation challenge to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services' proposed restrictions on the dissemination of medical textbooks and other clinical and scientific information by industry), I have lived with FDA and HHS bureaucratic overreach throughout my long career.

Use of the power of government to restrict speech about health, government operations and in our institutions of education isn't some abstract notion. It is a calculated, direct attack on the fabric of our Constitution. Set against the backdrop of the latest "perfect storm" of federal scandals involving communications failures, it should be a wake-up call for us all.

Harry Sweeney

Philadelphia

How times change! Greg Lukianoff warns that "even assigning a potentially offensive book like 'Lolita,' could now be construed as harassment." As a visiting professor at Amherst College in 1977, I assigned the Marquis de Sade's elephantine satire of natural morality, "Juliette," as collateral reading in a seminar on European intellectual history. When one of my students asked which of the book's 1,200 pages they should read, I answered, "Read as much as you can stand." None of the women or men in the seminar pressed charges.

R.P. Neuman

Davis, Calif.

Psalm XXIII

Here.

Music

Close your eyes and you will hear Eddie.

Dilbert

Here.

Hoplophobia

This man has a pathological hatred of guns.

Compassion

This is truly frightening. How long before progressives force it onto people? Remember: to a progressive, the end justifies the means.

From Today's Wall Street Journal

Many of the May 14 letters responding to Ezekiel Emanuel's "Health-Care Exchanges Will Need the Young Invincibles" (op-ed, May 7) cogently point out some of the fundamental logical flaws in the basic assumptions behind ObamaCare. But what all the letter writers omit to mention is that this is all intentional. It has to be. The ObamaCare authors and strategists are wrong, but they are not dumb. They know that this 20,000-page monstrosity cannot possibly work. And they are smiling because their strategy is working.

ObamaCare is designed to fail disastrously so that the same architects can then ride to the rescue with what they have always wanted, a single-payer, nationalized health-care system. There is no other logical explanation for the existence of a program that has to collapse under its own weight and poor design. We are just beginning to see the system collapse—exchanges unbuilt, costs skyrocketing and confusion on all parts. It will continue to collapse. And then we'll see the true strategy revealed as Obama and company march the U.S. toward European socialism.

Mark Ling, M.D., Ph.D.

MedaPhase, Inc.

Atlanta

Baseball

Apologists for Felix Hernandez say (among other things) that he can't be judged too harshly as a pitcher because he plays for a bad team. Specifically, they say that the fact that he has won more than 14 games in a season only once (in seven full seasons) shows only that he doesn't get much run support.

Okay. Let's take his team's ineptitude into account. What percentage of his team's victories are his? I did a calculation for four active Cy Young Award winners:

• Justin Verlander: 20.4% (129 victories out of 632 Tiger victories)
• Felix Hernandez: 18.5% (99 out of 535)
• Roy Halladay: 16.7% (200 out of 1,192)
• David Price: 16.1% (62 out of 385)

I didn't count first seasons unless the pitcher pitched all or most of it.

By this standard, Hernandez does well, but not as well as Verlander. If I had time, I'd do a calculation for the likes of Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton, Jim Palmer, and other greats. I'm pretty sure that Hernandez would not rank near the top of this list.

Addendum: Just for the heck of it, I calculated the victory percentage for two greats:

• Bob Gibson: 17.3% (251 out of 1,445)
• Jim Palmer: 15.2% (268 out of 1,756)

These were the days of four-man rotations, so you would think that the percentage would be higher.

Addendum 2: Here are two more single-season greats:

• Steve Carlton, 1972: 45.7% (27 out of 59)
• Denny McLain, 1968: 30.0% (31 out of 103)

When Hernandez won 19 games in 2009, his team won 85 games. That's a percentage of 22.3. When Verlander won 24 games in 2011, his team won 95 games. That's a percentage of 25.2.

Morality

Here is a list of attitudes toward various acts. Which surprises you the most?

Dilbert

Here.

Montrose, "Music Man" (1976)

Jump on It (1976).

From the Mailbag

Dr. KBJ,

I thought you might enjoy this essay, "What Does Bias Look Like?," by my new favorite columnist Megan McArdle. She emphasizes bias in academia, which I know you have railed against.

Best,

Mark Bauer

From Today's Wall Street Journal

Have you heard? President Obama will not "tolerate" the IRS targeting conservative groups. The president expresses his outrage and intolerance often. He seems to think that he simply has to state that he will not tolerate something and it will stop. Here are some recent examples. He will not tolerate Syria using chemical weapons. He will not tolerate attacks on Americans. He will not tolerate sexual harassment or rape in the military. He will not tolerate school shootings. He will not tolerate the IRS targeting conservative groups. He will not tolerate another debt-ceiling debate. We can all rest assured that these things will not happen again because he will not tolerate them. Right. And don't forget, President Obama has stated that he will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Should we be concerned? You bet.

Scott Engers

Ann Arbor, Mich.

A Free Press

Wait. I thought it was racist to criticize Barack Obama.

Dilbert

Here.

Animals

Idiocy never sleeps.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Grotesque Speed for Florida Capital Cases” (editorial, May 15):

Unlike many other issues, the disagreement about the death penalty in the United States does not correspond with the partisan divide.

Many Democratic and most Republican politicians continue to support capital punishment. Yet it is curious that those lawmakers who often express concerns about trusting the government on other issues seem to put so much faith in this life-or-death matter, especially when there are continuing questions about its fairness and justice.

Instead of rushing to send more dead men walking, Florida should send its death penalty walking.

TOBIAS WINRIGHT
St. Louis, May 15, 2013

The writer, an associate professor of theological ethics at Saint Louis University, is a former corrections officer with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department in Florida.

Note from KBJ: Jurors are not "the government." They are our peers. We punish murderers with death because we value innocent human life.

Dilbert

Here.

Roto Ergo Sum

Here are scenes from today's stage of the Giro d'Italia. Not for the fainthearted.