Some ants are indestructable.

Elmer Smith weighs in on the Foot Hood massacre:

That trail will go cold. The committee will find only the most tenuous connections between Hassan and any terrorist affiliations just as it has found no terrorist links on his computers.

But it will issue a detailed report. Its findings will be preserved in the annotated archives of mass murder and draw dust until the next spring-loaded nut job spins out of control and starts mowing down innocent bystanders.

We can always come up with something from the catalog of homicidal motivations to rationalize the irrational. Was it a family feud or a money dispute?

But there is no "real reason" for a psychopath to make himself the arbiter of life and death.

Basically, I agree -- although I think there are some caveats that I'll be adding later, This afternoon's a travel day for me, and full-time blogging finally resumes tonight, Until then, consider this an open thread to discuss what's happening. Other than the agony and the ecstasy of health care reform, unemployment topping 10 percent, more fallout from Fort Hood, the end of the SEPTA srike, a bunch of expected and unexpected Phillies moves and that other Philadelphia sports franchise That Shall Not Be Named, I didn't really miss anything in my time away, did I?

From last night:

NEW YORK — Hundreds of Yankees fans in New York City who hit the streets to revel in their team's 27th World Series championship have been greeted by an NYPD van, several patrol cars with lights flashing and officers standing on street corners.

Fans in Yankees jerseys and hats who watched the 7-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies at sports bar Stout poured onto 33rd Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues early Thursday to celebrate and remained well-behaved.

"Hundreds" of Yankees fans? As Chase Utley might say, "Are you (bleep)in' kidding me?" Hundreds? Here in Philadelphia, we throw that many fans into a police paddy wagon in the first 90 seconds after a big victory. See that picture up top? That's Phillies fans a couple of weeks ago celebrating just getting into the World Series in a way that puts New Yorkers to shame -- there's no comparable picture from Manhattan or the Bronx last night to show, no NYC equivalent of Frankford and Cottman, where regular folks pour into the streets by the thousands. And we know from last year how crazy this town would have been if we had actually won this thing.

So what's wrong with New York? OK, there are two important caveats. One, and I know from my years in and around the Big Apple that this is important, is that close to half the people in the city who care about baseball are Mets fans who hate the Yankees more than you do, if that's possible. The second is that NYC is much more of a magnet for a) immigrants who've not yet adopted our strange and wonderful traditions of baseball and b) out-of-town transients seeking to make it in theatre, media, Wall Street, whatever. In other words, the so-called "penetration rate" of Yankees fans in New York is actually much much lower than the percentage of Philadelphians who get jacked about the Phillies, despite the disparity in World Series rings.

But I think there's something else in play. If you paid attention to what's happened in the Bronx the last couple of years, the Yankees have done everything to price out of their market the kind of fan who'd paint his chest and head out to a street corner with 10,000 of his newest bestest friends. In moving into the new Yankee Stadium this year, in the teeth of the worst economy since the Great Depression, the Yankees jacked up their average ticket prices by a mindboggling 76 percent, from $41.40 to 72.97. That's also about 40 percent higher than the No. 2 team, the Boston Red Sox, where a high fan base and Fenway Park's limited seating creates huge demand. The Yankees still drew fairly well this year -- in the nation's largest city, with more millionaires than you'll find anywhere else -- but also had a couple thousand empty seats right behind home plate for most games -- even some at the World Series! -- because of premium prices as high as $2,625 for one seat.

And you wonder why New York's Joe Sixpack wasn't excited last night?

I saw a sad story in the New York Times during the Series, about how moving across the street into their $1.5 billion palace -- which elected officials, who financed the infrastructure with tax dollars, claimed would be a boon to local merchants in the faded Bronx neighborhood -- had in fact devastated many of these local businesses, souvenir shops and working-class-style tap rooms. The article was kind of weak on explanation, but you have to think the kind of stockbroker dudes paying hundreds of bucks to see a baseball game aren't going to shop in, you know, the Bronx -- unless you count the Yankees' own clean and overpriced merchandise shop inside their elite fortress of a ballpark. That's great for the Yankees economically, which is how they buy the best players, but you don't have to grease your streetlamps for partying investment bankers when you win, either.

On the whole, I'd rather be in a winning Philadelphia, of course. But beyond that, I'd also rather be in the kind of city that goes wild for its two World Series wins, instead of the one that yawns at its 27 titles. Wouldn't you?

(Blogger's note: It's a long weekend for me, thanks to a scheduling flip. So I'll see you early next week.)

There's a startling story this afternoon out of Ford Hood in Texas -- a shooting that has killed seven people and wounded anywhere from 12-15 people wounded. As I type this, I'm watching an interview on CNN with Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the commander of Katrina relief efforts and former commander at the Texas base. He says that the attack was carried out by two and maybe three gunmen -- possibly soldiers at the base, although that is not confirmed -- armed with M-16s, and that one of the shooters has not yet been apprehended but is "cornered."

The possibilities boggle the mind -- typically a tragedy of this magnitude is the act of a lone gunman. (It's certainly possible that an armed soldier was trying to defend himself, which would cause confusion about the number of shooters.) Fort Hood is a staging area for troops coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now, the only thing anyone can do or say with any certainty is to pray for the families and spouses of those who lost their lives in this horrible incident.

More later.

UPDATE: CNN's Barbara Starr reports death toll rises to 12.

UPDATE II: Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, an Army mental health professional said to be upset about a pending deployment to Iraq, is identified as the lone gunman. As discussed earlier, the reports of other gunmen are apparently erroneous.

Remember Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist whose tape recorder sparked the infamous Pennsylvania "Bittergate" scandal that came close to derailing Barack Obama's drive to the White House, highlighting the disconnect between a Harvard Law grad and the rank-and-file Democratic voters he said "were clinging to guns and religion" as a response to economic and political upheaval?

Today, Fowler is back with the long -- and I mean looooong (seriously, it could lose about 2,000 words...citizen journalism is great, but some people need editors) -- story behind the story. She provides some interesting evidence that Obama's remark was inspired by a published interview with a notorious barfly from the blue-collar Bucks Coutny suburb, a man that Obama himself was supposed to meet but never did.

As is clear from Obama's remarks at the San Francisco fundraiser, he had that same Sunday, on the flight to San Francisco, been reading in the New York Times Sunday magazine Michael Sokolove's engrossing essay on returning to Levittown, where Sokolove had grown up, and finding the old working class community not particularly disposed to Obama. According to Mullane, after the town hall meeting in Levittown Obama had planned to stop by Gleason's Bar, where Sokolove had conversed with the locals. "Eight men sat around the bar, and not one of them supported Obama," Sokolove had written. Mullane said that in setting up the Gleason's stop the campaign staff had told the bar staff that Obama really wanted to talk to Steve Woods, the Gleason's habitué whose negativity had been particularly colorful. "Rapid fire, he told me the issues he cared about," Sokolove wrote. "'No. 1, gas prices. It's killing everybody. No. 2, immigrants. They should go back to Mexico. Three, guns. Everybody should have the right to bear arms. In fact, everyone should have a gun in this day and age,'" Woods had said. But, as is often the case with campaign schedules, Obama was running very late that Wednesday and never got the chance to swing by Gleason's Bar and meet Steve Woods.
 

Read -- or better yet, skim -- the whole thing. The backstory of Steve Woods has a twist that you may not see coming. As for Obama, I think much of his agenda -- especially a robust universal healthcare program -- could do more to help working-class folks in a place like Levittown than any president since FDR, but even Roosevelt, patrician that he was, knew how to speak the language of the people he was helping. Obama still has more work to do on that front.

(Photo by Mark Peterson/New York Times)

I woke up this morning, and there was a sharp chill in the post-dawn gloaming. Today is the worst day of the year. Always is. It's not just that the Phillies came up disappointingly short in their once-in-a-lifetime chance to take down the universally reviled Yankees -- thought there is that. The end of every baseball season is depressing -- I even felt a bit that way last year, even though the Phillies had just won the World Series; because victory still meant an empty ballpark for the winter, the loss of the cherished warm summer ritual. Why do you think God invented Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve? -- His desperate attempt to get we mortals over the hump of a frigid, tree-dead, baseball-less winter. It's still not enough, O Lord.

It's hard to know what to say about the Series. It's clear after these six games and also the three regular-season matches that the Yanks and Phils are the two best teams in baseball, and evenly matched -- were it not for the Phillies' problems with Brad Lidge and Cole Hamels. But were it not for Lidge and Hamels, the Phillies wouldn't be our Phillies, would they? In winning three straight NL East titles, going to back-to-back World Series for the first time in the 126-year history of the franchise and winning once, we've been blessed to watch the greatest incarnation of the Phils ever. Next up, a return trip to the Fall Classic in 2010, and a victory (hopefully, as Charlie Manuel said last night, over these Yankees); that would match the 1929-31 A's -- who went to three straight Series and won two of them -- as this city's greatest team in any sport, any time. (Just as the Yankees flourish under Democrats, Philadelphia baseball thrives in horrible economies -- the A's of the Great Depression, the Phillies of late 1970s-early '80s stagflation and unemployment, and now this recession-timed group. Interesting.)

I'm trying to get out of baseball, but here's a very short list of what the Phillies need to do on the off-season/

1. Sign the best set-up man available in free agency. Brad Lidge is under contract and realistically can't be traded, so the Phillies need to take the money from Brett Myers' now-expired contract and get someone who can pitch the 7th or 8th (along with Madson) if Lidge gets it together for 2010, and the 9th if he can't.

2. Somehow revamp the entire bench. The Phillies desperately need someone like Hideki Matsui -- but who can run and play the field.

3. Pray for the rapid maturation of Kyle Drabeck.

4. Take all the extra cash from all those sellouts at Citizens Bank Park and use it -- to buy the full-time services of Dr. Phil (I figure $5 million should do the trick). The Phillies need the world's greatest tough-love psychologogist to whip Hamels and Lidge back into shape, and that may be the only way for this team to return to its rightful destiny next October/November.

Like I said, I was hoping to be totally done with baseball here -- but I now realize that there's also something else that needs to be said...about New York.

Later.

If you can feel the anticipation in the fall air, it must be Game 6 of the World Series. It's not just the Phillies staging their remarkable comeback here, though there is that. It's also that arguably the three greatest baseball games of the the last half-century were all Game 6s of the World Series. Each one is famous for high drama -- and for extending the series to a Game 7.

Remember these:

1. Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds:

You've seen it again and again, and still you are hard pressed to change the channel every time it graces your screen. The image of Carlton Fisk watching his ball soar into the Boston night, urging it from afar to pass inside the foul pole atop the Green Monster, and finally leaping with ecstasy when his homer stays fair continues to provide goose bumps for baseball fans worthy of the designation.

2. Game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox:

Boston is one out away from winning its first Series since 1918, holding a two-run lead with two outs and nobody on base in the 10th inning in Game 6. But the Mets get three consecutive singles to make it 5-4. Bob Stanley relieves and third-base coach Bud Harrelson tells Kevin Mitchell, the runner on third, "He might throw a wild pitch. Be ready." Stanley does, and the game is tied.

The rest is history.

3, Game 6 of the 1991 World Series between the Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves:

Puckett was a one-man gang for the Twins, knocking in two runs, scoring another, and robbing the Braves of still another with a gravity-defying snare of a Ron Gant drive to the wall in the third. But thanks to a game-tying homer by Terry Pendleton in the seventh, Puckett would need to produce even more.The game remained tied at three through the eleventh when Atlanta skipper Bobby Cox sent Game 1 starter Charlie Leibrandt, the veteran left-hander, to the hill to face the heart of the Twins' order. He never even got past Puckett. The first batter up that inning, Puckett capped his performance by driving the game winner into the seats in left-center to force a Game 7.

That's also the game that ended with Jack Buck's famous call, "And we'll see you tomorrow night!" Oh, how Philadelphia would love to hear that call again. So what's going to happen? Well, I could tell you what I think, or I could tell you what Attytood reader SM instructed me to say, convinced that my post Monday about the Yankees' success under Democratic presidents had some role in outcome. So, let's say it again -- the Yankees are going to win. There, baseball gods, I've said it. Now do your magic.

Last night proved once again the inanity of the media and the off-year elections, trying to come up with a Rorschach test out of some random blobs of ink (inanity best captured by the Jon Stewart clip below). There were higher-profile wins for the GOP, to be sure, in the two governor's races and conservatives' successful putdown of gay marriage in Maine, but the Democrats' captured an upstate New York congressional seat that includes counties that have been Republican since 1871, won a California House race by a larger than expected margin and won a gay-marriage vote in Washington while beating back right-wing anti-tax measures in that state and also in Maine. Then there's the Michael Bloomberg Party -- more on that in a second.

I think that for Republicans -- with all the focus on the civil war in that NY-23 District -- the real lessons are to be found in Virginia and Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell's runaway victory there. McDonnell was someone whose deep conservative roots were enough to keep the base happy, but he introduced himself to Virginia voters as a moderate, more concerned with the bread-and-butter of jobs than the social issues that drove his early career. As unemployment hovers at the brink of 10 percent, 2010 will be a good year for the GOP if it has the discipline to follow the McDonnell playbook. But do you think that will happen? The series of unfortunate Republican events in upstate New York suggests that it won't.

The one clear message from voters last night has been mostly lost in the partisan clutter (although Newsweek's Howard Fineman talked about this on MSNBC last night). It's not just that voters continue to be mad at incumbents, although I believe there is that. It is that the American people may have had its fill of rich people. Because the absolute worst Election Night of all was the one experienced by the two billionaires on the ballot.

Republican-turned-independent Michael Bloomberg should have won re-election in a walk. Keeping New York City fairly stable in the aftermath of a terrorist attack and then as Ground Zero for an economic meltdown, the founder of the lucrative business-news network that's used by most Wall Street traders and investors spent a whopping $100 million of his fortune to ensure a third term, even after the Democrats put up a fairly tepid opponent. Instead, Bloomberg escaped with his political life, capturing just 51 percent of an election that was supposed to be a landslide.

Then we have New Jersey's Jon Corzine, the former head of Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs who followed the Bloomberg model to political success. Indeed, both Corzine and Bloomberg are not natural politicians at all; both men are awkward in pressing the flesh, and uninspiring public speakers. So how did they go so far in politics? Like Cyndi Lauper said, money changes everything. They bought political friends (and even girlfriends), bought hours of TV time, and ultimately bought elections. The reason that voters didn't resent that was that it was the 2000s, and who didn't want to be a billionaire?

Until 2009. Suddenly, a briefcase full of cash didn't make you a genius anymore, not when so many voters are hurting so badly. In New York, there was widespread resentment over Bloomberg's obscene spending and his heavy-handed tactics to repeal the city's term limits. Ditto for Corzine, who spent his millions on an off-putting negative campaign that started by running against George W. Bush, which would have been appreciated in 2005 but seemed pretty ridiculous now, and ended by essentially calling now Gov.-elect Chris Christie fat.

Being a good Republican, Christie was incapable of running a populist campaign against Wall Street's Corzine -- he might have won in a landslide if he had. Every day, America learns more about the cancer known as Goldman Sachs, which Rolling Stone's Matt Taibi once brilliantly described as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Over the next 12 months, I think voters will grow even madder at any politician who smells like money. They'll be reading things like the current McClatchy takedown of Goldman Sachs and its role in the mortgage foreclosure crisis, and blood will boil. And in 2010 the electorate won't only take that out on actual billionaires but the mere millionaire politicians who enabled them -- Democrat or Republican.

That's the lesson of 2009, and it's not a new one. During the last economic crisis, the Great Depression, America turned to a liberal in FDR who aggressively enacted social programs, but Roosevelt's landslide re-election in 1936 only came after verbal warfare against the "economic royalists" who were destroying the country. If President Obama and congressional Democrats want to duplicate that success, they'll need to stop kowtowing to bankers and go after the economic royalists of the 21st Century, the way that hundreds of thousands of voters went after Jon Corzine and Michael Bloomberg yesterday. 

This one?

Or this one?

When this World Series is over, New York City is going to have to address its low civic self-esteem problem.