After Matsuzaka weathered a painfully long first inning, he was superb. And he was definitely challenging hitters, mixing his fastball and changeup to stifle the Rays without a hit for the first six innings. As solid as Matsuzaka’s statistics were this season, this was the effective, economical pitcher the Red Sox yearn to see all the time. [...]

“He looked unbelievable,” Red Sox third baseman Kevin Youkilis said.

With the suddenly captivated fans of the Rays ringing cowbells and trying to implore their worst-to-first team, Matsuzaka’s precise pitching acted as the ultimate silencer.

WARREN: First thing, without being systematic, what comes to mind
without running off a week and praying about it, would be that
America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the
Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in
the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to
make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things
you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck
with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like
putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see,
that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks. There's
another thing in the American experience that makes for a curious
kind of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves and what
we stood for in one night. No other nation ever had to do that. In
fact, one man did it--one man in an upstairs room, Thomas
Jefferson. Sure, you might say that he was the amanuensis for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent and
backed by a wilderness, and there's some sense in that notion. But
somebody had to formulate it--in fact, just overnight, whatever
the complicated background of that formulation--and we've been
stuck with it ever since. With the very words it used. Do you know
the Polish writer Adam De Gurowski? He was of a highly placed
Polish family; he came and worked as a civil servant in
Washington, a clerk, a kind of self-appointed spy on democracy.
His book America--of 1857, I think--begins by saying that
America is unique among nations because other nations are
accidents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea.
Behind the comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July
platforms there is the solemn notion, Believe and ye shall be saved.
That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a part of the
American experience--and of the American problem--the lag
between idea and fact, between word and flesh.

"My approach to the law now is coloured by my Australian experience," the former public prosecutor says. "I visited Old Sydney Town three times in six months, and I saw there what it was with Australia's history, how strict the early law there was. I was thinking at that time, in fact, how could it be that Australians these days so willingly obeyed the law; how had society become so compliant? You know, just as with Singapore, (in Australia) smoking is generally not allowed, public toilets are clean, when you board a bus the elderly are given a place to sit up the front, that kind of thing.

"Now, I really learned from that. And (at Old Sydney Town) I realised that people must be made afraid first. Only then will they become obedient."

Dioramas depicting floggings and judicial executions in the colony, as well as live-action re-enactments of modern Australia's brutal seeds, became the former public prosecutor's touchstone for how he thought Indonesia's huge need for public service reform could be met. "Open-air courtrooms, a la ancient Rome, that really inspired me," he says. "It meant for us that if we wanted to enforce the law, we mustn't allow permissive thinking at first. First you have to frighten people, then they become compliant. After that, we may allow some permissiveness."

A harsh prescription, perhaps, but Antasari's campaign against Indonesia's porous public sector is showing outstanding results. The Transparency International network last month announced a vastly upgraded result for the country in its annual corruption perceptions index, an outcome welcomed by all observers. "It's fantastic, 30 per cent of the world is now below us," enthuses long-time Indonesia-based anti-corruption warrior Kevin Evans, a former Australian embassy staff member in Jakarta.

Jakarta's rise up the ladder, from 143rd place to 126th and, more important, its edging upwards towards the transparency rating of three on a 10-scale, was attributed by the world organisation in large part to the very public actions of Antasari's bureau.

"He does not want anything forced or imposed on the Iraqi people," al-Maliki said. "Rather he wants it to be done through the institutions. If the government and the parliament approve this, then the Sayyid (al-Sistani) will be convinced that is what the Iraqi people have decided."

Al-Maliki also said al-Sistani believes "all the components" of Iraqi people should participate in the decision and in "resolving this matter through constitutional institutions."

Obama's health plan is really slow-motion Medicare for all. And the problem with Medicare-like price controls is that they reduce the number of people willing to provide medical services, which always means longer lines and rationing.

McCain's health plan has a problem of its own. It is not too radical but too timid. A refundable tax credit of $5,000 per family -- in addition to increased cash wages from employers no longer burdened with paying for health care -- would help middle-class workers get insurance. But for people on the lower end of the scale -- who don't qualify for Medicaid -- the $5,000 credit alone would not be enough to buy adequate coverage, which can cost more than double that amount.

To be a genuine alternative, Republicans should follow their own logic and make the ownership of private health insurance an entitlement. Fund the purchase of a basic health insurance plan completely, through a refundable tax credit, so every low-income American can afford insurance. Help consumers exercise their newfound choice of health plans by requiring the disclosure of comprehensive information on health costs and outcomes.

Universal Medicare is a frightening prospect. But it may be unavoidable unless Republicans can counter the rallying cry "health care for everyone" with a simple and superior alternative: "Health insurance for everyone."

For all its currency, that decline appears to be way off. In recent years, two baseball researchers, working independently, have found that blacks probably never made up more than 20% of major leaguers.

The findings are interesting because research on race in baseball can have an impact beyond the diamond. Baseball is a popular laboratory for workplace studies of diversity and discrimination, including how race influences assignments to specific jobs and how diversity affects company success.

A drop to 8% from 20% is still a sharp one, but perhaps it isn't so surprising given the influx of Asians and Latin Americans, and Americans of Asian and Latino descent, into the game. In 1975, when 19.4% of 844 players to appear in the majors were African-American, fewer than 11% of players were Asian or Latino, according to Tom Timmerman, professor of business management at Tennessee Tech University. In 2006, nearly 28% of major leaguers were Asian or Latino.

Baseball researchers still use a crude method to assign a single race to each player -- by gazing at baseball cards, flipping through media guides and judging whether surnames are Latino.

The exercise of grouping players by race runs into obstacles that have for decades confronted the U.S. Census Bureau and others. For the 1960 Census, respondents themselves identified their race; before then, enumerators largely marked down race according to their own observations, says Charles Hirschman, a sociologist at the University of Washington. In 2000, respondents could check off multiple boxes, meaning they could identify themselves, for example, as both black and of Latino origin.

Complicating the picture is that many foreign-born baseball players are from Latin America and have dark skin. Many consider themselves Latinos but would have been excluded from baseball before Jackie Robinson. Perhaps a third of today's major leaguers wouldn't have been allowed in the game before the color barrier was lifted.

The kingdom’s latest reported diplomatic venture may have a slightly better chance. In Mecca at the end of September, King Abdullah hosted a Ramadan breakfast that gathered representatives of Afghanistan’s Western-backed government as well as of the Taliban rebels who were overthrown seven years ago. Both the Afghan government and its opponents have been quick to deny that anything like real negotiations took place. The denial is understandable, since both parties are divided, with factions bitterly opposed to any accommodation. Even if talks did go beyond polite requests to pass the salt, full-scale negotiation is a long way off.

Yet the Saudi initiative to bring the sides together comes at an opportune time, when interests may start slowly to converge towards a negotiated solution. Despite calls for more coalition troops to back President Hamid Karzai’s government, a growing number of Western soldiers and diplomats reckon there can be no purely military solution in Afghanistan. And though Taliban guerrillas have got bolder, they have suffered heavy losses. An offensive by Pakistan’s army on its own side of a lawless border seeks to deny the Taliban their main sanctuary.

In a desperate effort to get information, the Russians sent an electronic reconnaissance version of the Tupolev Tu-22M Backfire bomber over the battlefield and it got shot down. In all, Russia lost four planes, including three Sukhoi Su-25 attack fighters to unexpectedly effective Georgian air defenses. Some Russian commanders reported using cellphones to communicate with their units when their own radios failed.

Additionally, the tanks deployed by the Russian Army did not have night sights for their guns, and the reactive armor designed to protect them from Georgian antitank weapons proved unreliable.

On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?

Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.

At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked [Lehman Bros. CEO Richard] Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis."

Someone identifying himself as “Jockim Alberton,” from 1581 Leroy Avenue in Wilmington, Del., began giving to Mr. Obama last November, contributing $10 and $25 at a time for a total of $445 through the end of February.

The only problem? There is no Leroy Avenue in Wilmington. And Jockim Alberton, who listed his employer and occupation as “Fdsa Fdsa,” does not show up in a search of public records.

An analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times this week found nearly 3,000 donations to Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, from more than a dozen people with apparently fictitious donor information.

U.S. crude for November delivery sank $6.96 to $79.63 a barrel in electronic trading, its lowest level since crude traded in the high $70 range in September of last year.

McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans' hostility to illegal immigration.

And he's been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.

Obama first moved to Chicago in 1985, when he worked as a community organizer. But his career got on its current course when he returned to Hyde Park in 1991 to practice law and teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Four years later, he met Ayers at a lunchtime meeting about school reform.

As it happens, I was on the scene, too. [...]

To meet Ayers and Dohrn, as I did in 1995, was to encounter a middle-aged couple in their early 50s who seemed at ease in the vibrant academic community of Hyde Park.

ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring said that in most cases the bogus registrations were flagged by ACORN supervisors during a review, brought to the attention of the local officials when they were submitted, and ACORN fired "probably a couple of dozen" employees who fabricated them. Under most state laws, the organization must submit every card an employee collects, he said. [...]

In 1995, as a lawyer in private practice, Obama and two other lawyers from his firm represented ACORN in a successful suit that forced the state of Illinois to comply with a federal law that made it easier to register to vote. The group's political arm endorsed Obama this February and an ACORN-affiliated group was paid about $800,000 for get-out-the-vote operations in four states during the primaries. [...]

Allegations of fraudulent registration forms are not new to ACORN, a 38-year-old organization that advocates for lower-income people on housing, access to credit, education, and other issues. Employees in Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, and the state of Washington have been accused of submitting false registration forms since 2004.

There is no evidence that anyone has actually voted as a result of the bogus registrations, which in some cases involve names being listed multiple times at fake addresses.

But Cairncross of the RNC said the bad registrations constitute fraud and tie up local election officials and law enforcement agencies.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian.

CNN reported last Monday that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia hosted high-level talks for four days in late September between senior Taliban members and Afghan government officials during Ramadan. Described as “an icebreaker”, no al Qaeda representative however was present at the meeting, as Taliban leader Mullah Omar has reportedly broken with Osama bin Laden’s organization. Encouragingly, the CNN report states further discussions between the two sides are scheduled in two months. [...]

What probably stirred hardliner Taliban leaders to seek talks is the deteriorating situation in their strategic tribal agency base areas in Pakistan. Two months ago, the Pakistani army launched a major offensive with heavy artillery, tanks and fighter bombers against Taliban and al Qaeda assets there. Although well dug in, the jihadists have lost more than a thousand fighters and are hard-pressed.

But what is probably causing the Taliban even greater concern than the relentlessness of the offensive is that the tribes they once dominated are going over to the government. At the end of August, one formed a battle party that fought 900 Taliban, while another this week raised 20,000 fighters. Their support is regarded as crucial in the government’s ridding the tribal areas of the Taliban and al Qaeda for good.

Shutting down the jihadists’ Pakistani base areas would also see a virtual end to the insurgency in Afghanistan. And it is most likely due to this realization the Taliban is now willing to play the peace card in order to remain a factor in Afghanistan.

In August, the campaign's previous coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, resigned over a similar issue, pointing up one kind of challenge facing the campaign: pursuing the votes of the Muslim community while not perpetuating any misunderstandings about Sen. Barack Obama's religion. Sen. Obama is a Christian.

Mr. Asbahi, who also attended the meeting now entangling Ms. Husaini, resigned after questions arose about his brief tenure on the board of an Islamic investment fund along with a controversial Illinois imam. At the time, campaign officials said he was stepping down because he didn't want to become a distraction for the campaign.

After the crowd stopped chanting "USA," McCain promised that he would take on Obama and the Democrats (and wisely didn't choose the moment to present his case for the financial bailout or his plan to have the government buy mortgages). Before the question-and-answer portion of the rally, McCain had already clobbered Obama several times. But the audience stuffed into the gymnasium at a local sports center wasn't satisfied.

A man suggested McCain talk about abortion to draw the distinction between him and Obama. Another asked, "Why is Obama where he's at? Everyone in this room is stunned. We are all a product of our associations. Is there not a way to get around this media and line up the people" whom he is associated with? (No one in the press corps could hear the end of the man's statement because the crowd roar was so loud. Each advice-giver was cheered like a hero.)

These findings suggest that the costs associated with relocating children to different schools are offset by apparent long-term academic benefits.

Nicholas Cafardi, former dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, voluntarily offered to resign from the board of trustees at Franciscan University of Steubenville, the school said in a statement.