David Pinto refers to an e-mail dialogue we have had regarding this year's ballot and first-ballot inductees generally.
His information regarding historical patterns of first-ballot inductees is very enlightening. However, he drops in the following conclusion:

As time goes on, I believe the percentage of first time ballot elections will continue to rise until we have about 90% of players being elected on their first try.

I'm not sure why he believes that, but I don't think it's true. I think that a large part of what makes for first-ballot inductees is the timing of when players retire. Even though the large backlog of deserving candidates has essentially been cleared away, as Pinto notes, there's no reason it can't be replenished to a degree - enough so that 90% just seems far too high.
More specifically, I think that Pinto doesn't account for the historical factor that Bill James alluded to in the 1986 Abstract when he developed his system for predicting HOF induction based on historical patterns, and in his book on the Hall of Fame: voters (especially the Veterans Committee) have historically not adjusted sufficiently for extreme playing conditions. What that means is that as the players who compiled their stats in today's hitter-happy era retire (and assuming that conditions move somewhat closer to a center, which is already happening), many of today's hitters, with their gaudy stats, may eventually gain induction into the Hall as time passes and voters forget the historical context (especially if the Veterans' Committee continues in any substantial form). That forgetting may take time, which may lead to players getting in after a while on the ballot (and it will also take time to sort through the many players likely to retire with vaguely similar and inflated stats).
Later tonight or tomorrow, I hope to post more on this year's candidates for election

As many of you may already know, one of the chief weapons inspectors now beavering away in Iraq has, shall we say, an unusual resume. This topic was made for Mark Steyn, and he doesn't disappoint.
The only comparable thing I've ever read was P.J. O'Rourke's incomparable beginning to the chapter on agricultural policy from his book Parliament of Whores, which I will not recap since children and rabbis allegedly read this blog. (But it's worth the price of purchase.)

The New York Sun has an interesting retort to those who argue that New York City government is too lean to cut.

The Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar, by way of complaining that the Israeli attacks have destroyed the capacity of the Palestinian security forces to keep an allegedly imminent peace, writes in Ha-aretz:

Assume for a second that Amram Mitzna is elected prime minister and a few months later signs an agreement that puts an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Also assume that his government does evacuate the isolated settlements and the Palestinians agree to leave Gush Etzion and of course the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem...

Eldar reminds me of the economist in the following desert-island joke:

Three guys are alone on a desert island: an engineer, a biologist and an economist. They are starving and don't have a thing to eat, but somehow they find a can of beans on the shore.
The engineer says: let's hit the can with a rock until it opens.
The biologist has another idea:
"No. We should wait for a while. Erosion will do the job."
Finally, the economist says:
"Let's assume that we have a can opener".

This could be extrapolated into a larger point about those who assume that electing Mitzna or some other unilateral Israeli gesture short of suicide will magically erase the events and ramifications of the last two years. I'll leave it at this for now.

A report in Ha'aretz cites this article from the Kenya Daily Nation stating that the terrorists who blew up the Israeli-owned resort in Kenya and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner were Iraqis with ties to al-Qaeda.
The Kenya paper has the following damning allegations:

Kenya's security agencies were warned four times of an impending bombing a clear eight months before last week's suicide attack near Mombasa...
They were told a terrorist mission was planned at the Coast;
that a bomb had been smuggled into the country;
the names of the terror group linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda movement that was responsible;
and they were even given the names and pictures of two Iraqi terrorists who planned to enter Kenya from Somalia to carry out the attack.

If true, this certainly does not reflect well on Kenya's security services (although it should make commiserating with the CIA and FBI easier at future security conferences). The independent commission recently formed to investigate 9/11 should examine the Kenyan paper and use it as a model if similar neglect comes to light (though I doubt it will; more on that later).
But perhaps more importantly, this is the first allegation
I'm aware of linking Iraq to the attacks. Could this be the "smoking gun" linking Iraq to al-Qaeda that skeptics have insisted on seeing before approving of war with Iraq, or do attacks after 9/11 not count? And even if the terrorists were Iraqis and Iraqi state involvement is demonstrated, will the usual suspects argue that attacks against Israelis are somehow different? ("Yes, such attacks are inexcusable when directed against any party, whether Israeli or Palestinian, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the conflict occurs in a political context...") I think I know the answer; after all, Saddam's underwriting Palestinians who murderer innocent people usually hasn't been cited as a casus belli.

UPDATE: This Newsweek piece contains the following quote from an Israeli intelligence source:

An Israeli security official also said that authorities had stopped two Palestinian cells in the past year whose members were trained in Tikrit, Iraq, in a plot to fire missiles at airliners taking off from Tel Aviv airport. "We know these ideas [hitting airplanes upon takeoff] originated in Iraq," he said.

This article in Salon asks why books cost so much, and implies that the costs have increased dramatically in recent years.
Except they haven't. As the author notes:

When the prices of hardcover books are adjusted for inflation, they turn out to have remained fairly flat between 1975 and 2000.
Nonetheless, for those who remember the 1970s, the escalation in prices does appear substantial. Figures obtained from R.R. Bowker, the company of record for information about the publishing industry, show that, from 1975 to 2000, the price of the average hardcover book of fiction went up 200 percent to $24.96. Average prices for hardcover poetry and drama books increased 211 percent to $33.57. Nonfiction hardcovers went up 123 percent to $40.29. The largest increase was in the juvenile category, which climbed 227 percent to arrive at the current average of $18.40.
Still, adjust these figures for inflation and you get a different story, says Robert Sahr, an associate professor of political science at Oregon State University who studies media coverage of complex matters such as budgeting and economic policies. He found that the cost of hardcover fiction in real dollars had actually gone down 2 percent, while poetry and drama and juvenile categories had risen only a few percentage points. Nonfiction hardcovers had decreased in real price by 27 percent.
"I'm not very surprised," Sahr says. "Trade books are one of the clearest examples of a completely discretionary purchase. They have to be price-sensitive."
So why imply that the nominal increase is meaningful, when in the same breath you've shown that it isn't?

The New York Times has been taking plenty of abuse lately for sloppy, agenda-driven news coverage. (This correction is a stunner when viewed against the original story (especially the headline), even by Times standards.)
But in the spirit of Chanuka and Thangsgiving, we should take a moment to appreciate the Times' virtues as well. Specifically, I hereby call for a one-day moratorium on NYT-bashing in the blogosphere. Any paper which publishes a lead editorial with this headline can't be all bad.

Chalk up another entry in the "famous last words" file. At the risk of further fattening it, this week should provide more & (possibly) better blogging.