Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Roger Craig. He's 82. When I was little, the Giants were a great team, and my memory stretches back to the end of that era, but my real memories of being a Giants fan was 1972-1985, when they were a joke franchise. You know -- we don't really have joke franchises any more in baseball. The Pirates are probably the closest it gets, and on the field as a bad team is even longer, but it doesn't seem quite like what the Giants (and Indians) were in that era, and what some other teams were earlier (hard to be a joke franchise when you have a decent ballpark). Anway -- then Al Rosen and Roger Craig showed up, and it's as if it never happened; the Giants have certainly had bad years since, but from Opening Day 1986 on they were just done with being a joke franchise. Hum baby, indeed.

The good stuff:

1. Brad Plumer has a nice post about the documents leaked from a climate denialist organization. Including this excellent point about their apparently minimal fundraising from the oil industry: "That’s a sign that climate skepticism has become less the sole concern of self-interested oil companies trying to fend off regulations — and more an ideological enterprise on the right."

2. Harold Pollack on the contraceptive flap.

3. At the Monkey Cage, Lucy Barnes cites the research on comparative taxation and concludes that the US taxes are in fact more progressive than most comparable nations, but at the same time US taxes and transfers produce less redistribution of wealth. Got that? If not, click through and read the explanation.

4. Update from yesterday's links: Jon Cohen explains the WaPo policy on using robopolls.

5. And Kylopod on the question of ideology in US politics.