McCain in San Diego: "Washington changed us."

John McCain stopped in San Diego tonight for a fundraiser and reminded us of our major contribution to Washington politics in the past 20 years, the most corrupt congressman ever.

From the Union-Tribune:

“We came to Washington and gained a majority to change Washington and Washington changed us,” said the Arizona senator, who will officially claim the Republican presidential nomination next week. “We let spending get completely out of control.”

Without mentioning Cunningham by name, McCain alluded to the former Rancho Santa Fe Republican congressman who was driven from office in 2006 by a massive bribery scandal.

“I don’t use the word corruption lightly,” he said. “We have former members of Congress residing in prison, and it’s because of this practice of earmarks. And it’s going to stop.”

ABC News reports that McCain is preparing to ramp up attacks on Obama contributor Tony Rezko. Mentioning Cunningham will probably go over like warm champagne with McCain’s moneybags at The Grand Del Mar, but at least somebody’s talking about corruption in Washington. About damn time!

Director John Waters, my neighbor

For a few years, director John Waters and I were once neighbors.

Waters lives in the Tuscany-Canterbury section of Baltimore. In this leafy enclave of Tudor-style homes inhabited by white yuppies, it’s easy to forget that you’re in a crime-plagued, drug-infested mess of a city that gave rise to HBO’s The Wire.  My alma mater, The Johns Hopkins University, is a short walk away.

t_680s4cix.jpgMy Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house was also in Tuscany-Canterbury, but I never saw Waters in the neighborhood. In fact, one of my regrets in life is I never went trick-or-treating at the Waters home, which was just a few doors down.

Still, I felt a certain kinship. He made films with dog-poop eating drag queens and my frat brothers and I behaved pretty much like you would expect a fraternity to behave. We were both neighborhood outcasts.

The neighborhood finally had its revenge on Phi Psi last year. Neighbors got the city council to  ban the fraternity from the house on a zoning technicality. Then, last month, the neighborhood association amended its rules so that the private Calvert School next door could raze the building and build more facilities for the elementary students whose parents pay $19,000 a year to send them there.

That was too much for Waters. He wrote a letter to the Tuscany-Canterbury neighbohood association saying that the project would be “construction noise hell. In the letter, Waters also threatened to drive to Calvert Headmaster Andrew Martire’s house and honk his car horn each morning at 6:30 a.m. in revenge for the noise in the neighborhood. “I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again,” Waters wrote.

Thanks John, for being a good neighbor.

If political writers covered baseball

With apologies to The Washington Post.

This is Playoff Week. That, in reality, is about all that anyone knows outside Terry Francona’s inner, inner circle — that sometime in the next week the Boston Red Sox General Manager will announce his pitching lineup against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Beyond that, the baseball world is in a zone of fevered speculation.

Nothing is certain, and one sign of how jittery everyone is about the timing and the choice came a few hours ago, when the gossipy PROSportsDaily.com posted an item that said, “Paper: Red Sox may announce pitching lineup in AM.” That set off alarms in newsrooms across the country until the team’s front office shot it down — although it was not clear exactly what they were shooting down, other than that the announcement would come early this morning.

There was a widespread assumption, based on nothing solid from the campaign, that Francona could make his announcement this morning, this afternoon, or stage a multi-day rollout. Now, in a twist that goes against recent history, there are signs that Francona may wait to announce his choice until this weekend or just before game one on Monday in hopes of providing a big boost before the series opens.

In addition to giving some playoff-eve energy to the Red Sox, a late-in-the-week rollout would have another benefit in the eyes of his loyalists. It could help overshadow the other dominant story heading into the playoff, which is the long-running drama involving Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz and his girlfriend, Erica Ericsen, the 2007 Penthouse Pet of the year.

An announcement late in the week suggests that the Red Sox coaching staff believes that, in an era of 24/7 coverage and increasingly shortened news cycles, sustaining interest in a multi-day rollout has become increasingly difficult. Last year, Francona, the World Series winning manager, choreographed a five-day rollout of his choice of starting pitchers. Media attention spans today are considerably shorter.

Francona could move whenever he’s ready, but if he makes his announcement sooner than Friday, it would mean disrupting a schedule that is already set. He will be in Boston on Tuesday for a meeting with the coaching staff, an important event that he probably won’t want to overshadow with a pitching lineup announcement.

One possibility is Curt Schilling will get the call in game one. Schilling ….

Duke Cunningham, Mike Aguirre and Sign On radio

I was on Chris Reed’s radio show on Sign On Radio this morning, an Internet radio station run by the San Diego Union-Tribune. Chris is an editorial writer and blogger at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

We started talking about Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s request for a commutation, but then Chris asked me about a piece I wrote back in February on San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre.

That piece caused a bit of a stir, I guess, because I asked a question that nobody else was asking. Aguirre, our elected city attorney, called the mayor “schizophrenic” and told a San Diego Union-Tribune that he was “pathological.”

That struck me as odd because many people say privately that Aguirre is the one with mental problems. But if you, as a reporter, raised this issue, Aguirre suddenly got defensive. Or hinted at forces out to stop him. Or wrote a letter to your editor telling you to get out of the office more.

Then today I spotted news that Aguirre’s brother, a wealthy attorney, is working as an “unpaid intern.” Double the fun!

I voted for Aguirre because I thought we needed someone to shake things up in paradise or Enron-by-the-sea as The New York Times called us.

I just don’t like bullies.