cyberbullying from Michigan state attorney's office

This is insane: an assistant attorney general in Michigan is in the middle of a massive cyberbullying/stalking campaign against the student body president of the University of Michigan because the kid is gay.


He's protested outside the kid's house. He leaves comments all over the kid's blog, and harasses his friends. He keeps a blog about the kid and shows pictures of him with rainbow flags with swastikas in the middle.

And he's an Assistant Attorney General of the state of Michigan.

Gliese 530g, where the "g" stands for Goldilocks

Astronomers at UC-Santa Cruz find a habitable planet. It orbits a dwarf star in the Libra constellation.

food stamp Cadillacs

A look at what you can actually buy with current ($4.50/day/person) and soon-to-be-cut food stamps. Doesn't look much like living high on the hog to me.

an American death squad in Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman has the story.

Dantonio

Speaking of Saturday's game, best wishes to Spartan coach Mark Dantonio on a speedy recovery. He was admitted to the hospital after suffering a heart attack just a few minutes after making one of the ballsiest calls I've ever seen in college football, a field goal fake from the wrong side of the 30 yard line in overtime after ND had already gone and scored its own FG.

That takes some serious cajones, coach.

we only lose because the refs make us

Here is one will likely end up being the inaugural post of the series "what Kelly said". Yeah, maybe there should have been a delay of game penalty on the fake field goal attempt. It doesn't matter, though, because in any game there are going to be occasional bad calls. If the defense had properly covered Gantt the play clock wouldn't be an issue. If the Irish had played better than Michigan State during regulation, that play would never have happened in the first place.

The fact is that the Irish were not robbed. Michigan State played as well or better than Notre Dame, with more total yards and fewer turnovers. They won that game.

We're at an uncomfortable moment in this season because ND was played to a stalemate by a middling Big 10 team while at full strength (unlike last game when we gave Michigan a free half to pull ahead). If you had asked Irish fans at the beginning of the season if they expected the team to be about that good, a middling Big 10 team, a potentially dangerous opponent for most outfits but not really competitive with the league's elite, they probably would have agreed. Confirmation of your team's mediocrity still hurts, though, no matter how accurately you predicted it.

I think the most common prediction I heard a month ago was 8-4 on the season. I think we're able to establish ND's relative strength with the last game, though, and with USC, Stanford, Pitt, Utah, and Boston College still on the docket, escaping with only 4 losses would be miraculous. Barring significant progress in the secondary and running game, I'm ready to predict a 5-7 season, picking up one of these tough ones (we shouldn't be favored in any of them) but dropping another to one of the patsies.

It's ok, though. I said at the end of last season that ND should land a great coach and give him time, because building a great team often means making systemic changes to the current one. Weis' teams were highly talented but overwrought, underconditioned, weak on fundamentals (tackling in space, anyone?), and lacking in confidence. It takes time to remedy those issues, especially the last one.

I know it sounds corny and fanboyish, but I have confidence in Brian Kelly in the long run.

overthinking it

Marc Ambinder:

Why did Democrats take a beating for passing a health care bill that was very similar in form to what Republican intellectuals had been urging for more than a decade? Because the Tea Party, conservative independents and Republicans have moved the political center to the right--marginally on a 0 to 100 scale, but enough to tip the scale away from Democrats. The electoral environment favors economic libertarians, and the Tea Party movement (or the conservative movement) has organized itself in such a way that really excites conservatives, while liberals, at a disadvantage ideologically (in the sense that conservatism has always been more organized and less diverse) cannot, as they did in 2008, build a tent around a larger coalition.

Holy hodgepodge of tendentious analogies, Batman!

The answer to why Democrats took a beating on HCR is actually quite simple. It's the same reason, in fact, that they took a beating on the stimulus and the bailouts.

They didn't listen to their base: liberals.

Liberals, not unions or minorities or women, are the engine of Democratic PR and campaign operations. They are the ones who send in letters to the editor and mount demonstrations and write on their shitty little blogs like this one. They're the ones who talk on cable news shows and fund commercials and 527s. They're the ones who get excited about politics and talk to their family and friends and argue Democratic policies and win converts.

Liberals by and large feel somewhere between disappointed and betrayed by the Obama Administration, and find their Senate delegation and its leader hopelessly gunshy. Despite Jonathan Chait et al.'s insistence that Barack Obama is "the most effective liberal president in at least four decades," it does not escape liberals that their president and massive, filibuster-proof majorities in Congress have so far given them Mitt Romney's health care plan, George W. Bush's tax cuts and bank bailouts, and were last seen working on Ronald Reagan's environmental regulation system. They are in general agreement that Barack Obama and Harry Reid gave away the store on health care with the public option. They worry that Obama screwed any liberal that will ever want to talk economics again by pushing a doomed stimulus plan that was less than half the size it needed to be, and nearly half of which was composed of inefficient tax cuts rather than public projects that keep people employed, giving the appearance of a Keynesian response but not enough oomph to sustain the recovery. They are sore that he wrote blank checks for Wall Street after its irresponsibility and craven behavior nearly destroyed the economy, but had no solution for putting people to work. They are outraged that he never fought for cramdown, and that his only attempt to deal with the housing market (HAMP) turned out to be not just unhelpful but downright predatory, cajoling people into staying in their homes just long enough for their lenders to squeeze a little more blood from their stones before evicting them anyway. And they are horrified by the Administration's war on whistleblowers, embrace of indefinite detentions, and decision to co-opt all of President Bush's illegal "war powers" rather than restore the Rule of Law.

And when they had the temerity to say something, the White House Press Secretary openly mocked them on national television. Mocked them, after all those hours and doors and phone calls and personal checks. Is there any other voting bloc in the country, any at all, that is ever openly derided by their own politicians?

Now we're a month and a half from the midterms and Democrats are wondering why they have no support, no volunteers, no campaign donations, and no one is applauding their policies on TV. It's a hell of a lot harder to motivate your base when they give you everything, and then two years later all you can say is, "at least I'm not the other guy, right?"

"anti-colonialism"

To quote a current internet fad, I'm so old I remember when "anti-colonialism" was part of the American consensus.

I am amazed and horrified at this place where we have found ourselves, where Americans are so "white hot" with racist rage and existential anxiety that we have these kinds of attacks being launched at the president on a seemingly daily basis by people who are proffered as "thoughtful conservatives" by the press, and these are the more benign mutterings of the white right. Sizable groups of influential people are openly arguing that Muslims should not be allowed to build mosques in the United States and do not deserve First Amendment protections, and Patriot Day has become essentially an anti-Muslim holiday. And the demonstrations and even arson at mosques all over the country, my God! One side of the political spectrum has openly embraced ethnic discrimination.

learning something ugly about yourself

Over the last several days, I've been processing an event from earlier in the week. I should preface by saying that I've always thought myself fairly enlightened on matters of race compared with many white people (of course, I suppose all white people probably believe that). Unlike a great many whites I know, I don't live in denial of my own latent racist tendencies, or of the benefits I have personally derived from white privilege. I live in a mixed neighborhood, and by choice. I'm politically left on matters of race, from affirmative action to prison reform and the War on Drugs. For a white person, I think I'm pretty well read in terms of African American literature.

So to the matter at hand: on Tuesday I was surfing the intarwebs, and I came across a series of Harvard tests on implicit associations and preferences. Just for kicks, I decided to take the race one. After about 5 minutes, the results were in.

According to the test, I have a "strong" preference for white faces over black, stronger than most white respondents.

What does that mean? Does it mean I'm more racist than most people? At first I thought, "well, I went to pretty segregated schools for the most part, and there aren't a ton of black people in my profession, so maybe it's just that I don't have as much experience with black people as others." That isn't true, though, nor is it relevant. It means exactly what it looks like: I associate white faces with good qualities and black faces with bad more than most white respondents. Are my southern upbringing and, shall we say, "racially insensitive" parents to blame? Maybe, but does it matter?

What do I do with that? People on all sides of the political and racial spectrum deride "white guilt," but shouldn't I feel guilty about this? Shouldn't I feel convicted, to borrow a less ambiguous term from theology? I suppose "should" doesn't really matter. I do.

Perhaps I could counteract this subconscious malady of mine by interacting with more African Americans. How would I do that, though? I know hardly any black people these days aside from a few of my neighbors, with whom I have little or nothing in common and who all have busy family lives. I don't work closely with any, and I could probably count on one hand the number of black people who even work in my giant academic library. There are none in my wider circle of friends or in their circles. I don't share the religious tastes of most African Americans, so church is out of the question. The only obvious place I can go to socialize with black people is the bar down the street, which I've made a point to avoid because a) drinking at bars is expensive, and b) it allows smoking inside, which makes me smell like an ashtray and entices me to smoke.

It appears I've run aground against a persistent spatial segregation in America. Even when I want to hang out with black people, there are few places where our lives intersect. We have constructed separate societies for ourselves that inhibit not only necessity for interaction, but opportunity for it.

Some months ago I asked a friend of mine what it was like growing up in the segregated South (he was a kid in Tenessee in the late 50's-early 60's). What he said was that in the Tennessee he grew up in he hardly knew black people existed. Segregation wasn't about making black people use crappy water fountains or giving white people the good bus seats; it was about moving black people away so whites didn't have to interact with them. It was about not living near them, or being in the same stores and restaurants as them, or standing in line with them or sitting next to them or going to school with them.

Here I am, 50 years removed from Jim Crow in a part of the country that was never officially segregated, and suddenly I'm finding that description of 1950's Tennessee alarmingly familiar. I'm also feeling like I just saw those test results all over again.

everything you know about learning is wrong

Fascinating. Part of the reason I like this article, admittedly, is it validates my long-held theory that all this "what type of learner are you?" stuff I keep encountering in my classes is pop psychology bulls**t:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Almost zero.

More difficult to deal with is the revelation that mixing up studying venues, rather than using the same spot every day, improves retention. I did a fair bit of this in college, taking study sessions wherever I could get them because of an unpredictable social life and work schedule, but for many students this is going to be a problem due to the importance of establishing routines to maintain discipline. People often set up a particular place and time to study because studying sucks, and things that suck are easier to keep doing once you've established a routine. Furthermore, even in college people tend to regiment their other daily activities pretty tightly, so there will be a tendency to want to do that with studying as well. We are creatures of habit.

pictures of home

I was surfing some of my Red Raider blogs this morning when I came across this picture of a dirt road somewhere in Texas. It looks very much like the area around the Caprock, about an hour to an hour and a half outside of Lubbock, but it could pass for most of the state.

I think I stared at this picture for 5 minutes, overwhelmed by nostalgia.

Netflix: the little engine that could

James Ledbetter at Slate asks why it's perennially underestimated by so many tech writers:

How nasty and wrong have the critics been? In 2005, Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities, called Netflix "a worthless piece of crap with really nice people running it." Today, that worthless piece of crap has a market capitalization of $6.4 billion. In early 2007, when Netflix first announced its plans to allow subscribers to stream videos instantly—rather than wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail—esteemed tech journalist Om Malik predicted that this move would "soon be relegated to the dustbin of failed ideas." Netflix has more than doubled its subscriber base since then, and today nearly two-thirds of them use Netflix's streaming video service.
...
What is it about Netflix that causes critics to misread it so badly? Call it the innovator's paradox: Netflix forged an identity by building a simple business—DVD delivery by mail—that had never been done before. The very fact that this DVD-by-mail idea connected so deeply with consumers led many observers to think that was all that Netflix could or would ever do. Instead, the DVD delivery service—while still vital to Netflix's revenue—looks more like the Trojan horse of a much wider strategy designed to change how Americans watch filmed entertainment.

I find this subject fascinating as a Netflix devotee. I think the reason for Netflix's continued survival is actually pretty simple: they cultivate an almost militantly loyal fanbase. They're similar to Apple, Trader Joe's, and Costco that way. It's about brand loyalty.

They managed that by developing quality products, attention to detail, fundamentals, blah blah blah, but what binds these four companies together in particular is poached a ton of people from another company whose own customers hate them. Thus Apple gave people a way out of patronizing Microsoft, Trader Joe's has Whole Foods, and Costco has Wal Mart. Netflix, for their part, had movie rental stores in general and the loathsome Blockbuster Video in particular. Among Netflix users I knew, there was a palpable sense of foreboding when Blockbuster introduced its own mail order viewing service, because we were worried it would be better than Netflix. Not excited or curious, but worried!

That strength of brand loyalty benefits Netflix immeasurably. Many of its customers (myself included) have no interest in finding better movie services even though some may well exist. I don't investigate Redbox or any of the other interlopers fully knowing that one might be better suited or cheaper for me. I tell my friends about Netflix. I post on my crappy little blog about Netflix. And so on.

American Taliban

It's the new book by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos fame. From what I can tell, the thesis of the book is:

...in their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban.

Provocative.

A number of liberal voices have taken issue with Kos' book, arguing that it's an intellectual analog to the odious Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. I myself haven't read the book and don't plan to read the book; I read my share of polemics during the Bush years, and I'm done with it.

I want to point out this post on the subject from Ta-Nehisi Coates, though. Coates et al. are right: there are substantive differences between the American Right and the Taliban, those differences being pretty much everything the Taliban does that make them our enemies. Even if they reflect similar values, believing that women will be sluts if we allow them birth control is a far cry from believing that women will be sluts if we don't throw acid in their faces. Believing that gays shouldn't be allowed to marry is hardly the same as believing that gays should be executed. And of course, the Christian Right pretty rarely engages in violence in furtherance of its cause.

That being said, though, there is a grain of truth here, and that's where I'm not sure if this book does its greatest service or disservice. I can't help but think that the reason Kos is taken so much flak for this comparison is his decision to use "jihadists" instead of "Islamic fundamentalists." The two are often conflated, but they're different in the same way that (to break my own rule and use an analogy) Christian fundamentalists and abortion clinic bombers are different. Just because there are Christian fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics, it doesn't mean that Christian fundamentalists as a rule want to bomb clinics or agree with bombing clinics. For all the right wing bluster about "the left" being in bed with Islamists, the group in America with the most in common with Islamic fundamentalists is undeniably Christian fundamentalists.

The difference between our fundies and their fundies is one of degree rather than one of quality. So yes, the Christian Right does not believe gays should be executed, but they do believe that they are undeserving of the full rights of straight people. They may not force their women to wear hijabs or burqas, but they do believe in patriarchy, teaching their daughters that a woman's place is in the home and that the husband is the king of the household. They may not want Sharia law, but they do want more religion in our laws. They share very similar views of "decadent" liberals and atheists. They both approve of the use of torture. They agree that Iraq and Afghanistan are battles in the great clash of Christianity vs. Islam. They both agree that we should go to war over Israel.

Does Kos' book "move the Overton window" allowing for discussion of these similarities in respectable circles, or does it delegitimize any and all comparisons by association in the same way that Dan Rather's false documents rendered any discussion of Bush's special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard verboten? I'd like to see the former, but I fear the latter.

588

That's the number of total yards Hawaii racked up against USC last night. Hawaii.

Know hope.

the Bible got it wrong

An evangelical preacher is taking a new tack in proselytizing to gays, starting with "I'm sorry." The idea is that he used to be a bigot about homosexuality until several of his friends came out, and now he tries to talk to gays about Jesus without pressing on them that their lifestyle is sinful. From what I can tell, however, he still thinks homosexuality is sinful, he just doesn't talk about it openly:

"It's theologically sloppy to say it's not a sin," he replies. But he quickly adds that all Christians are sinners, according to Romans 3:23. "We're all dealing with something."

Thus the current limits of evangelical outreach to the GLBT community.

My real interest is the next part. Dan Savage moves from here and drops a bomb on the whole conversation:

When evangelicals are ready to admit that the bible got homosexuality wrong—just like it got slavery and shellfish and figs and masturbation and burnt offerings wrong—then we can talk.

Provocative. It did get those things wrong, though, didn't it? Certainly slavery and masturbation in any case.

The problem here is that biblical inerrancy is a principle feature of conservative religion in general and evangelicalism in particular. Popular religion is rife with unexamined contradictions, of course; we're all perfectly aware that, for instance, kosher law is in the Bible and yet Christians don't practice it, or riffing from prior conversations, that the Sabbath is on the 7th day of the week, which isn't Sunday. Sometimes Christian children in Sunday school ask where Cain's wife came from, or how Noah was able to get animals native to the Americas before the Flood. Biblical inerrancy as a sentiment, however, is deep and powerful and fundamental to conservative reliosity. To let go of it jars loose the entire rock of the church.

To ask evangelicals to admit that part of the Bible was wrong, any part, is frankly asking conservatives to become liberals.

Trader Joe's

A pretty good article from Fortune Magazine on the business side of Trader Joe's.

the Sabbath

I don't usually bother with the guy on this little blog, but Glenn Beck said something I found just high-larious. He said he originally planned his "let's all worship Glenn Beck" day speech for 9/12, but changed it because he didn't want to ask people to "work on the Sabbath."

9/12 is a Sunday.

Ok, maybe that's only a punchline for me. It's a minor pet peeve of mine. I understand that this is a somewhat common misconception among Christians, much like calling the last book of the New Testament "Revelations" (just one long, weird Revelation, people!), but the Sabbath is the 7th day of the week. That's Saturday for the calendar-illiterate. Hence why Jews go to synagogue and 7th Day Adventists go to church on Saturday.

Christians go to church on Sunday, the Lord's Day, in honor of the Resurrection.

I guess I'm just interested by all the tiny ways people like Beck and Palin accidentally let on that their supposed expertise is a complete fabrication. Beck doesn't actually know a damn thing about the religion he's trying to champion, and Palin's storehouse of homespun wisdom is just part of the stage set, an illusion meant to help the audience suspend their disbelief.

These two people are the de facto chairs of the political party that may take the House in November.

perennially underrated

Mandel is right on this: Texas Tech enters the season underrated yet again. Every season A&M is picked to finally rise up and take their rightful place above the Red Raiders, and every season they fail. This year the only real change for either team is that (arguably, at least) Tech upgraded their coaching staff.

I think ultimately this is about history. The Aggies were historically the second team in the state with the Red Raiders a distant third (or worse), so everyone keeps expecting a return to the natural order. As anyone in the ACC will tell you, though, there's no good reason to expect a team to magically improve just because it was good 15 years ago.

women are for sex, men are for violence

A fantastic post from Chastity on oppressive gender-based societal expectations ... for men. The money quote:

...it’s perfectly okay to beat up men, because if a man can’t defend himself it’s his fault.

Warning: this is a super geeky post from a Warcraft blog. Yes, it does dig a little into the weeds of a video game. The middle part (3 male good spellcasters) is probably the most exclusionary one. The gist of it is simply that the game reflects a larger cultural assumption that men settle their conflicts with brute force.

Also, echoing Chastity, none of this is intended to imply that men have it as bad as/worse than women.

what you need to know about the egg recall

Thanks to Salon for publishing a quick list of "need to know" facts, such as where to find out if your brand is affected, the symptoms of salmonella, etc.

Recalls like this are why it's increasingly in our interest to unplug ourselves from industrial agribusiness where possible. I realize that sounds hyperbolic, but clearly mainstream food production has become so centralized and so poorly monitored that massive summertime food-borne disease outbreaks and attendant food recalls are becoming commonplace. Even the FDA has admitted that they lack the funds and manpower to "shift from reactive to preventive."

There is a way to innoculate yourself from the annual poisoning of the American consumer: buy local. Despite the assurances of the free marketeers that it's "in the interests of big business" to provide a safe product, industrial agribusiness has a terrible record when it comes to food safety compared to your local farmer. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, I think:

1. what does minimum wage (or worse!) worker #4,972 care whether he's really thoroughly washing the lettuce, or keeping the eggs at a safe temperature, or making sure there's absolutely no paint chips falling into the peanut butter?


2. the giant company that supplies billions of eggs a year to half the country will be inconvenienced by the recall, and will have a bad year for profits, but will survive and be in perfect form again in a year or two. If the guy at the poultry booth in the farmer's market sells bad eggs and his customers get sick, between losing the trust of his customer base and the hell that state/federal regulators will call down on him he'll almost certainly go out of business.

Nevermind the remarkable difference in quality and taste between local free range and industrial eggs. There are some foods where there's little change in taste between the local and industrial stuff, and others where it's night and day. In my experience tomatoes, strawberries, grass fed beef, and eggs are the products where the difference is starkest. The eggs even look different on the inside: you don't realize how pale and flabby and unappetizing industrial yolks are until you crack open a local, free range egg and see one of those dark, almost burnt orange, thick yolks sitting almost perfectly spherical in the pan.

Buying local means not having to worry about national recalls.

learning the lessons of Greece

Wait, what's that, you say? Going full-on austerity in a vulnerable economy was a terrible, terrible idea that plunged Greece into a bonafide depression?

some facts about new incoming freshmen

Beloit College does this every year, and it's fascinating. Some of the facts are more mind-blowing than others, such as "Nirvana is on the classic oldies station" and "few in the class know how to write in cursive," not to mention simply the birth year: 1992.

Some, however, are of world-historical relevance: "they have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S." This is the first college class born after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the same year the European Union was created.

"a model of cowardice"

That's how Glenn Greenwald described the behavior of prominent Democrats in response to the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," a misnomer so egregious it compares in silliness to "partial birth abortion" and "Holy Roman Empire." It is the "death panels" of this summer, to be sure, but this wholly absurd debate* is useful in one single solitary respect: it provides a tiny glimpse into the hearts of prominent politicians. Some have been heartening, such as the courageous stands made by Michael Bloomberg and Russ Feingold, while others were dispiriting, whether as predictable as Harry Reid's craven vote-mongering or as disappointing as the fraying of Howard Dean's moral fiber.

*As Howard Kurtz mentions, the organizers of the cultural center have only managed to raise $18k of the $100 MILLION needed, so it's unlikely this thing will ever be built anyway.

change we can believe in

On Monday the United States military led by the Obama Administration convicted a child soldier to an undisclosed sentence without a jury trial using evidence acquired through the use of torture and after having already imprisoned the boy for 8 years, over 1/3 of his lifetime.

Just thought you might find that interesting.

the activist base

Quote of the Day, from David Frum commenting on Robert Gibbs' attack on liberals:

"More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base."

Bradley Manning: rage-filled homo

Interesting to see how our liberal media writes a bio piece for a whistleblower as if he were a serial killer or a terrorist. Why would he do such a thing? Is it because he had a rough childhood, or was gay, or had a temper? Is it because he fell in with "hackers" who started filling his head with crazy ideas?

the death of Ted Stevens

I can't get out of my head what must have been going through Ted Stevens' head in his final moments. To survive a plane crash but lose your wife and the mother of your 5 children in it is one hell of a life event, in every sense of the term. One can only imagine the kind of grief and survivor's guilt that accompanies it.

To then be in a second downward spiraling plane 32 years later, the odd familiarity, the sudden reminder of that past life and love and grief on top of the fear... There are no words.

"Borked"

I'm hearing the lament among lots of people who should know better that the judicial confirmation process is a lot more partisan than it once was, and it's the Democrats' fault for opposing Robert Bork. It amazes me that even people in the news media will throw this claim out there without ever mentioning the reasons behind the opposition to Bork, as if it was just mere "partisanship."

Robert Bork openly supported Jim Crow poll taxes. He also did not believe in a constitutionally protected right to privacy. At his confirmation vote, no fewer than six Republicans voted against him, and he won only 42 votes for confirmation.

Still think the Democrats were being overly partisan?

A quick history lesson: when the special prosecutor of the Watergate Hotel break-in, Archibald Cox, came a' knockin' for Richard Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings, Nixon knew he was in deep shit. He refused to hand them over at first, but Cox pressed on. Nixon offered a compromised, that a near-deaf Senator named John Stennis would listen to them for him. Cox refused the compromise, so Nixon did the only thing left he could think of: he ordered his Attorney General to fire the Special Prosecutor.

The Attorney General refused and resigned in protest.

So Nixon asked the next guy in line to fire him. The next guy in line refused and resigned in protest.

So Nixon asked the third guy in line to fire him. That guy saw the Attorney General job dangling in front of him, snapped it up, and fired the Special Prosecutor, an act so unethical that 5 years later Congress enacted the Ethics in Government Act specifically to prevent that kind of thing from happening again.

That guy who did Nixon's dirty work, as you can guess, was Robert Bork.

gay judges can't be impartial

I'm a firm believer that, while sports do not "teach us" the things coaches always claim they do, like "moral values," they do model some important lessons about human behavior. For instance, whenever one side loses an important match, rather than admitting weakness, the fans' first defense is to blame the refs.

fun with numbers: government workers edition

The federal budget is overwhelmingly eaten up by 3 things: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense, and all in roughly equal measure. If there was a mass of useless bureaucracy that could easily be washed away that would make any significant dent in the budget, you can bet it would have been by now.

Or not?

Let's take a look at the staff of the federal government, since in matters not related to Social Security and Medicare, much of what the government pays for is people: people to calculate tax revenue, people to analyze data, people to go enforce rules. Lucky for us, the federal government provides a handy dandy outline of what its staff looks like.

Notice anything interesting?

There are 1.9 million people employed by the federal government, not including the Postal Service or soldiers. Of those, 1.1 million of them work for the Dept. of Defense, Veterans' Affairs, or Homeland Security. That's 58% of the entire federal government. And that does not include enlisted men and women!

Put another way, including the 1,421,000 active duty personnel, there are over 2.5 million people employed by the Depts. of Defense, Veterans' Affairs, and Homeland Security compared to 329,000 in all other areas of the federal government. There are more than 7 times as many people working in national defense as there are elsewhere.



And I didn't include the other 848,000 people in the reserves.

The Dept. of Education, every conservative's favorite target for elimination? 4,000 people. The evil, evil Dept. of Housing and Urban Development? 9,000 people. NASA? 18,000 people.

But remember, kids, the only way to balance the budget is with steep cuts to Social Security!

new right wing media guy invented robot chef and cure for cancer

Seriously. This guy is a.maz.ing.

Not helpful if you're trying to make the "teabaggers aren't really crazy " argument, though.

the American police state

Add another one to the list of advances in the Bush-Obama police state. You may already know that the Obama Administration has approved the targeted killing of an American citizen with no trial and no judicial consent whatsoever, solely on the basis of the Administration's own assurance that he is a terrorist.

Here's a new one, though: when the guy's dad went to court seeking an injunction from the United States government assassinating his son, the administration claimed that they put a special label on his son making it illegal for anyone to represent him or file anything in court on his behalf.

The Obama Administration now claims the ability not only to deny you access to a lawyer, but the right to imprison any lawyer who would try to petition the government on your behalf. The government can now tell attorneys whom they can and cannot represent.

Let's review, shall we? The Executive now claims the right to tap your phones, read all your emails, and keep a complete database of all of your internet activity from searches to websites visited on any computer, all without any judicial oversight whatsoever. They can arrest American citizens without charge, imprison them for an indefinite period of time, torture them, or even kill them, all with no judicial permission or oversight. They can blow your head off as you're getting into your car to go to work one morning, having made the decision completely in secret and without having to inform anyone of even the reason for it. And if anyone out there doesn't like what's happened to you and goes to the courts about it, they can be arrested, too.

Sorry to get all Glenn Beck on you, but the construction of the American police state is complete. The legal precedents are now de facto ratified by both parties, and the colossal apparatus required to implement them is in place, as shown by the Washington Post several weeks ago.

Just think back on all Barack Obama has done when given the reins to this monster, how even a former constitutional law professor, a guy who championed the rights of the arrested as a state legislator, took the powers assumed by Bush and ran with them. Now imagine Sarah Palin or Rudy Giuliani being elected president.

the Inquisitor state

Slate has a story on the history and process of stoning in Iran. Truly gruesome stuff, and people are condemned to it for adultery and prostitution. Also, the judge doesn't actually need any evidence or witness testimony whatsoever to condemn a woman to die this way.

Did I mention that you get buried up to your chest before you are stoned to death by rocks the size of tangerines?

The Slate story was prompted by the plight of Sakineh Ashtiani, a woman condemned to exactly such a penalty (despite the supposed moratorium on stonings in Iran) and an offer from the president of Brazil to grant her asylum.

I point this out first of all because it should have been us that offered asylum. I don't care if it's a publicity stunt, or if there's any chance of her getting an opportunity to take Brazil up on it. The combination of Ashtiani's charge, trial, and sentence encapsulate a horrific complex of police state tactics and medieval theocratic values, an "Inquisitor state" that we should be attempting to expose and humiliate at every opportunity.

Iran's example reminds us how Bush and Cheney had it wrong when they argued that our civil libertarian values make us weak and vulnerable. Rather, it is precisely our principles, our belief in everyone's right to privacy, religious freedom, and the rights of the arrested that make our society not just different from Iran's, but superior.

I also bring this up because stoning seems like an old ritual punishment that shows how Iran never progressed beyond the Middle Ages, but in fact it has only existed in Iran since 1983. We forget that Islamic fundamentalism is a recent phenomenon, a reaction to western colonialism. The United States' first participation in a coup of a democratically elected foreign head of government, in fact, was committed in Iran by the Eisenhower Administration.

It seems all our current nemeses are our own creations.

Elkhart farmers' market closing

So says the Trib. I try to think of the reasons the market didn't do well, and perhaps it's best to consider why I only went a few times despite having a great experience. I have a few quibbles with the place, the biggest being that it has little or no produce most of the time, nowhere to buy non-food groceries, and half or more of the place was occupied by craft stores.

All that aside, though, you know why we didn't go? It was in Elkhart, a 20+ minute drive from our house. The only things we buy regularly from a farmers' market are poultry and eggs, and South Bend has a farmers' market 5-10 minutes from our house where we can get those. That's why.

By far the two most successful markets I've ever seen are in Cork, Ireland and South Bend. They have exactly one thing in common that isn't shared by the failed American Countryside: they're centrally located in the city of their customer base. In a city of 100,000 people, 20+ minutes is a seriously long drive for groceries, especially when you can't even get all your groceries there.

Speaking of, the Old English Market in Cork is by far the most successful of the three for a very simple reason: it had a booth that sold condiments, prepackaged foodstuffs (dried soup, canned goods, etc.), and other such things. It didn't force its customers to go to its major grocery store competitors for their non-fresh-food groceries. There aren't just a ton of people willing to switch to a farmers' market from their convenient, familiar grocery store in the first place. There are far fewer willing to make two trips a week instead of one just so they can get free range eggs and chicken breasts. In Cork, however, the market seemed to do as much business as Tesco.

If the South Bend market had a booth or section where they sold things like cheap mustard bottles, canned beans, paper towels, and bath soap, I would do all my grocery shopping there, even if they didn't have all my brands. The market would gain not only my paper towel and bath soap business, but also my potatoes and milk and rice and sandwich meat business. If the Elkhart market had done so, it's possible we would have made the trip more often.

fun with numbers: autoworker pay edition

The Washington Post tells me that, while auto workers from the pre-bailout era make $28/hour, new hirees are making a government-mandated $14/hr.

Interestingly, although most people who read the Post are probably on salary and think of wages in terms of annual income, the Post never bothers to tell us how it translates.

In case you were wondering, $14/hr. X 8 hrs/day X 5 days/week X 52 weeks/year = $29,120/year. That's factory work (i.e., physically taxing) for guys assumed to be primary breadwinners, 99% of whom according to the article have at least high school degrees. That also means those supposedly hugely overpaid damn union workers were making less than $60k.

Wikileaks strikes again

90,000 pages of classified information on the Afghanistan War published by Wikileaks and sent to 3 different major newspapers. The cache of documents paints an ugly picture, and the Obama Administration is flailing to answer the charges. Their best counter is that all this occurred before the surge, and that much of it formed the basis of that decision. Some great commentary here.

How serendipitous it is that this bombshell drops only a week or so after the Washington Post's massive report (2 years in the making! as we are frequently reminded). The Post's is useful especially to us laymen, but many of critiqued it for bringing no new information to bear. It seems more to be an aggregate of stories published over the last several years on the intelligence community, and with little cohesive narrative thread to boot.

Compare with this story and all its truly new information.

An interesting note about its publication: the New York Times requested that Wikileaks withhold "harmful material" from its website -- on behalf of the Obama Administration. A wonderful comparison of priorities between old and new media right there.

technology and the end of privacy

Even getting harder for spies, as technological trends are tending to favor the surveillance state.

Dems to make Bush tax cuts permanent

An extraordinary act of cowardice from a party that found such cuts repugnant just a couple of years ago. From Time:

Senate Democrats will soon advance a plan to make permanent President George W. Bush's 2001 tax cuts for middle-class Americans earning less than $200,000, but let the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans expire, two Senate party aides said Tuesday. They will also propose to reinstate a 45% estate tax on individuals for the next two years.

The emerging tax plan is designed, as much as anything else, to clarify the differences between the two parties as they hurtle toward the fall elections. Following on their success with the financial-regulatory-reform bill, Democrats are betting that Republicans will once again take up a legislative battle on behalf of the wealthy. "Republicans are going to have a real choice ahead of them," says a Democratic aide. "Are you for extending these tax cuts for middle-class families or are you against them because you want to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans?"

This, of course, will be the second Obama tax cut in two years despite an already record low tax burden. The likely effect of permanent Bush tax cuts as shown by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (via Ezra Klein):

Tax cuts are the perfect example of a policy that is popular yet irresponsible. The cost is enormous, and the gain for the average citizen minimal.

Need I show more examples on this blog? Over and over we've seen how tax hikes amounting to pocket change for the average person can completely solve the budget woes of entire school districts. Instead, cities around the country are putting fire and police departments in hock. Meanwhile, at the federal level the argument on taxes is between those who want to bankrupt the Treasury cutting huge checks to the rich, and those who want to bankrupt the Treasury cutting checks for chump change to the middle class.

We have completely lost our minds on this issue.

Top Secret America

A massive report from the Washington Post. It's huge. It will make you sick to your stomach.

That being said, I know it's sexy in media circles to frame things in teabagger terms, but the "waste" and "overspending" in our secretive shadow government is so, so very beside the point.

Bradley Manning charged

And he could face 52 years in jail. Manning is the whistleblower who gave damning government documents to Wikileaks. People are already starting to compare him to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

This is a serious matter. I wasn't all that surprised to see Obama give in on the public option, and it didn't shock me to see a smaller stimulus than was expected. His willingness to open our shores to further offshore drilling was unwise but not entirely unexpected. What has truly shocked me about this administration and this former-constitutional-law-prof-turned-president, however, is the secrecy of this administration, its cavalier attitude toward civil liberties, and the zeal with which it pursues whistleblowers. Never would I have thought that Barack Obama would be an enemy of civil liberties and a British Tory Prime Minister a defender of them.

Whistleblowers serve a valuable purpose in democratic governments. Governments that have whistleblowers in their midst have more incentive to deal honestly with the people and be more effective because someone is watching. As with all things in government, oversight is key.

Whistleblowing is also a right, however, one tied to freedom of speech, privacy, and dissent. One can't help but notice the sustained rollback of our civil rights over the last 30 years, and any hope we had of a Democratic president acting as a bulwark of those rights is all but gone.

cutting unemployment benefits won't create jobs

It's a pretty simple calculus, really, but no one's pointing it out. Cowardly Democrats and craven Republicans want unemployment benefits to expire, so the argument goes, so that people will get off their duffs and go get jobs. This theory assumes that there is a glut of jobs out there going unfilled.

The situation they are describing is what happens in times of full employment, not an economic downturn. The problem is not that a half million jobs are going unfilled; the problem is that there are a half million fewer jobs than applicants. This is not difficult to understand.

Journalism in the age of Bush and Obama

The Frum bruhaha is in fact only a small part of a wider clustershag happening all over the world of journalism over intellectual freedom, dissent, and the proper role of journalists vis-a-vis their subjects.

We have three major leak stories:

1. Wired Magazine reported on the exposure and arrest of Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who supplied several thousand documents including a controversial video of a helicopter strike on Iraqi civilians to the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. See Greenwald's excellence coverage of the matter for details.


2. Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings published a humdinger of an article exposing disparaging comments made by General Stanley McChrystal and his staff about civilian leaders that ultimately led to his resignation. CBS News' Lara Logan slams Hastings in response, denigrating his journalistic ethics and his patriotism for daring to publish the remarks because there's an unspoken agreement that you don't publish anything that will embarrass the troops. "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has," she says at one point.


3. FishbowlDC published remarks disparaging prominent conservatives made by Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel, whose beat is the conservative movement, on the liberal journalist listserv Journolist. The WaPo freaked out, and accepted Weigel's resignation. Conservative Atlantic blogger Jeffrey Goldberg says they were right to can him, that only conservatives should report on the conservative movement, and that he would gladly publish remarks from the listserv if they suited his purposes. Greenwald pwns him on it, and Joe Klein comes to Goldberg's defense by questioning Greenwald's patriotism and calling him a lawyer over and over (that may sound unfair, but seriously read it. One wonders if it was really written by John Boehner, as overloaded with sophomoric, Republican innuendo as it is).

There are numerous similarities between some of the stories, such as the question of whether anything you say in front of a journalist is unpublishable. What I find more interesting is the response from establishment journalists on these issues. We have Lara Logan and Joe Klein, neither one known as a conservative and one known as an out and out liberal, not only not taking the journalist's side but impugning people's patriotism. Meanwhile, in the first story, one involving an actual, bonafide whistleblower, the print press has already apparently lost interest, with coverage of the story now occurring almost exclusively online. To test this argument, I mentioned this story to a friend of mine who pays close attention to national news but doesn't read blogs, and he had never heard of this story, or even of Wikileaks!

In the first two stories there's the similar thread of establishment media personalities being uninterested in whistleblowing and hostile to reporting that is unfavorable toward the government. They show how the press has become more deferential toward the government in recent years and perhaps no longer claim the civil libertarian mantle they once did.

In the third story we see a similar argument that reporters should not be adversarial toward their beats, though this time it's an ideological beat. The argument from the WaPo and Goldberg is essentially that reporters should agree with those they're covering, that someone covering conservatives should be a fellow traveler (nevermind for now the issue that the WaPo doesn't have anyone covering the liberal side!). Also, what constitutes lack of "toilet training" in journalism is whether you say ugly things about your subjects and use naughty language, rather than whether you write things that are later proven to be utterly false, refuse to retract them, and use your column to let your friends insult your enemies anonymously.

Interesting and scary to see what's happening to that profession. And they wonder at their credibility problem.

professional conservatism

Don't look now, but there's a really interested bruhaha going on right now in the conservative community about ideological orthodoxy. Some of you may remember a post I linked from David Frum called "Waterloo" about the GOP's historic defeat when the healthcare bill passed. Frum is a big name conservative who served in the Dubya White House but who, on occasion, has been able to have honest conversations about the state of the Republican party.

As you can guess, he was promptly ostracized after his post. Among other things, his request to have his blog added to the conservative blogads network was denied. According to the manager of that network, John Hawkins, his was only one of two blogs that have been denied, the other being the dreadful Little Green Footballs which actually shifted from a Bush-loving conservative blog to a Rachel Maddow-loving liberal one.

Frum's response is very interesting. Here's one bit that resonated with me:

Hawkins seems to be suggesting that we go on TV not as individuals, to express our own ideas as best we can, to offer the most useful information we can discover. No – people should appear as representatives of pre-existing tribes: conservatives, liberals, blacks, whatever, to engage in a ritual of synchronized repetition of pre-existing phrases. You are a conservative? You must say THIS – and never that. You must approve THIS – and never admit to doubts about that.

Hawkins asks: “What’s the point of putting Frum on TV?” Take him seriously though and you have to wonder: What’s the point of putting ANYONE on TV when the job could be so easily automated?

This is similar to the point I've been trying to make for a long time when I talk about "professional conservatives." Hawkins ascribes to the same view of punditry as that of many TV news shows: when you bring on a guy that's a conservative (which you're always supposed to do, of course), he isn't supposed to be an expert with an expert's individual opinion. Rather, he's merely the representative of the conservative movement that they're for some reason entitled to in every single news segment, and thus his job is to present the conservative line. His role is to counter the expert and represent the Right.

Frum, however, has the temerity to suggest that the conservative should also be an expert bringing his expert opinion, rather than a medium for GOP talking points.

Ireland's economy in the toilet because of austerity

Clearly the problem is that they didn't fire enough teachers. Bond investors feed on their tears.

the GOP's Elena Kagen clown show

Just finished watching Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama accuse the late Justice Thurgood Marshall of having "used [his] power to redefine the meaning of our constitution."

You don't have to be Ralph Ellison to read between those lines.

more on war, or moron war

We have a lot to learn.

In the NYT Ross Douthat argues for permanent war in Afghanistan ... I mean, staying until we "succeed," which in the context of his article just means until the Taliban are guaranteed never, ever to rule again, Al Qaeda are eradicated in Pakistan, and the Middle East is no longer volatile. Then we can go home!

Maybe we can hope to be as successful there as we were in its sister-warzone, Iraq, where after 4000 soldiers' lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have "succeeded" in finally establishing the Islamist state with strong ties to Iran that we've always dreamed of.

And look here! Here's Joe Klein in TIME, one of the major liberal voices in the press, referring to the antiwar base of the Democratic party as "vestigial," as in a useless, degenerate extra part inherited from a prior age. It is notable that those who are considered "antiwar" are considered deserving of such open contempt -- by a liberal pundit!

Just as with Iraq, however, we can at least take heart that the people are smarter than their chickenhawk pundits.

the corrosive effects of war

A great piece in the Post today from Andrew Bacevich on the increasing mistrust and alienation our professional army feels toward the rest of the populace. The opening two sentences are much broader, however, and I'm glad to see someone saying it:

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government.

I hope that we get at least one great benefit from the war in Afghanistan, since it looks like we'll get little else: the lesson that even "good" wars are bad. Aside from the trite costs "in blood and treasure," war creates new enemies even when it vanquishes the old ones, damages our reputation abroad, desensitizes our people to violence (which carries its own attendant degradations of character), and breeds resentment of our democratic values and civil rights among both the military and civilian populations. It makes us coarser and more authoritarian as a people.

diving in soccer

(image c/o Shrunken Mind)

Yeah, it bugs me. In World Cup, and in futbol leagues around the world, guys take comically fake dives in order to draw a foul whenever they can, as incredulously gawked at here by the New York Times today. Supposedly it's a major turn-off for many American viewers because it comes across as unsportsmanlike and an affront to masculinity to feign injury to tug at the heart strings of the refs. John Doyle at The Globe brushes off those complaints by making an argument about how the need for moral uprightness in sports is a distinctly Anglo thing, but he opens himself to the same Anglo-centric charge of which he accuses American viewers.

The real problem with American "tut-tutting" over soccer dives and the Times' treatment of it as some strange, foreign ritual is that -- news flash! -- it happens in American sports all the time. Anyone watched a basketball game in the last, I don't know, 30 years? At both the college and NBA levels, your average hoops game is filled with foul-drawing theatrics to rival Ronaldo's finest performances. How about a football game (yes, even the hallowed sport of manliness and sportsmanlike conduct!) where a defensive end got anywhere within 5 yards of the kicker? Christ, at least in FIFA you can get yellow-carded for diving; in football and basketball there is no penalty for make-believe.

In America as in other countries, the culture of sports dictates that teams play to win by any means at their disposal, despite all the lip service paid to sportsmanship. Anything not explicitly against the rules is fair game, and anything that is explicitly against the games is still done if there's a decent chance you won't get caught.

Death to the Death Penalty

A beautiful ad from Amnesty International:

the Big 12 survives

Amazing. Texas is staying, and the Big 12 moves on with a new TV contract.

So now the Big 10 has 12 teams, the Big 12 has 10 teams, and the Pac 10 has 11 teams (for the moment; they're likely to pick off Utah to make an even 12). All that's left to see now is whether the Pac 10 takes Utah and what the look of the Big 10's divisions and championship game will be.

Bummer. I was rooting for mass chaos.

Nebraska officially applying to the Big 10

That loud pop you heard? That's the sound of Nebraska putting the Big 12 out of its misery. Sports Illustrated:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- University of Nebraska officials said Friday that they will apply for membership in the Big Ten Conference and expect to be accepted.

Chancellor Harvey Perlman disclosed the plan during a meeting of the university's Board of Regents, proposing that play in the new conference begin in 2011 after one more year in the Big 12. He said he believed Nebraska is more "aligned" with the Big Ten when it comes to academics, culture and athletics.

He also said the move offered stability "that the Big 12 simply cannot offer." The regents approved a resolution supporting the move to the Big Ten.

Of course, that's all bullshit for the papers. This was about the Big 10 Network, perhaps along with a little frustration at Texas becoming the center of gravity of the conference.

Speaking of Texas, UT already said there is no Big 12 without Nebraska. I guess it will be on Kansas to turn off the lights on the way out.

the empathic civilization

Jeremy Rifkin argues that capacity for empathy is not only wired into our cerebrum, and that this capacity extends to animals as well, and is exhibited by animals, but that our capacity is growing due to technological advances. It is a bold and hopeful challenge to the cynicism that is in vogue today, typified by things like the monkeysphere.

David Mitchell's Soapbox

I had no idea Mitchell was doing these. Here's the latest:

Sources: Nebraska to the Big Ten, Colorado to the Pac 10

(All this c/o the most excellent Dr. Saturday)

So the disintegration begins. The Chicago Tribune:

The Big Red will be joining the Big Ten.

A source with knowledge of the expansion talks has confirmed to the Tribune that Nebraska will be invited to apply for Big Ten membership, a mere formality in the process. An announcement is expected Friday.

The league has not determined, the source said, whether it will remain at 12 schools or expand to 14.

For every action, there is more grist for the San Jose Mercury News' Jon Wilner:

Just got off the phone with a source familiar with the negotiations between the Pac-10 and Big 12 schools, who said:

* Colorado “is likely to formally accept” an invitation to join the Pac-10 on Thursday.

Repeat: Colorado to the Pac-10 on Thursday.

At that moment, it will become the Pac-11.

* Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State are committed to joining the Pac-10 if Nebraska joins the Big Ten … and they might do it even if Nebraska doesn’t join the Big Ten.

On the home front, here's Red Raiders.com:

When Nebraska leaves the Big 12 Conference this week, so too will Texas Tech, Texas and Texas A&M, a high-ranking Tech official confirmed Wednesday.

The official said those three Texas universities have vowed to stick together through any major conference upheaval, which — according to multiple reports from reputable newspapers across the country — Nebraska will trigger this week.

The University of Texas, along with Tech and A&M, should soon be leaving the conference to join the Pacific-10 Conference, according to the source.

Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle says that Texas and A&M may actually go their separate ways, with the Aggies going to the SEC.

UPDATE: edited out statement by Captain Obvious that, if Nebraska gets the 12th Big 10 invite, then Mizzou isn't. It was early in the morning.

Notre Dame and the Big 10 in talks

Amazing stuff happening in college football as we speak:

According to sources, the Big Ten officials and Notre Dame officials have entered into talks that could drastically alter the realignment talk which has dominated headlines in recent days. One insider told FanHouse on Tuesday that the two sides are talking about the nation's biggest independent joining one of the most influential conferences to give the Big Ten its desired 12 members.

The source said the talks "could not necessarily" be described as negotiations but said if Notre Dame can be convinced to give up its long standing independence that things could move rather quickly. Another source familiar with the back-and-forth between Notre Dame and the Big Ten over the years believes all of the Big Ten expansion talk which began with commissioner Jim Delany's announcement last December has always been aimed at getting the Irish to join the conference.

That last comment is interesting. The idea behind it is that the conditions that allowed ND to remain independent rather than joining the Big 10 a decade ago have been deteriorating, so the Big 10 decided last year to try its hand with Notre Dame. Notre Dame said no because the Big 10 still has little to offer; the Irish already have a sweetheart TV deal (though not quite as lucrative) and the Big East for all their non-cash-cow sports.

The Big 10 Network is the conference's ace in the hole. Because it brings in so much money, the Big 10 is more attractive than any other conference to any school out there. So the Big 10 made its move: "either you come with us, or we pull all the pillars out from under the Big East and leave you truly independent."

Checkmate? Let's hope so. With a far less favorable BCS deal than what we once had, the likely impending doom of our NBC TV deal in 2015, consistently shittier scheduling than we had even five years ago (Western Michigan and Tulsa? seriously?), and a commitment to our non-football varsity sports, many of which we just spent millions of dollars building fields and stadiums for, the Big 10 makes a lot of sense.

Let's look at scheduling for a moment. The complaint from Irish alumni about joining the Big 10 is that we'd have to fill our schedule with their shite teams. Here's the ND 2010 schedule:

Sept. 4 PURDUE
Sept. 11 MICHIGAN
Sept. 18 at Michigan State
Sept. 25 STANFORD
Oct. 2 at Boston College
Oct. 9 PITTSBURGH
Oct. 16 WESTERN MICHIGAN
Oct. 23 at Navy (at Meadowlands - East Rutherford, N.J.)
Oct. 30 TULSA
Nov. 6 Open Date
Nov. 13 UTAH
Nov. 20 ARMY (at Yankee Stadium - Bronx, N.Y.)
Nov. 27 at USC

Here's Michigan's schedule:

Sat, Sep 4 Connecticut 3:30 pm
Sat, Sep 11 at Notre Dame 3:30 pm
Sat, Sep 18 Massachusetts 12:00 pm
Sat, Sep 25 Bowling Green TBA
Sat, Oct 2 at Indiana TBA
Sat, Oct 9 Michigan State TBA
Sat, Oct 16 (7) Iowa 3:30 pm
Sat, Oct 30 at (9) Penn State 8:00 pm
Sat, Nov 6 Illinois TBA
Sat, Nov 13 at Purdue TBA
Sat, Nov 20 (16) Wisconsin TBA
Sat, Nov 27 at (5) Ohio State TBA

Which one has more crappy games?

Big 10 teams have eight conference games per season. That means the Irish can keep their annual games with Navy and USC, have two cupcake games (or even better, rotate in real teams that we play now like Pitt, Boston College, and UCLA) and still get their requisite 8 conference games.

As far as conference games go, the Big 10 would likely split into 2 divisions roughly divided by geography. The three Indiana schools, Ohio St. and Penn St. + 1 other team would form the eastern division. A Notre Dame Big 10 schedule, then, could conceivably look like this:

Sept. 4 PURDUE
Sept. 11 MICHIGAN
Sept. 18 at Michigan State
Sept. 25 STANFORD
Oct. 2 at Boston College
Oct. 9 INDIANA
Oct. 16 ILLINOIS
Oct. 23 at Navy (at Meadowlands - East Rutherford, N.J.)
Oct. 30 PENN STATE
Nov. 6 Open Date
Nov. 13 OHIO STATE
Nov. 20 NORTHWESTERN
Nov. 27 at USC

Tough schedule. Me likey. The problem with it is Notre Dame doesn't get any cupcakes while other Big 10 teams still do. The only teams we can take out to make room are BC and Stanford, meaning we've lost the ability to have new quality out-of-conference teams come play. Thus one of the sticking points may be limiting the Big 10 to fewer conference games or fewer cupcakes so we can still bring Boston College to town once in a while.

A Classical Education

Stanley Fish in the NYT on the need for a return to the old model of secondary school curricula. Like most people, I've been struggling with pinpointing the problem with current practices in education, other than "teaching to the test" which I find vague and unhelpful by itself. Unpacking it a bit, there's the problem of students learning strategies of test-taking rather than the content of their classes, which Fish mentions, but the failings of the educational system extend much further than that. Many, many students arrive at college campuses and are woefully unprepared, so unprepared, in fact, that colleges are having to increase the size and number of remedial classes available to make up the slack. There are problems with testing, as many allege, and problems with the curriculum, as Fish argues, as well as problems with overexperimentation, social promotion, imbalanced funding, and other problems.

There is also the problem of the internet. Nicholas Carr talks about the difference between reading books and reading on the internet in his book The Shallows, where he alleges that the easily distracted, multitasking nature of internet reading doesn't train the mind in reflection and in holding attention and ideas for extended periods of time that book reading does. Consequently, students get to college and have great difficulty reading more than 10-20 pages at a time, and are virtually incapable of the abstract thought necessary for philosophy and literary theory. The frequent reading of internet drivel instead of books combined with neglect in teaching grammar also means students get to college and cannot write. They have no sense of spelling or punctuation on the one hand, and cannot sustain an argument through multiple pages on the other. This may be another byproduct of "teaching to the test" if, as some allege, the need to spend more time on test stuff has cut into reading assignments.

I'm not sure if returning to a classical education is a panacea, but I do agree with its proponents that students may not be doing anywhere near enough reading and writing, and that may lie at the core of the problem.

SEC expansion?

There are also interesting questions in this expansion matter for the SEC. Despite their tremendous success in football, huge payouts from the BCS, and lucrative TV deal, they've been blown off thus far by schools in favor of the Big 10 and Pac 10 because of their low academic reputation. After the Texas schools (A&M is the only one that's shown any interest), their most obvious targets for expansion to a 16 team format similar to the coming Big and Pac behemoths are the Florida contingent of the ACC, Miami and Florida State, as well as North Carolina, Duke, UVA, and VA Tech. NC, Duke and UVA are likely not part of SEC for a reason, the same reason, in fact, that likely explains why Texas is uninterested in the SEC's overtures -- North Carolina, Virginia and Texas are the three most academically esteemed public universities in the Old South. Like the Texas 3, the Tar Heels and Blue Devils are likely a package deal as well as UVA and VA Tech.

It's an interesting point of the current state of conferences that none of the schools in Virginia and North Carolina belong to the SEC. In fact, every school in the ACC except Boston College is located in the South. Yet so far there is no discussion that I know of involving a mass flight from the ACC to the SEC. It seems more likely, in fact, that the ACC will become the 4 major conference by absorbing the Big East!

It's an interesting mimicry of political culture, where Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida have gradually become better educated and more alienated from the rest of the South.

"the timeline could be affected"

From Matt Hinton:

Saturday, Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott reportedly presented a handful of options to conference presidents, chancellors and athletic directors for pursuing expansion. Today, Scott said he'd been granted authority by the membership to pursue any and all of them...

To recap, according to both ESPN Los Angeles and Orangebloods.com, the four options Scott laid on the table on Saturday ran as follows, from least to most dramatic:

• Retaining the current 10-team structure, unchanged since Arizona and Arizona State joined the Pac-8 in 1978;
• Adding Colorado and Utah to form a 12-team conference with two six-team divisions and a championship game, a la the SEC, Big 12 and ACC;
• Brokering a merger with six Big 12 schools, as reported by Orangebloods on Thursday, as long as one of those schools is Texas; or
• Brokering a full merger with the entire Big 12, creating an unwieldy, 22-team behemoth that would completely redefine the concept of a "conference" in college sports.
...
While "by the end of the year" is certainly technically correct, and in keeping with the conference's initial 6-to-12-month timeline for considering expansion options, every indication over the last 72 hours suggests the strike is bound to come by the end of the month, if not by the end of the week.

Reacting to this news (and to contact from the Pac 10 assuring them that there will be an invitation incoming), the Big 12 has presented an ultimatum to Nebraska and Missouri to declare their intentions to stay in the Big 12 or listen to the Big 10's siren song by the end of the week.

For the Big 10, who had been planning on settling on a plan in November or so, "the timeline could be affected," as Big 10 commish Jim Delany put it.

If you remember, the Big 10 is not only courting the Tigers and Huskers, but also still has its designs on Texas, though the Texas legislature's insistence that any conference who wants the 'Horns also take A&M and Tech is a problem for the Big 10. Thus, if Delany wants Mizzou and Big Red, he's got to give them assurance of invites this week, and if he wants even a shot at Texas, he needs to send them an invite this week as well, which means clearing the way for Texas Tech through Big 10 presidents that don't think the Red Raiders meet the Big 10's academic standards.

So my thought: where is Notre Dame in all this? Do we have a plan of action in case the Big 12 falls apart this week? If the Pac 10 becomes the Pac 16, the Big 10 will become the Big 16. You can take that to the bank. I'm guessing we don't want to be left out of that?

Doug Gillett had a great post on why ND is independent several months ago, and it's worth looking at again. Of course, alumni cares aside, it's a money thing, specifically our sweetheart BCS deal and our even sweeter NBC deal. Gillett shows, however, that conference schools in the SEC and Big 10 have done comparably well with conference TV contracts, and actually gotten a much better payout from the BCS than ND overall (like 10 to 20 times as much).

Plus, of course, that sweetheart deal with NBC is increasingly unlikely to be renewed in 2015 as ND continues to stagnate in football and NBC struggles with, well, everything. Sure, Brian Kelly may pull off the great Return to Glory, but when your master plan for maintaining current revenue includes "winning a national championship" as a prerequisite, you don't have a good plan.

If Delany gets the Texas schools, ND is screwed. The Big 10 is actually 11 schools, plus the Texas 3 plus Mizzou and Nebraska = Big 16, with no room for the Irish. I don't think this is going to happen, though, because there are too many hurdles for Delany to clear with too many people to get those invites out this week. He's been outmaneuvered by the Pac 10.

There's a pretty good chance, I think, that the Pac 10 will raid the Big 12 South and the Big 10 will make off with Mizzou and Nebraska, leaving 3 schools left for the Big 10 to grow into the Big 16. Supposedly Syracuse, Rutgers, and UConn are being courted to become the last 3.

Again I ask: do we have a plan?

"raghead"

This article from the Charleston, SC NBC affiliate is amazing in so many ways, for the offensiveness of the story itself, the inaccuracy of the guy's comments, for the choice of title, for the apology. South Carolina is a crazy place.

No, wait, this may be better. The money quote:

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

in the NCAA inter-conference cold war, the first shot is fired

And it's fired by ... the Pac 10:

According to "multiple sources close to the situation," the Pac-10 plans to offer conference membership to six Big 12 teams at its conference meeting in San Francisco, forming a 16-team behemoth that spans the entire Western half of the country and encompasses seven of the nation's top-20 television markets.

Those six teams: Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado. Let the denials begin.

The vastly restructured league will reportedly feature two eight-team divisions with an East-West divide: The new newcomers will join Arizona and Arizona State in the "Inland" division, with the original "Pac-8" schools – California, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, USC, UCLA, Washington and Washington State – holding in the "Pacific" division.

That's the entire Big 12 South, switching Baylor with Colorado. Colorado's AD confirmed it last night.

It's funny, I was just thinking about this possibility over the weekend, considering the likelihood that, now that the Big 10 has put massive expansion on the table, one of the other big time conferences (i.e., the SEC or Pac 10) would attempt a pre-emptive strike to keep from being left out in the cold.

So the big question: will they jump? I think they might. Missouri has all but admitted that they would accept an invitation from the Big 10 if offered, and Nebraska has made some noises that they would consider such an offer as well. In the increasingly likely event that the Big 10 plunders the Big 12 North, the southern teams only have two options: the Pac 10 and the SEC. The Big 12 South has cultivated strong rivalries and academic relationships between its schools that now gain national attention, and this deal is probably the only one they'll get that preserves them (the SEC has supposedly expressed interest in Texas and Texas A&M, but not in Tech, Oklahoma, or OK St.).

Plus, conferences are also very much about academic relationships, and the SEC is laughably deficient in that respect. There are really only two high caliber public universities in the Old South, North Carolina and Virginia, and they're both in the ACC! Add Clemson and Duke to the ACC milieu, and you're left with an SEC that counts Vanderbilt as pretty much its only school with serious academic credentials. Meanwhile, the Pac 10 includes Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and Southern Cal.

And finally, there's the money question. The Big 10 Network has been a financial success beyond the most optimistic expectations, bringing millions to every school in the conference. In an expanded Pac 10, a network along the lines of the Big 10 Network would lock up the media markets in the two most populous states in the Union (California and Texas), plus Seattle, Phoenix, and Denver. The SEC just can't compete with that. The Big 12, by the way, has the fewest quality TV markets of all, claiming only the Texas markets plus Denver and St. Louis.

If it's a decent deal, I think they should accept the invitations. It's the smart play given the circumstances, especially for Red Raider fans who have a serious concern that Tech be in a conference that is:

• viable and profitable


• includes Texas and A&M


• will further Tech's goal of becoming a Tier 1 research university

Long live the Pac 16!

Incidentally, this may constitute one of Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick's "seismic" changes that "forces our hand."

Galarraga

Tough break. Personally, I feel worst for the umpire, Jim Joyce, who admitted after the game that he'd blown the call and felt horrible about it. We bitch about blind refs all the time, but of course they do an incredibly difficult job (interpreting split-second events in real time) and make dozens of calls per game. They're going to botch one on occasion. What can you do?

What can you do, indeed. ESPN has technology to show you instantly where a ball was vis-a-vis the strike zone when it crossed a plate and where the runner was when the first baseman caught the ball. Computers don't make mistakes. If the technology is there to take the mistakes out of refereeing, why not use it?

Having humans there to "eyeball" it is what you do when you lack the precision of modern technology. Umpires are for little league at the local park, not for the Majors. If the fans really would prefer to leave the authority with an umpire making their best guess in close calls, that's fine I guess, but you can't complain when they blow one.

On the other hand, Matt Hinton notes that even the Galarraga incident pales in comparison to the bizarro, "Kafkaesque" call that robbed Oklahoma of victory in the Holiday Bowl several years ago, which has to be the worst call ever made in the history of sports:

And that call was deemed to have been confirmed by video evidence!

Of course, this is not to say that refs + instant replay isn't significantly less error-prone than just refs. Instant replay is going to catch some of the refs' mistakes, and thus it's certainly worth implementing. Leagues that continue to refuse to do so are asking for trouble.

CJ's returning in July/August

Important news for Benders.

the gold standard: nugget of idiocy

Apropos of my apparently ongoing diatribe against libertarianism is this wonderful refutation of the gold standard argument by Matt Steinglass posted in, of all places, the comment section of one of his blog posts.

The upshot: value is intangible, and therefore money is intangible. It is no more inherent to gold nuggets than it is to nickel currency or electronic pulses in an online stock exchange. There is no more of an imperative on people to admit the value of a gold nugget than to agree to the value of a government-backed sheet of denim with George Washington's face printed on it. To insist that one must always be equal to another just adds a pointless level of complexity while tying the value of the dollar to the vagaries of the gold market.

This quote from Paul Krugman at the link Steinglass provides is absolutely brilliant:

The legend of King Midas has been generally misunderstood. Most people think the curse that turned everything the old miser touched into gold, leaving him unable to eat or drink, was a lesson in the perils of avarice. But Midas' true sin was his failure to understand monetary economics. What the gods were really telling him is that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange--a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance.

The rest of the Krugman article, while dated, is also very useful.

Intellectual Freedom and Natural Rights

I came across an interesting fault line in liberal politics today that I thought I'd share and compare with y'all.

It happened in my intellectual freedom class. Someone posted a discussion about Haystack. Haystack is a program developed in the United States that allows the user to bypass the state censors in Iran, providing Iranians with unfettered internet access.

Me, I think it's awesome. I think undermining oppressive governments' bans on intellectual freedom should be our national pastime. I believe that all human beings have a natural right to intellectual freedom, and the more a government tries to curtail it, the less legitimate that government becomes.

There was a surprising near-consensus among the people in my class that generally identified as "liberal," though, that this was an arrogant imposition of our cultural values onto others, and that we could be negligently engendering the lives of people who use it.

Is this a generational thing, with my beliefs being a relic of Cold War-era liberalism? Is the classic liberal belief in natural rights in decline? Is it war fatigue? Are you "furt" or "agin't?"