France "1", Eire 1 (O.T.): It figgered this would be the way France would qualify for the World Cup.

One of the more fascinating transitions in public opinion has to be how Barry Goldwater evolved from being a reactionary, anti-Civil Rights political hack who never met a foreign policy problem he didn't want to sic General LeMay on, to a distinguished, honorable sentry of libertarian values. Richard Nixon gets blamed for the Republican dive to the bottom, the "Southern Strategy," but Tricky Dick never was so audacious as to make Alabama and Mississippi his electoral base, and if it had been up to Goldwater, we still would be recognizing Chaing Kai-shek as the true ruler of China, while fighting to the death to hold on to sovereignty over the Panama Canal.

As for his fabled libertarianism, it sets the bar pretty low to associate that term with the former Arizona Senator, at least during the 1950's and 60's. As one of Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy's closest friends and associates in the Senate, he was more than willing to use the power of government to harass political enemies, as he himself tried to do in the late-50's against Walter Ruether (his ideal labor leader of the period was James Hoffa !!) His opposition to Civil Rights legislation, based on what he claimed was its emphasis on encroaching federal power, didn't lead to any denunciations on his part against George Wallace or Ross Barnett. His "libertarianism" was of the Chamber-of-Commerce variety, more a smokescreen to back an agenda that comforts the wealthy than anything that truly strengthens the rights and liberties of man.

So what happened to change the perception of the late Senator? I suspect that when his prodigy, Ronald Reagan, was elected, there was a need to create a counterpoint on the right between the electable pol and the principled ideologue, and Goldwater fit the bill to perfection. Even though Reagan had won by a landslide in 1980, Goldwater barely won reelection that year, so there may have been jealosy on his part as well. The Christian Right, many of whom had been lured into politics by the '64 campaign, also came out strongly against the Supreme Court nomination of fellow-Arizonian Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981, and Goldwater's angry response in defense of his homey brought to the fore issues, like abortion, that hadn't played much of a role in his previous campaigns. By the time he was out of politics in 1986, he had found a niche as a critic of the same conservative activism that he had once led, and the revisionist interpretation of his frightening politics of the '50's and '60's began to take hold.

The best interpretation of the 2009 Election Results:

Is FoxNews a "news organization"? I guess it depends on whether you think professional wrestling is a "sport"...there is a long and gloried tradition in the American free press in the existence of newspapers, journals, and the like that are controlled by or give allegiance to a specific faction or ideology. For most of the 18th and 19th Centuries, there were, in fact, specific newspapers that were directly financed by the White House, as well as by the opposing party; such was the spoils system that juiced the American government for much of this country's history. No one ever claimed that Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson was trying to overthrow the First Amendment by not allowing the other side's publications equal access to the White House.

Even sillier than the faux-outrage over the entirely sensible approach by the Obama Administration towards propoganda media outlets is the notion that it is somehow comparable to Nixon's Enemies List, or even to the actions of totalitarian dictatorships. Nixon tried to use the power of the federal government to coerce the free press, most particularly by using the IRS to go after perceived political opponents, using the FCC to strip reputable news organizations of broadcast spectrum based on how they covered the White House, and bringing anti-trust actions against the three networks. So far, the Obama Administration has merely called the hucksters at FoxNews "liars," which one must admit is a relatively benign form of oppression, and certainly not the sort of thing that will convince anyone with a compelling need to have their thinking done for them by O'Reilly or Beck to avoid the channel.

FoxNews is a news channel in the same sense that The Undertaker is a real "athlete." Pro Wrestling, or something like it, has been popular in this country for almost as long as people have attended or watched athletic competition. Vince McMahon didn't invent the notion of a staged, artificial sporting event that capitalizes on the blood lust of the audience; Roman gladitorial contests could often be just as fake as SummerSlam. Pro wrestling can often be as fascinating to watch as more mainstream athletic contests, and the characters that are promoted can be as interesting as those found in classic drama. But the fact that pro wrestling gets better ratings than tennis or track does not make it a better sport, or even a sport at all, and President Obama should be under no obligation to treat FoxNews as being somehow equivalent to CNN or the network news divisions.

Yeah, I was shocked too....

In this month's always fascinating Central District Bankruptcy News, we find out:

1. Fatburger, IndyMac Bank, and Lenny Dykstra have recently joined the Realm of the Financially Undead;

2. Bankruptcy has gone up 70% in the LA Area over the first eight months of last year; Chapter 13's, the favored avenue of homeowners threatened with foreclosure, is up 56%. Nationally, the number of Chapter 11 filings has nearly doubled over the same totals from last year; and

3. The Courts are closed on Columbus Day. Is that still a holiday?

On this, the last day of my 46th year on the planet, I give you something that still gives me the chills:

In case you missed it, the big news this morning was the arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland on thirty-year old charges of drugging and raping a 13-year old girl, the facts of which he has never contested. Or, as Jerralyn Merritt puts it:

The Swiss have arrested Roman Polanski on an outstanding warrant from California relating to his 1977 prosecution on a sexual assault charge. They were laying in wait, as they knew Polanski, who had always been allowed to freely travel to the country, was en route to accept an international film award. (citation omitted)

France is outraged. So am I. Polanski has lived in France since fleeing the U.S. in 1978 after the Judge, at the behest of a prosecutor not involved in the case, re-negged on a plea deal and was going to sentence Polanski to prison instead of the agreed upon time served in exchange for his guilty plea.

Ms. Merritt has been very important to this blog in the past, enabling me to have access to a much wider audience, but she's wrong about this. I, too, am outraged, but more over the fact that L.A. prosecutors in the late-70's had so little concern about enforcing the laws prohibiting rape and pedophilia that they actually thought they could get away with offering the director a plea deal that didn't involve a substantial amount of time in prison. It's no wonder the victim would rather not have to go through this whole thing again; the first time round she clearly did not have the support of those whose job it was to enforce the law. It turns out that the only person who acted heroically in this matter was the publicity-whore judge (who, being dead, can't defend himself from the recent attacks) who in the end wouldn't give Polanski a slap on the wrist.

Let's look at this another way. If a non-famous person was to drug and rape a woman of your acquaintance, you would be properly angry and outraged. You would rightly anticipate that if the authorities caught the assailant, he would get something more than a suspended sentence, and you would probably be right. Then realize that the victim in this case was younger than Dakota Fanning, and just a few years older than President Obama's daughters are now. Certainly, someone without the notoriety of Polanski should expect the judicial system to come down hard, and like the non-famous people who meet up with Chris Hansen on Dateline NBC, who have committed the less-serious offense of having only attempted to have sex with a minor, would probably see jail time.

It is very unlikely that a non-famous person who drugged and raped a thirteen-year old girl would be lionized in France, defended as a political refugee and allowed to travel throughout Europe for thirty years. Polanski has had many tragedies in his life, from losing parents at Auschwitz to seeing his pregnant wife murdered. But most people who had parents die in concentration camps don't go on to drug and rape thirteen year old girls. There were at least six other victims of the Manson Family, all of whom had people who loved them, but as far as I can tell, no one else has tried to parlay that into avoiding a prison sentence for a serious felony. And considering Polanski's other amorous encounters with teenage girls, such as the fifteen-year old Nastassia Kinski

Banana Republic Redux: It's a pity that this story hasn't received more play. I suspect that the notion of a military coup deposing a democratically-elected leader in Central America is a classic "dog-bites-man" story, so when it happened in Honduras this summer, it may have induced a collective yawn in the media. The junta has also utilized a sophisticated media campaign to justify its actions, which involved the expulsion of the rightful Prime Minister, Manuel Zelaya, in the middle of the night while he was still in his pajamas, and installing a puppet regime, which according to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, has instituted:

"a pattern of disproportionate use of public force" by the military and police, which has resulted in the deaths of at least four people, dozens of wounded, and thousands of arbitrary detentions. It also found that the de facto government has abused its emergency powers, using the military to limit freedom of assembly and expression. The commission confirmed that women had suffered sexual violence, and that threats, detentions, and beatings of journalists had created an atmosphere of intimidation among critical media outlets. While the commission reported some serious acts of violence and vandalism by protesters, it noted that the majority of demonstrations were peaceful.

As with most rightist coups in Central America, deaths and "disappearances" of political dissidents are becoming endemic in the new Honduras.

The rationale its shills have used to justify the coup, that President Zelaya "broke the law" by proposing to amend the Constitution to allow future Presidents the ability to run for reelection, doesn't survive the giggle test. The real reason he was overthrown was that he was becoming closely associated with that scourge of right wing oligarchs throughout the region, Hugo Chavez, although there is no evidence he was preparing to lead his country into Chavez' form of benign despotry. The silence of the Obama Administration is shortsighted, since it only serves to strengthen the cause of people like Chavez, who can point to the deposal of any popular leader by military thugs as typical Yankee behaviour towards anyone who challenges the interests of American businesses in Central America.

Something that works well any day, but particularly on this date:

One of the most commented aspects of the weekend's memorials to the late Senator Edward Kennedy was a letter he wrote to Pope Benedict shortly before he died. In the letter, he described what had been his life's work, as well as his personal failings:

I was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago and although I continue treatment, the disease is taking its toll on me. I am 77 years old and preparing for the next passage of life. I have been blessed to be part of a wonderful family and both of my parents, particularly my mother, kept our Catholic faith at the center of our lives. That gift of faith has sustained and nurtured and provides solace to me in the darkest hours. I know that I have been an imperfect human being, but with the help of my faith I have tried to right my path. I want you to know Your Holiness that in my nearly 50 years of elective office I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war.

Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States senator. I also want you to know that even though I am ill, I am committed to do everything I can to achieve access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life. I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and I will continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone. I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings of my faith. I continue to pray for God's blessings on you and on our church and would be most thankful for your prayers for me.

In fact, pundits and pols who view the Roman Catholic faith as little more than a monolithic entity, obsessed with issues like abortion and gay marriage, as well as the best way to thwart investigations into pastoral pedophilia, miss the theological core of the Church, which has always been its message that faith can be measured only through action.

As an agnostic, I don't attend mass regularly anymore; in fact, other than the occasional marriage, baptism, or funeral, I almost never set foot in a church. But having been raised in the Church, the notion that you can serve God only by loving your fellow man is one that still motivates me, and influences how I live and what I believe. Perhaps the best encapsulation of the essential Christian belief comes from this oft-quoted passage, from the Book of Matthew, Chapter 25:

But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink? And when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? And when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.

Clearly, the last sentence, in bold, describes the life and legacy of Senator Kennedy to a tee.

And what of those who believe that the best thing to do for the poor is nothing? To the free market libertarians of the day, and those who could have serenely let the Mary Jo Kopechnes of the world die of cancer because they happen to be uninsured, Matthew continues:

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry, and ye did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

Then shall they also answer, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me. And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life.

Now, I'm not a believe in Hell, but a prolonged banishment for such folks into the political wilderness would suit me just fine.

EMK (1932-2009): Two takes on the passing of the late Lion of the Senate. From Marc Cooper:

During various Democratic primary campaigns over the years, in California, Nevada, New Hampshire and many, many times in Iowa have been to rallies that featured Ted Kennedy. And unless you've been to one of these shindigs, it's hard to imagine just how stunningly popular Kennedy remained among the Democratic base. I don't care where the venue was, or who the candidate was he was backing, Teddy was the Main Event. Not an overstatement to say, right up through the Obama campaign, the "Liberal Lion" was a true political rock star. The first few times I saw the electric response he evoked among the party faithful, I was sort of taken back. But the magic was real. Kennedy, in his elder years and chubbier than ever, would amble up to the stage and unfailingly, unleash a red meat tirade, an old-fashioned barn burner than would set the crowd ablaze as he leaned on the podium, sweated like no tomorrow and turned beet red as he continued to thunder. Anyone who underestimates the mystique of the Kennedy name fails to understand the soul of your average Democrat.

And from Matt Welch:

Having spent most of my adult life around liberals, not conservatives, and on the West Coast, not the East, I always had a difficult time recognizing the Ted Kennedy of Republican Convention speechcraft. (And, in fact, it's difficult to reconcile the way Republicans talked about Kennedy at their gatherings with the way they talked about him on the Senate floor, or when joining with him to pass bipartisan legislation.) Not that he wasn't a bloated caricature, and one with blood on his hands, but rather that he just didn't mean all that much to my liberal friends. (My liberal friends' dads, though are another story.) He was arguably more an icon of the opposing team than the political tendency he represented, more interesting to nostalgia-addicted Baby Boomers than to the majority of people who now participate in politics.

Well, Matt, one thing you couldn't accuse Ted Kennedy of being was a libertarian (or a Libertarian, for that matter), so it's perhaps no surprise that your "liberal" West Coast friends couldn't stand the guy. He believed that the world could be made a better place, and that no human suffering should be tolerated. He is already missed.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, on how the change we can believe in won't ever happen:

There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.

Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.

The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.

But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.

So why won’t these zombie ideas die?

Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.

But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.

How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.

Krugman may be overly pessimistic, particularly about health care. There are two events likely to happen in the fall that will almost certainly change the dynamic of the whole debate: one, which is talked about frequently, is the explosion of cases of swine flu, and the possibility that a deadly strain will develop that will necessitate governmental intervention; the other, which is discussed, if at all, sotto voce, is the likely death of Senator Edward Kennedy in the next few weeks from brain cancer, which will create a win-one-for-the-Gipper situation within the Party that will make it almost suicidal for even the most mossbacked of Blue Cross/Blue Dog Senate Democrat to join a Republican filibuster on the issue.

It's also useful to point out that Krugman was a vitriolic critic of then-candidate Obama when he sought the nomination against Hillary Clinton. One of the reasons that "Reaganism" isn't "dead", of course, is that it represents an historical, archetypal belief embedded in the American political system: the notion that government can be a potential menace, and that "big government" is to be feared. It is a notion that rests comfortably with an equally engrained view in American political culture, that the people, acting together, can accomplish anything. It's why people can go to health care rallies and demand that goverment not touch their Medicare, or why the public option does spectacularly well in polling, while "government intervention" in health care doesn't, even though both describe identical policies.

Hopefully this will get you into a late-summer mood:

Isn't the story here not that by a 34-21% margin, the public is more, rather than less, sympathetic to the cause of the "Town Hell" protestors, but that 45% of the public is unmoved? To put it another way, according to Gallup, 66% of the public, or nearly 2 out of 3 people, aren't sympathetic at all to the opinions or tactics of the anti-reform brigades.


Such an interpretation is consistent with other polling numbers, which show a majority of Americans support the health care proposals backed by the President and Democrats. The only thing that's changed has been the numbers who believe Obama has handled the issue well, which really goes without saying; the only interpretation that seems to be consistent with the inept strategy the White House has pursued on this issue is that the President has little passion or interest in the notion that health care should be available and affordable for everyone, and is therefore disengaged. But the public, at least so far, hasn't held that against its backers in Congress.


There is an historical precedent for the seeming disconnect between the public attitudes towards the President's handling of the issue, their general lack of sympathy to the Town Hall Demonstrators, and their widespread support for the actual reforms being debated in Congress. In Rick Perlstein's masterful account of the late-60's, Nixonland, the book's protagonist masterfully (for a time) rode the waves of a similar cultural disconnect over the Vietnam War. Opinion polls consistently showed a majority believing that US involvement in Southeast Asia was a mistake, and that it would better for the US to withdraw sooner rather than later. Nixon shared those sentiments, and admitted to confidants back in the mid-60's that the US could not win in Vietnam.

Those same polls also showed that the most unpopular group in America was the long-haired hippies demonstrating against the war. And in spite of a policy which encompassed a dramatic increase in bombing, particularly civilian, non-military targets in North Vietnam, as well as an escallation of the war into the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, Nixon overwhelmingly won a second term, and consistently received public backing for his policies in Southeast Asia. He did it by shifting the terms of the debate, from whether we should be in Vietnam, to the best way of ending the conflict. And his perfect foil in that debate was the anti-war demonstrators.

Similarly, in the health care reform debate, the public may not think Obama has done an effective job on the issue, but it is also clear that it supports the specific policies he's backing. As in the late-60's, the loud, boorish demonstrators offer an effective foil to the President, in counterpoint to the vast majority in the Gallup Poll, who can be described thusly as

...another voice, it is a quiet voice in the tumult of the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non shouters, the non demonstrators. They're not racists or sick; they're not guilty of the crime that plagues the land; they are black, they are white; they're native born and foreign born; they're young and they're old.

They work in American factories, they run American businesses. They serve in government; they provide most of the soldiers who die to keep it free. They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American dream. They give steel to the backbone of America.

They're good people. They're decent people; they work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care.

A Silent Majority, if you will....

Cluelessness, thy name is Plaschke: Condensing moral complexity into its basic historically revisionsist nugget, the scribe writes:

Is the taint that (Manny)Ramirez and David Ortiz just brought to two of the most celebrated World Series titles in recent history going to spread to these Dodgers?

With Thursday's news that both men flunked steroid tests in 2003, the 2004 and 2007 World Series championships won by the Boston Red Sox must be considered fraudulent.

That's right, "fraudulent", as in "done or obtained with deceit or trickery", having "knowingly misrepresented a material fact" in the process, if I might use the dictionary definitions of the word. To think, Manny and Ramirez juicing the year before cheated Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield out of the World Series rings that rightfully should have been theirs the year after. As Atrios often says about stupidity, "IT BURNS !! IT BURNS !!"

The reaction in Mannywood this summer about the revelations that Mr. Ramirez had been on the Juice for awhile, just like the reactions in Boston today over Mr. Ortiz, and in New York over the most formidable opponent of the 2004 and 2007 Bosox, A-Rod, has been telling: the average fan made his peace some time ago with the notion that athletes will cut corners to gain a competitive edge, and in fact considers it a feature, not a bug, when it relates to the hometown star. Baseball fans are as likely going to be disappointed that a local hero was enhanced as college football fans are "shocked" that the kids are making money on the side. We just have different priorities than the people who cover sports for a living.

I have only the vaguest idea what this means, but it sounds funny:

Have term limits actually been useful? I feel like that's a horse that left the barn in the mid-1990s, only to, like Wildfire, ride eternally into the winds of our mind.
--Matt Welch, 7/20/09.

Return from the Beltway, young Matt....

I probably mentioned at some point that my favorite book from the last ten years was Moneyball, Michael Lewis' examination of how the Oakland A's were able to compete at the highest level of baseball for awhile in spite of having the lowest payroll and one of the least favorable market situations of any team in professional sports. Evidently, someone in Hollywood has seen blockbuster potential in the philosophy of Billy Beane, according to the LA Times:

Aaron Sorkin is best known in Hollywood as a screenwriter and TV producer supreme, having put his high-style signature on everything from “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” to “Charlie Wilson’s War.” But now, as Variety first reported Thursday, Sorkin has a new role—he’s the closer on “Moneyball,” the much-ballyhooed baseball movie at Sony Pictures that the studio shut down just days before shooting was scheduled to begin late last month.

The movie, which had Brad Pitt slated to star as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who was the focus of Michael Lewis’ bestselling “Moneyball” book, had its plug pulled after director Steven Soderbergh turned in a last-minute script revision that the studio felt took the film in a radically different, not to mention wildly uncommercial, new direction. But the news that Sorkin has appeared in the bullpen—get used to it, we’re going to employ a lot of baseball lingo here—sends a clear message that Sony is determined to keep the movie alive.

(snip)

So why would Sony hire Sorkin when the studio already had a perfectly good shooting script, penned by the Oscar-winning writer Steve Zaillian? The most likely reason: The studio wanted to send a message to Brad Pitt that it was still absolutely, incontestably behind the picture. If Pitt were to walk away from the project, it could deal a fatal blow to the picture, which is already considered something of a commercial risk, since baseball movies have zero appeal outside of the U.S., meaning that the movie would have to make its investment back solely on the strength of its domestic box-office performance. Pitt is considered indispensable, since the studio has always known it had an extremely short list of A-list stars who could be both believable and bankable as the real-life Beane, a charismatic, fortysomething ballplayer turned crafty but cerebral baseball theoretician. When it comes to potential stars, the drop-off after Pitt is steep.

No offense meant towards Mr. Sorkin or Mr. Jolie, but has anyone at Sony actually read Moneyball? I thought the whole point of Moneyball was that "stars" like Brad Pitt are never indispensable, that there was a plenty of talent out there that hadn't been recognized, that was undervalued, and that a team like the A's could exploit that without spending themselves into the poorhouse. Why spend $10 million on Brad Pitt when you can get Jon Hamm for a lot less?

But, you say, having an "A-List" star on the marquee guarantees success at the box office. Having Brad Pitt involved in your project automatically means the film will be a hit (putting aside Burn After Reading, Troy, and Meet Joe Black, of course), since the film-going audience will necessarily want to see anything he's in, right?

Well, no, actually, it doesn't, particularly for a project like this. As the Times notes, baseball films have little audience outside the United States, so keeping costs down takes on paramount importance. Billy Beane's innovative approach to baseball is equally applicable to the entertainment industry: fans pay money to see winners, not pricey stars. In a world where The Hangover can earn over $200 million starring Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper and Mike Tyson, and where Slumdog Millionaire can make a fortune and win Oscars with a cast unknown outside of Mumbay, the business model Sony is using is as outdated as the "old-school" philosophy baseball GM's used when they picked talent based on batting average and base stealing.

PhoeNixWatch: Another year, another splendid performance...from the Grey Lady herself:

The Almeida Theatre in North London, meanwhile, is boasting the finest new play seen at that address since its artistic director, Michael Attenborough, took over the running of the Islington playhouse in 2003. Consumed with climate change, love and loss, and the ways in which coincidence can make over our lives, “When the Rain Stops Falling” also inadvertently acts as a structural primer for the return to the London stage this week of “Arcadia.”To a degree exceeding Mr. Stoppard’s 1993 masterwork, the Australian writer Andrew Bovell’s comparably mournful play shuttles swiftly between time periods and continents to offer up a wounding theatrical mosaic that tells of two families — one in England, the other in Australia — across four generations and 80 years, from 1959 to 2039. (The production runs through July 4.)

(snip)

Among a finely calibrated ensemble, acting honors surely go to Phoebe Nicholls as the older version of the solitary Elizabeth, who must bid farewell first to a husband, then a son. “If you touch me, I will break,” she remarks calmly to the Australia-bound Gabriel, nursing a glass of her preferred red wine. As Ms. Nicholls speaks the line, you fully believe in a fragility that is one step away from finally going snap.

Which reminds me of a point made this week by Matt Welch over at the Reason blog, concerning the passing this week of the King of Pop. Riffing off of an old Bill James piece on the age of Phil Niekro, Welch notes:

Even more so than his fellow '58ers Madonna and Prince, Michael Jackson had a long and bizarre relationship with age. He was old enough to be in the public eye for more than four decades, young enough to live in a children's zoo. He recorded his first number-one single just two months after man first walked on the moon, yet sang like a castrato and surrounded himself with tweens. Young enough to have never developed a beer gut, old enough to have a decline phase lasting a full quarter-century. So just how old was Michael Jackson?

Michael Jackson was older than Appalachian wanderluster Mark Sanford, older than beloved Slate columnist Eliot Spitzer, and older than the 44th president of the United States. He was older than silver-haired Congressman Mike Pence, silver-bearded Nespresso pitchman George Clooney, and silver-tongued trial lawyer Erin Brockovich. Remember John Kennedy, Jr., the George magazine publisher who died in a plane crash 10 years ago? He was younger than Michael Jackson. As are Magic Johnson, Tai Babilonia, and Stan Van Gundy.

Perhaps Welch's child-like obsession with whether state government spending is exceeding the inflation rate caused him to miss other examples (as well as falsely id'ing Ms. Brockovich as a "trial lawyer"). Did you know Michael Jackson was older than Nadia Comenici? Diego Maradona? John Elway? Isiah Thomas? Gary Lineker? Wayne Gretsky? Marcus Allen? And don't get me started on Dan Marino or John McEnroe....

Joan Jett and Shawn Cassidy are of more recent vintage than the Moonwalking One. So is Welch's favorite journalist, award-winning columnist Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times. Had Kurt Cobain or Princess Diana lived to see the sunset last night, they still would have been younger than Jacko. Michael Jackson was older than Mr. Blonde, Michael Madsen, as well as Nuke LaLoosh himself, Tim Robbins.

David Remnick, the Editor in Chief of the New Yorker, is younger than Michael Jackson. So are Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, and Shepherd Smith. Same with the hosts of Meet the Press and This Week. So is Sarah Palin, and likely next-PM David Cameron.

However, Phoebe Nicholls is, was, and forever shall be, older than Michael Jackson.

Arguably, the most poorly-time LA Times analytical piece this year. I guess a lot can change in three days....