Chile 1, Honduras 0: Another freezing day saw Chile end a winless WC streak going back 48 years. The Chileans should have had many more goals against a Honduran team that was just happy to be there, no doubt almost as relieved as the North Koreans yesterday to be out of their national hellhole. Hopefully, soccer fans will be spared the efforts of the Honduran military to reverse the results.

During every World Cup there is always an attempt by a certain element within America to disparage the sport that we Yanks call "soccer," brilliantly parodied here by Stephen Colbert. Such eminents as Frank Deford, Jim Rome, and Glenn Beck have taken up the cudgel, usually with the aim of proving American Supremacy from the fact that soccer does not have the mass popularity here that it has in most of the world. Seat-of-the-pants sociology and outright xenophobia intermingle in their arguments, which have become less attached to reality over the years. It's one thing to make the argument in 1990, when there was no domestic league in America and the World Cup was broadcast on TNT, a cable station offered by few outlets at the time, and quite another to make it today.

Over at the New Republic, Jon Chait has attempted to resurrect this tradition. This post includes some of the hoarier chestnuts of this tradition:

Again, I don't really care if soccer becomes a major sport in the U.S. But it is not a major sport in the U.S., nor is it remotely close to becoming one. Bergmann cites two data points to suggest that soccer is a runaway cultural juggernaut. The first is that the World Cup has drawn higher television ratings. This is true. But keep in mind that the World Cup is a quadrennial event that creates massive international hype. Americans love international competition. When the Olympics comes on, we'll watch sports we'd otherwise never dream of following for the chance to cheer our country on against foreigners. U-S-A! U-S-A! Yet the U.S.-England match still drew less than any NBA Finals game. (Check SportsMediaWatch.) It drew less than NFL pregame shows, let alone actual NFL football. This is not a good showing.

The second data point is that millions of American kids play soccer. This is true. It has been true since the 1970s, which is when the claims that soccer is the sport of the future began. Soccer is a great sport for kids -- young kids don't have the hand-eye coordination to play baseball, basketball or football, but they have enough foot-eye coordination to play soccer. When I was a kid, my friends and I all played in soccer leagues for years. Then we got older and starting playing other sports. Even the kids who continued playing soccer mostly became fans of other sports. I realize that soccer can be played by skilled athletes at a high level. In this country, it is primarily a children's game.

The argument that soccer is not a "major sport" in the United States may or may not be true; since the term "major sport" isn't defined by Chait, it's hard to tell what he means. It clearly is not as popular a TV or spectator sport as American football, and it clearly is a much bigger sport, both in terms of spectator attention and fan interest, than tennis. But no screeds were ever generated ridiculing that sport as "minor," nor have there been any attempts to show that American disinterest in the recently-concluded French Open is evidence of American Superiority over the swarthy masses overseas.

But more ridiculous is Chait's request to "check" the SportsMediaWatch blog to compare the ratings for soccer and other "major" sports, focusing specifically on the US-England game and the NBA Finals. Ridiculous, I say, because if you do so, you find that this supposedly trivial, minor pimple on the American sports scene attracted higher, not lower, ratings than the first four games of the NBA Finals. And it's not just any NBA Finals, sir: try Lakers and Celtics, the two most hated-loved teams in the country, which, unlike the World Cup, is playing on prime time TV, when the audience isn't at the office or the beach.

Chait's glaring miscue on the rating's issue probably stemmed from his ignoring of the high ratings that the game Saturday also received on Univision, the Spanish-language station, which may arise from a much more insidious problem: the view that Latinos (as well as other soccer-loving ethnic groups) are somehow less equal than the white fans. Chait himself gives the game away, here:

The cultural backlash against soccer may get nutty at times, but soccer triumphalists bring it with with displays of smugness like this, from The Nation's Dave Zirin:

Among adults, the sport is also growing because people from Latin America, Africa and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautiful game to an increasingly multicultural United States. As sports journalist Simon Kuper wrote very adroitly in his book Soccer Against the Enemy, “When we say Americans don’t play soccer we are thinking of the big white people who live in the suburbs. Tens of millions of Hispanic Americans [and other nationalities] do play, and watch and read about soccer.” In other words, Beck rejects soccer because his idealized “real America”—in all its monochromatic glory—rejects it as well.

This sentiment actually mirrors the right-wing's efforts to divide the country into "real America" and the unrepresentative coastal elites. People who don't like soccer don't really count because they're white, fat and live in the suburbs. It also fails on its own terms, because of course African-Americans are also loyal to football and basketball. But attacking black people for being too fat and unsophisticated to appreciate soccer doesn't have the same P.C. zing, does it?

One would hope that Chait is not as disingenous when writing about important subjects, like politics and foreign policy, since Zirin doesn't come close to saying that. Any fair reading of what Zirin does say is that those who pretend that soccer has little if any popularity in the U.S. are deliberately ignoring the demographic changes in America that have made such assumptions about the sport false. It is hardly an "ugly" sentiment, as the title of Chait's post implies, to observe that America is not as white a country as it used to be, or that assuming that America has "rejected" soccer because white conservatives from the heartland don't like it has a strong element of racial myopia to it.

In fact, the more important demographic shift involved may not be racial or ethnic, but generational; the reason why soccer-bashing may seem more passe nowadays it that its practitioners are slowly dying out. The fanbase for the sport isn't middle-aged pundits like Chait (or Glenn Beck and Jim Rome, for that matter), but people between the ages of 21 and 35, the generation that went to the polls in 2008 and elected Barack Obama President. For them, soccer isn't simply a kids sport; it's a normal part of their lives, like basketball and football (baseball, the former National Pastime, is a distant fourth). Complaints about low-scoring games and being able to only use one's feet are about as relevant to them as arguments about busing and the gold standard. At a time when ratings for most sporting events are going down from year to year, the World Cup's ratings consistently rise, which is, itself, the clinching argument.

Brazil 2, North Korea 1: In one of the coldest games in World Cup history, tournament favorites Brazil shook off a scoreless first half to barely defeat the crazier half of the Axis of Evil. With a wind-chill factor below freezing in Johannesburg (it's wintertime down there), defender Maicon hit a shot from an impossible angle to put his team ahead shortly before the hour:



After a second Brazilian goal fifteen minutes later, North Korean left back Ji Yun-Nam shocked the crowd by putting his team on the scoreboard with three minutes left, an undeserved result considering how Brazil controlled the ball for an astonishing three-quarters of the game. A fun game to watch, if not a great game.

Annie Liebowitz, the Thomas Kinkade of photography, hops on the World Cup bandwagon, complete with the same cheesy music and half-clad subjects you get in an SI swimsuit video.

Ivory Coast 0, Portugal 0: Two evenly-matched teams played conservatively and got a result which satisfied both teams, but no one else. Cristiano Ronaldo seems to have an ungodly gift at being able to almost-but-not-quite score whenever he plays for his national side, and his booming shot off the goalpost in the first minutes of the game was the closest either team came to scoring. The Ivory Coast had the better team, FWIW, and the return of Didier Drogba in the second half (he had to wear a cast for his broken arm) may be a sign of good things to come. Finally, an African soccer team that doesn't underachieve in the World Cup !!

Lastly, when the non-English speaking peoples of the world start referring to my native land as the "United States of America", and not "L'Etats Unis" or "Estados Unidos" or whatever, I will start to refer to this team as "Cote d'Ivoire."

New Zealand 1, Slovakia 1: An underconfident Slovakian team couldn't blow out the least-respected team in the World Cup, and paid for it at the end. Robert Vittek scored five minutes into the second half for the country known mainly for its ice hockey team, making its first appearance in the tourney since the Velvet Divorce. The All Whites rarely threatened*, and seemed content to walk off the field with a closer-than-expected defeat, until Winston Reid headed in a cross in the final minute of injury time. Thanks to the two ties in Group F, both teams will have a mathematical chance to advance no matter what happens in their next game, when I will be on a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska and not have to care what happens.

*Or so I assume. Starting at 4:30 a.m. in Los Angeles, this was a classic TiVo 3x Special, and, much like the whole Palestine v. Israel dispute, this was a fight in which I had no dog. Since the more important game was on right after, I followed my policy of zipping through the action, stopping only to see what the goal celebrations honored, and watching only the final minute+ at normal speed. I think I can safely say that I didn't miss a thing.

Paraguay 1, Italy 1: An inauspicious start for the defending champs. Falling behind on a shock goal late in the first half, the Azzurri overcame a driving rain and sluggish defending to tie on yet another goalkeeping blunder, this time by Justo Villar, whose feeble efforts to corral a corner kick in the 63rd minute seemed more reminiscent of Lamar Odom trying to snag an offensive rebound in the NBA Finals. Since Italy managed to win World Cups in spite of drawing with such powers as Peru and Cameroon (1982), and the USA (2006), and even reached the Finals in years in which it suffered ties against Mexico (1994) and Israel (1970), all is not lost yet.

Paraguay's goal today came at the head of one Antolin Alcaraz, a journeyman who has spent most of his career trolling from team to team, but who has now signed a contract to play with Wigan Athletic in the Premier League. For the handful of Americans who don't religiously follow English soccer, Wigan is essentially soccer's version of the Oakland A's, a squad representing a relatively small market without sufficient financial resources to compete with the Big Boys (in this case, The Four, ie., United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool), and which has the lowest attendance in the league, but which has nevertheless managed to survive by plying its own form of Moneyball.

The undervalued talent that Wigan typically pursues is exemplified in players like Alcaraz; while Wigan's competitors pursue Brazilian, Dutch and Italian galacticos, Wigan prefers unknown players from Ecuador, Honduras, Ghana, and Egypt. And like their American counterpart, Wigan is quite good at talent-spotting, so much so that a good deal of their profit comes out of the re-sale of their more astute acquisitions, like Man U star Antonio Valencia. Of course, like the A's, Wigan isn't going to win any titles anytime soon, but their implausible stay in the world's top league for the past five seasons is reason to believe that some management principles are universal.

Japan 1, Cameroon 0: First upset of the WC. Late first-half goal by Japanese star Keisuke Honda, who may or may not be related to a friend of mine from Berkeley, and his team withstood heavy Indomitable Lion pressure in the second half to pick up their first "real" victory in their tiny nation's history (home wins don't count).

Efforts to ban the vuvuzela, the horn that has become ubiquitous with the 2010 World Cup, have proven to be of no avail. With a pleasing sound reminiscent of a massive swarm of bees that has just been sprayed with DDT, the vuvuzela is "ingrained in the history of South Africa," I suppose much like half-empty stadia, so FIFA will not deprive visiting fans, players and the billions watching on TV the pleasure of its sweet intoxicating sound. Yippee !!!

DutchLand 2, Great Danes 0: That is, Holland over Denmark. The Danes played defensively, seeking to shut down their much more talented opponents, struck first, less than a minute into the second half; unfortunately, it was into their own net, and things went downhill from there. First own goal of the Tournament.

Germany 4, Australia 0: Don't know if this means anything, but of the four goalscorers for Germany, three were born and raised in other countries. European teams are looking more and more like the US national soccer team used to look: foreign mercenaries who wear the national colors largely because it's where they started playing club soccer.

As far as the game is concerned, the Germans scored early, and coasted, while the Socceroos showed little sign it's going anywhere this time around, especially after its best player, Tim Cahill, got red-carded, which will keep him out of the remaining first round games. Germany often plays its best game in the opener, as it did in 1958, 1966, 1990, and 2002, and any signs that it has faded were not apparent today.

Ghana 1, Serbia 0: A continent celebrates. Unlike Nigeria yesterday or Algeria today, the Ghanians actually seem like they knew something about basic tactics, and had something up their sleeve other than relying on a hot goalie. Asamoah Gyan was the star of the Black Stars, nailing a penalty kick with ten minutes to go, and could have had a hat trick were it not for the Goalie's Best Friend on two other occasions. The winning goal was set up another boneheaded hand ball by the Serbians, who are sporting different national colors this time but playing their same traditional disappointing soccer. The first important result of the World Cup.

Slovenia 1, Algeria 0: In a result that is much more beneficial to the U.S. of A. than it is to England, the least-populous nation in the tournament stole a win against a team of French mercenaries disguised as the Arab World's only representatives. With a win or tie on Friday, the Americans will almost certainly clinch advancement should they beat the Algerians the following week, who will probably be mathematically eliminated by then. Highlights today include another classic screw-up by a goalie on the Slovene's only goal, and perhaps the dumbest hand-ball / red card in Cup history. A TiVo classic.

UPDATE: In light of the gathering consensus that Slovenia's win was actually a bad think for US chances, and/or the notion that America faces a must-win situation Friday, let me explain. Today's win puts Slovenia two points ahead of both England and the US, with Algeria holding up the rear. If the US ties Slovenia Friday, it would remain two points ahead of the US, and at the worst, tied with England, which plays Algeria later the same day.

However, in that scenario, the prognosis definitely favors the US. Our final game is against Algeria, which will likely have been eliminated by that point. A win over Algeria will give the US five points overall, thus requiring either Slovenia (or England) to win their last game against each other to stay ahead. Were that to happen, the US would finish ahead of the loser of that game, and would advance.

But even if England and Slovenia were to draw, creating a three-way tie for first, the US would still advance on the tie-breaker were they to defeat Algeria by more than one goal (on goal differential) or if they were to outscore Slovenia in winning by a goal (on goals scored). So the combination of a draw with Slovenia and a win over Algeria will, more likely that not, get the US into the next round. Since Algeria is likely going to be playing only for pride at that point, with the coach clearing his bench to give his back-ups some World Cup experience, the US' chances would remain good.

On the other hand, if Slovenia and Algeria had finished tied today, even at 0-0, Algeria would still be playing for advancement next week against the US, no matter how badly it does with England on Friday. With something to play for, they would give the US a much tougher battle; a draw, in fact, would be much more likely than it would be if they were simply playing out the string. Slovenia, on the other hand, would still be even with the US going into its final game (assuming that they tie the US), and would still have a good chance of advancing should it win or tie England.

So the result today does not mean the US needs to beat Slovenia Friday, or significantly reduce their chances of advancing. Got that?

U.S.A. 1, B.P. 1: I assume most of the readership here has seen this game, so there's no need to go into the details of yesterday's American win. When the back-up English goalie is known as David "Calamity" James, one can't really be surprised that their starter would play a largely negative role in games such as this. A dramatic reenactment of the Clint Dempsey goal is shown here:



For some classic schadenfreude, a better video may be this, involving an English blowhard predicting an English "ass-kicking" to avenge, believe it or not, the horrible way President Obama has treated the poor benighted souls at British Petroleum (starting at about two minutes in):

Argentina 1, Nigeria 0: Against a talented but often clueless African representative, Argentina scored early on an unmarked header off a corner kick, then lucked into some of the lamest shooting in Cup history by Nigeria before cruising to victory. For all the talk about this being an "African World Cup", one can really have no conclusion other than that the continent is reverting back to the tradition of the 1974 Zaire squad, which was famous for being unfamiliar with the concept of setting up a defensive wall on free kicks and was outscored, 0-14 in three games.

South Korea 2, Greece 0: Koreans impressive, Greeks lame as always, in the first TiVo match of the tourney. Soccer is a sport uniquely suited for digital video recording, since it has long spells where nothing of consequence happens, so an entire game can be digested by the casual fan in fifteen minutes or less, and this game, which started at 4:30 a.m. on the Pacific Coast, was no exception.

The ROK scored in the fourth minute, and were never threatened. The Greeks have now played 360 minutes of World Cup action since 1994 without scoring a goal; the record is 517 minutes, by the hapless Bolivians over a period of three World Cups spanning sixty-four years.

France 0, Uruguay 0: Both the expected (a Uruguayan player was ejected for a thuggish play) and unexpected (Thierry Henry didn't cheat, which may explain why the game ended scoreless). All four teams in Group A tied today, which means all four will be mathematically alive on going into the third game of the round robin, no matter what happens in the second game. Yipppeeee !!

Mexico 1, South Africa 1: And so it begins. The Bafana Bafana narrowly avoid being the first host country to lose its World Cup opener, holding Our Neighbors to the South to a draw, causing great joy in South Africa and great consternation among teabaggers in Arizona. In fact, it was the Tricolores who needed to rally late, tying the game on a goal by Rafael Marquez in the final twelve minutes to earn the point.

Even more annoying than the non-stop blare of the air horns, which threaten to drive down interest in the sport to near-American levels in the rest of the world, is this year's set of announcers on ESPN. It has become a tradition among soccer snobs on the East Coast to make sport of whichever converted baseball announcer is doing the games for that network, that it became easy to forget that England is not just the birthplace of soccer, but also crappy sports announcing as well.

This year, Americans are treated to someone named Martin Tyler, a Chris Schenkel-esque bore who may have done more to reinforce the stereotype for Americans of soccer being a deadly-dull sport than anyone this side of Juventus. It took only forty minutes of listening to this clown and his announcing partner for me to switch over to Univision, where I can at least have the pleasure of listening to people who act like they enjoy what they're doing, even if I can't understand a word of Spanish. The low point for ESPN occurred when Mr. Tyler and his sidekick attacked a linesman for disallowing a goal, apparently not realizing that the rule in the sport requires that there be two defenders (one of whom may be the goalie) between the recipient of the ball and the goal line. Bring back Dave O'Brien !!!

It should be a fun four weeks....

With the World Cup starting in four days, it's time for what has become a quadrennial tradition at Smythe's World: the breakdown of the entrants by what team they would be in the NCAA Tournament. So hear goes with the first draft:

Algeria -- Southern Conf. champion
Argentina -- Michigan St.
Australia -- Siena
Brazil -- Kentucky

Cameroon -- Pac-10 runner-up
Chile -- Baylor
Denmark -- Gonzaga
England -- Kansas

France -- Louisville
Germany -- North Carolina
Ghana -- Michigan
Greece -- Temple

Honduras -- MEAC champion
Italy -- Duke
Ivory Coast -- Washington
Japan -- Big Sky champion

Mexico -- Purdue
Netherlands -- Connecticut
New Zealand -- Play-in winner
Nigeria -- California

North Korea -- SWAC champion
Paraguay -- Mississippi St.
Portugal -- Villanova
Serbia -- Illinois

Slovakia -- Arizona St.
Slovenia -- Colonial Conf. champion
South Africa -- Big South champion
South Korea -- Ivy League champion

Spain -- UCLA
Switzerland -- Oklahoma St.
United States -- Missouri Valley Conf. champion
Uruguay -- Texas A&M

Leave any questions, challenges, tips, etc. in the comments section....

Obama and the White Sox: This is over a month old, so perhaps I should have blogged about it earlier, but insofar as Reason Mag decided this morning to interupt its usual defense of white, pot-smoking, gun-packing militiamen with a repeat of this canard, I had to respond.



As you can tell from the interview, presented here in its entirety, Obama states that he became a White Sox fan when he moved to the South Side of Chicago (in the early 90's), and is then asked a question by Rob Dibble as to who his favorite White Sox player when he was growing up. He answers the question by stating that his favorite team when he was growing up in Hawaii was the Oakland A's. He doesn't hem, haw, stutter, come up with some bogus answer about how he loved all the Chisox who ever played going back to Dummy Hoy; he plainly says that he wasn't a fan of the Pale Hose back then, implicitly communicating the fact that he didn't have a favorite. And that was the complete interview.

Like the President, I also didn't have a favorite White Sox player growing up, but I was a baseball fan. Since we're contemporaries, I can safely say that the Sox during that period didn't really capture the public imagination. They never made the playoffs, and other than Dick Allen and Wilbur Wood, they didn't have anyone who would have been a household name to a typical baseball fan, much less someone living in Hawaii whose only exposure to baseball was the Saturday and Monday Games of the Week and the post-season. If Obama had told Dibble that his favorite player was Bill Melton or Stan Bahnsen, that would have been clear evidence that he was bs-ing. The answer he gave was the only correct one a true baseball fan could give.

An oldie but a goodie: If my blog will be remembered for anything, it will be for accurately predicting the collapse of the real estate market back in 2005, and the role that the passage of the 2005 Bankruptcy "reform" act (or BARF, as it has come to be known) in exacerbating the crisis. How badly the GOP-enacted law screwed things up, however, can best be seen in a more scholarly paper recently published by UC Davis, and co-written by Wenli Li, Economic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia. The conclusion:

Before 2005 bankruptcy reform, homeowners in financial distress could use bankruptcy to help save their homes. Homeowners could have their unsecured debts discharged in Chapter 7, thus freeing up funds to make their mortgage payments. Homeowners who were in default on their mortgages could stop foreclosure by filing under Chapter 13 and could use Chapter 13 repayment plans to repay their mortgage arrears over several years. Most homeowners who filed for bankruptcy were not obliged to repay anything to their unsecured creditors.

But the 2005 bankruptcy reform made filing for bankruptcy less useful as a save-your-home procedure. Debtors’ cost of filing increased sharply after the reform. Also the homestead exemption in bankruptcy was capped at $125,000, thus making it impossible for homeowners with high home equity to keep their homes in bankruptcy. A new “means test” increased higher-income debtors’ obligation to repay their unsecured debt in bankruptcy.

Because these changes reduced homeowners’ gain from filing for bankruptcy, they reduce default rates on unsecured debt. And because homeowners’ ability-to-pay is fixedin the short-run, these changes are predicted to increase default rates on mortgages. In the paper, we test whether adoption of the 2005 bankruptcy reform led to higher rates of mortgage default. We use a large dataset of prime and subprime mortgages.

Our main result is that bankruptcy reform caused mortgage default rates to rise. Comparing default rates three months before versus after bankruptcy reform, the increase was 36% for prime mortgages and 11% for subprime mortgages. Using a longer period of one year before versus after the reform, the increase was 50% for prime mortgages and 7% for subprime mortgages. Homeowners subject to the cap on the homestead exemption were 50% more likely to default after the reform, regardless of whether their mortgages were prime or subprime. Homeowners with subprime mortgages were 13% more likely to default if they were subject to the new means test, but default rates of those with prime mortgages did not change.

The study uses a lot of complicated mathematics to make its point, but its well worth browsing through if you have the time.

Perhaps a more devastating land mine, however, is something that was hatched by the lending industry, at roughly the same time they created default swaps and high-risk adjustable rate notes. The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, was invented by Big Banking as a way to cut costs on the production of legal documents, specifically recording deeds. In real property transactions, ownership is usually shown through the public recordation of deeds, which create a chain of title proving that the person who claims to be the owner has a legitimate case, based on a series of orderly transactions dating back to Adam for all to see. At the same time, any party that has a lien on property, whether it be from a mortgage or some other debt, can also record, thereby establishing a priority based on when the lien was recorded.

Of course, recording anything with the county costs money. The almost-entirely unregulated process of lending money to prospective homeowners, the fruits of which we have seen in the insane rise and precipitous fall of the market in the last five years, generated increasingly complicated arrangements by which trusts involving multiple investors financed these high-risk notes, which would then be bought and sold to other investors. A very complicated system, indeed, which was how MERS came to be.

The idea behind MERS was that rather than generating a new document every time a loan was transfered, and thereby having to repeatedly record (and repeatedly pay fees) mortgages, an entity would be created that would take on the role of "holder of the lien" as a "nominee" of the actual note holder. The lender would collect money from the homeowner, but if the borrower ever fell behind, MERS would step in, and initiate the foreclosure process. MERS, however, is never actually the note holder, has no right to collect money on debts, and has no privity of contract whatsover with the parties to the homeloan.

Which is problematic, since MERS does not otherwise have anything resembling a right to participate in foreclosures, and courts are increasingly rejecting their attempts to proceed on the sixty million mortgages to which they "hold title." In Kansas, for example, the state supreme court recently held that MERS had no standing to pursue foreclosures, and courts in that state have effectively given a free pass to homeowners whose loans were originally held in the name of MERS. It's a slip-up that has effectively put the brakes on foreclosures based on loans generated after 2005, since the right by MERS to foreclose can be challenged even after a sale has occurred; even in states where MERS' claim for standing has been upheld, the threat of litigation challenging it's right to foreclose has suddenly made the option of modifying the underlying loan to terms that better suit the borrower more palatable, and certainly better than anything dreamed up by the Obama Administration.

The Best and the Brightest:

During oral argument on a case involving privacy rights and electronic communication devices, some disturbing questions were raised about the street-smarts of the men who run the Supreme Court:

(I)n the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

Other justices’ questions showed that they probably don’t spend a lot of time texting and tweeting away from their iPhones either.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

And no, this is not from an Onion article.

True Fact: The use of the term "flake" to describe an eccentric individual was originally coined by a star baseball player on the 1950's.

The poet laureate of Great Britain has composed a new verse about her nation's fallen hero:

Achilles (for David Beckham)

Myth's river- where his mother dipped him,
fished him, a slippery golden boyflowed on, his name on its lips. Without him,
it was prophesised,
they would not take Troy.

Women hid him,
concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs...
but when Odysseus came,

with an athlete's build, a sword and a
shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar,
and it was
sport, not war,

his charmed foot on the ball...

but then his
heel, his heel, his heel.

Unclear whether "Odysseus" in this instance is John Terry or Rio Ferdinand....

The Cleveland Cicero: When your only accomplishments over the dozen or so years you've spent in Congress is to sponsor bills "to make available to the Ukranian Museum and Archives the USIA television program 'Window on America,'" a bill "to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 14500 Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio as the 'John P. Gallagher Post Office Building'" and a bill "proclaiming Casimir Pulaski to be an honorary citizen of the United States posthumously," you know you're making a difference.  And soon there may be another notch on Dennis Kucinich's belt: preserving the non-access to health care for 50 million Americans.

It used to be a sports truism that the Winter Olympics was one of the weak links in the American sporting empire, but no more. As Nate Silver points out, if we were to count only those sports that existed in 1988, the last Olympiad in which the Warsaw Pact (incl. East Germany) still competed, the US would still have led the medal count, winning nearly three times the number they won in Calgary. Canada appears to have been the real beneficiary of the "X-Games" expansion; 18 of the 26 medals it won in Vancouver, as well as 11 of the 14 gold medals, were won in events that didn't exist in 1988.

The nations of Eastern and Central Europe, on the other hand, have fallen off the pace rather dramatically. Even when you combine Russia and the other former Soviet Republics, the "Soviet Union" trails dramatically, losing twenty of the twenty-nine medals they won from the 1988 Olympics, and East Germany also takes a hit, although, remarkably, athletes born in the area that used to encompass the DDR continue to outpace their brethren from the former West Germany. And just to show that it doesn't simply represent the collapse of Communism, the decline is also evident in the performance of two perennial winter powers, Switzerland and Finland, both of which lost more than half of their medals from 1988.

Don't think this is over, Canada !!!

Nothing should be more surprising than the fact that the National Enquirer is touting the fact that its reporting on the John Edwards baby-daddy story has been "nominated" for the Pulitzer Prize.  A better question might be whether there has ever been a year when someone from that rag hasn't been "nominated," since quite literally anyone who has had something published can be nominated for the Prize, so long as anybody (including the aspiring prizewinner himself) fills out the necessary application.  It's the lowest-hanging fruit of the awards season.

It is a testament to the life well-lived that the his armed nighttime entry into a bank is only the second craziest thing Rip Torn has ever done:



Who doesn't like a hammer fight at the end of a movie?

Isn't the real outrage here the fact that this tribune of the underclass was cozying up to a woman named "Bunny"? If he had been the Party's nominee, and this information hadn't come out until just before the election....

The one thing that seems to be missing from the discussion of whether the House Dems will vote on the bill already passed by the Senate or will simply agree to kill health care reform for the foreseeable future, is what "health care," as an issue, means to the left in American politics. As an abstract issue, "health care" is an issue that tracks very well in the polls when there is nothing concrete about to be passed by Congress. For Democrats, it is a handy issue for when it is in opposition, something it can use to establish its populist bona fides, since the issues involved (coverage, cost, access, etc.) are concerns that affect the great mass of people. And as a matter of rhetoric, it is something that even a Blue Dog/Dixiecrat can support, at least on the campaign trail.

But when progressives actually attempt to do something to match their rhetoric, they find that it is nearly impossible to pass anything. Public opinion is easily fooled, especially when powerful business lobbies are involved, and on those few occasions when liberals have all their ducks in a row and can actually enact something, they discover that an issue that works pretty well when they are out of power, is more of a cancer when they have to take the reins.

So the fact that progressives in the House are abandoning the bill shouldn't be much of a surprise. As an issue, calls for universal health coverage are to progressives what opposition to abortion rights is to the right: something to advocate, not enact. Because once something like the Senate bill actually becomes law, the issue, and its usefulness as a vote-grabber, disappears. Not getting a bill enacted isn't the big surprise; the big surprise is that progressives went through the motions in the first place.

If there was any doubt that health care reform was, for the umpteenth time in American history, dead as a doornail, following the election of a Republican to the Senate seat held for generations by the Kennedys, it was dispelled when Rep. Barney Frank flatly asserted in the aftermath that further negotiations between the Senate and House would be useless. The real problem, as Frank notes, is the filibuster, the archaic, authoritarian parliamentary tool which has been used in this circumstance in the same way it has been used throughout American history: as a way for a minority to thwart those rare progressive attempts to extend the benefits of liberty and justice beyond the privileged few.

The health care bills passed by Congress were clearly not very popular, but any reform worth its salt that could have been popular would have upset too many special interests, and obtaining an extraconstitutional 3/5 super-majority meant too many compromises needed to be made. It may be politically incorrect to say this, but most great legislation is not accomplished through compromise of disparate coalitions, but through the politics of sheer power. LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after he had shoved it down the throats of the Dixiecrats and libertarians that opposed it, not because he made some sort of deal, and Lincoln only ended slavery with the barrel of a gun.

So losing the "supermajority" is probably not the most significant event to have come out of tonight's election. Any coalition that depends on such disparate elements as Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson is not going to produce much in the way of productive lawmaking, and now having to hope that Olympia Snowe (or the Playgirl model who just got elected) can be wheedled into supporting something useful isn't much to hang one's hat. And in any event, as Mickey Kaus has repeatedly noted, the House of Representatives can, at any time before the next Congress is seated in 2011, vote to ratify what the Senate has already passed (even in a lame-duck session after a November 2010 landslide defeat).

No, tonight's event will be most significant within the Democratic Party. In the year since he took office, Barack Obama has, bloodlessly and without passion, generally supported a very progressive domestic policy, but he has done so through the goo-goo rubric of "good government." It is a style of governing that is contemptuous of public opinion, of the down-and-dirty aspects of democratic politics: vote for me for your own good, no matter how bitter-tasting the medicine. Policymaking without inspiration, wonkery without populism, is a political recipe for disaster, and it will doubtlessly lead to a huge defeat in November.

But in the more immediate term, it also spells the end for Barack Obama. Part of his 2008 campaign's raison d'etre, its motivation, was the fact that he was The Change. No one who voted for him could have any doubt that his election, in and of itself, would change American politics forever, simply because he was who he was: an African-American in a society which had historically treated others like himself as a second-class citizen. His election made manifest that the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were real, not fatuous statements of idealism fit only for white male property owners.

Now that he's elected, though, we can also see that whatever gifts he has as a policy wonk and a thinker, he is a half-hearted leader. He won't fight. He's a McClellan, not a Grant, and he has no coattails. He has political gifts, but they don't transfer. By rebranding America, he has served his most important purpose, but there is nothing more needed from him in that respect: America has already elected a black President. In the Democratic Party, no one, whether it be the Blue Dog right or the left-of-center base, fears him, and thus there will be nothing to impede anyone from challenging him for the party's nomination in 2012. Short of the GOP nominating Sarah Palin, we are looking at a one-term President.

A Christmas Miracle, more poignant than anything from the imagination of O Henry....

You know, there was a time when Joe Lieberman actually had a reputation for being a person of singular integrity. Thankfully, he's outgrown that stage:

Mr. Lieberman had supported the Medicare buy-in proposal in the past — both as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2000 and in more recent discussions about the health care system. In an interview this year, he reiterated his support for the concept.

But in the interview, Mr. Lieberman said that he grew apprehensive when a formal proposal began to take shape. He said he worried that the program would lead to financial trouble and contribute to the instability of the existing Medicare program.

And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.

“Congressman Weiner made a comment that Medicare-buy in is better than a public option, it’s the beginning of a road to single-payer,” Mr. Lieberman said. “Jacob Hacker, who’s a Yale professor who is actually the man who created the public option, said, ‘This is a dream. This is better than a public option. This is a giant step.’”

Yes, this is a grown man, an elected member of the most august and exclusive club in the country, who if the people had had their way in 2000 would have spent eight years a heartbeat away from the Presidency, saying that he changed his mind on an important issue, one that will have definite life-and-death consequences in the real world, because a liberal congressman said he agreed with him (incidentally, the quote from "Prof. Hacker" is completely made-up). Is there no bottom to the man?

Look out, Tiger Woods: This is the sort of story that comes out everytime she has a new movie to promote.

You ask me if I have a God complex?: Well, let me tell you something... it's kinda cool being compared favorably with Alec Baldwin in the comments section at this blog. The post itself, written by someone who could be generously described as a poor man's Jonah Goldberg, is a dull, tired piece o' snark rather typical of blogospheric "wit". But the posts that follow, a few of which were not written by my sockpuppets, are classic.

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.