Sometimes, political arguments remind me of this:
November 2007 Archives
Scientists have found intriguing evidence that one major reason so many people are overweight these days may be as close as the seat of their pants. Literally. According to the researchers, most of us sit too much.In most cases, exercise alone, according to a team of scientists at the University of Missouri, isn't enough to take off those added pounds. The problem, they say, is that all the stuff we've heard the last few years about weight control left one key factor out of the equation. When we sit, the researchers found, the enzymes that are responsible for burning fat just shut down.
I'm sure politicians will see it differently, but this is exactly the reason why online poker must be legalized -- and regulated -- here in the United States.
It's the most efficient way to protect American citizens -- far more so than banning something that is unbannable.
Online Poker Players Expose Alleged Fraud Them's Cheatin' Electrons: Players Root Out Alleged Fraud at AbsolutePoker.comBy RUSSELL GOLDMAN
Oct. 19, 2007You've gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em -- and know when to turn to the collective intelligence of the Internet to root out an alleged online poker gambling scandal.
A network of professional gamblers turned amateur sleuths followed the money in what appears to have been a series of rigged online poker games, gathering what they say is enough evidence to accuse a part-owner and former executive of the Web site Absolutepoker.com of cheating by looking at other players' digital cards.
This line from Paul Krugman's column tells you all you need to know:
One striking statistic: the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner was 11 percent higher this year than last year.
It's not that income isn't growing.
It's shrinking.
Housing prices fall 4.5% nationwide
This is really not very good news. Under Bush, about a third of the increase in GDP was directly attributable to higher volumes and prices of housing sales, not to mention the construction and other jobs related to those sales.
It's all evaporating.
I've posted a new video over at hillaryattacks.com: "Experience matters."
I'm planning on following it up tomorrow or Thursday with a shorter version, focused more narrowly on Hillary's recent bogus line of attack on Barack Obama's experience.
For some reason, the immigration debate focuses almost exclusively on immigrants -- not people who hire them when they come here.
Almost always, when an immigrant is here illegally, somebody has hired that immigrant illegally.
Now that the Bush Administration has proposed cracking down on these "illegal employers," they are crying foul.
Justice Seeks Delay in Court Challenge to Immigration Plan Bush Administration Says It Will Modify Crackdown on Employers Who Hire Illegal WorkersBy Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page A11The Bush administration said Friday that it will modify its planned crackdown on U.S. companies that employ illegal immigrants, asking a federal judge to delay hearing a lawsuit brought by major American labor, business and farm organizations until the new strategy is completed.
In papers filed in San Francisco late Friday afternoon, Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey S. Bucholtz told U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer that the Homeland Security Department is making unspecified changes to its plan to pressure employers to fire as many as 8.7 million workers with suspect Social Security numbers.
In it's own weird way, the Bush Administration's plan called the bluff of illegal employers.
If people were paying attention, they might realize people aren't coming to the United States for driver's licenses.
They are coming here for jobs.
Want to impact immigration? It's pretty simple. Focus on the magnet: jobs.
What in the flying f**k is it with the Republican machine?
Now they are trying to claim that the 2006 elections make the Democratic Party the party of the rich?
Uh, no. The Republicans are the party of the rich, diptard. To wit:
Their argument goes something like this:
Actually, in the interest of further humiliating the nitwit at The Heritage Foundation who is trying to make this case, I'll show you his argument as transmitted by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist hack stenographer Donald Lambro in the Washington Times:
Study: Democrats the party of the rich By Donald Lambro November 23, 2007Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts.
In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.
...
"I just found the pattern across the board to be very interesting. That pattern shows the likelihood of electing a Democrat to the House is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in that district," Mr. Franc said in an interview with The Washington Times.
...
"The demographic reality is that the Democratic Party is the new 'party of the rich.' More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households," he wrote on Nov. 5 in the Financial Times of London, in a preview of his study.
Um. On what crazy-ass planet does this genius live on?
Down here on planet earth, Democrats tend to represent the bottom-end of the income scale. Take a look at 2004, when just 43% of the wealthiest third of congressional districts sent Democrats to DC, compared to 58% of the bottom third.
Even in 2006, when the Republicans dedication to needless war, terrible economic policies, and neglect of the environment led to their removal from power in Congress, most Democrats came from the bottom third of congressional districts, ranked by wealth.
In 2006, Democrats did better across the board, but their biggest gains came right in the middle, where it hurt Republicans the most.
You probably didn't need this data to know that the Heritage Foundation report is yet another package of lies, wrapped in a nice little bow for the Washington Times by one of their brain dead research analysts.
Whoever did this analysis is so stupid that he probably got his college degree from the same place that Karl Rove got his.
I mean seriously, are you kidding me? Do they really expect people to buy this crap?
This is such laughably idiotic stuff that I can't help but roll on the floor.
Even William F. Buckley probably chortled (or whatever it is that he does) when he saw it.
Franc's boss must have been on Richard Brookhiser's best stuff when he approved this "study."
On the other hand, if this is the kind of stuff they are going to be pulling out of their ass in 2008, they are going to get slaughtered.
I mean reamed -- totally destroyed.
What a bunch of joking jokers. :)
If Kerry were to upset Gephardt for second place, that would amount to one of those "unexpectedly strong finishes" that dominates news coverage on caucus night. Many in the political community "expect" Dean or Gephardt to win and the other to come in second. If Gephardt finishes second, goes this conventional wisdom, he's a gonner because he won Iowa in 1988 and will have failed to repeat the feat.A second-place finish for Kerry would be a legitimate Big Deal and would position him as the anti-Dean candidate in the race. Kerry would become the "comeback kid" of 2004, something Bill Clinton was able to spin out of his second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary in 1992. There is much positive buzz surrounding a candidate who comes from behind to win that designation.
01/19/2004 - Des Moines RegisterOrganization will be key to victory
By DAVID YEPSEN
If organization is as important as caucus lore tells us it is, Howard Dean should win the Iowa caucuses tonight. Driven by youthful energy and anti-war activism not seen since the Vietnam War, Dean has assembled what his organizers claim is the best get-out-the-vote operation ever built in the state.
They are probably correct. As the campaign draws to a close today, the important story isn't the candidates and their hoopla. It's their organizations and their boring grunt work on the streets and telephones of Iowa.
So no -- I'm not worried about Yepsen's prediction that Edwards is collapsing and Richardson is surging.
(Here's some more of Yepsen-Dean 04.)
In a city of 8.1 million people, just 0.0004% were murdered by strangers -- a remarkable statistic.
My diary, Paul Krugman gets John Edwards, reached the recommended list today on Daily Kos.
Sweet! Hope is not lost. Speaking of that, hillaryattacks.com is just a few days away from being ready.
It seems big Rx lobbyists really do earn their money:
November 22, 2007 Big Rise in Cost of Birth Control on Campuses By MONICA DAVEYIn health centers at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country, young women are paying sharply higher prices for prescription contraceptives because of a change in federal law.
The increases have meant that some students using popular birth control pills and other products are paying three and four times as much as they did several months ago. The higher prices have also affected about 400 community health centers nationwide used by poor women.
The change is due to a provision in a federal law that ended a practice by which drug manufacturers provided prescription contraception to the health centers at deeply discounted rates. The centers then passed along the savings to students and others.
You'd think the anti-choice people would be up in arms about this.
Paul Krugman's latest column on the banking industry is a good read.
November 23, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist Banks Gone Wild By PAUL KRUGMAN“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.
The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn’t.
In a direct sense, the carnage on Wall Street is all about the great housing slump.
...
How did things go so wrong?
Part of the answer is that people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.
But another part of the answer lies in what hasn’t happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven’t been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.
Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.
But if the success turns out to have been an illusion — well, they still get to keep the money. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Not only is this grossly unfair, it encourages bad risk-taking, and sometimes fraud. If an executive can create the appearance of success, even for a couple of years, he will walk away immensely wealthy. Meanwhile, the subsequent revelation that appearances were deceiving is someone else’s problem.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. The huge rewards executives receive if they can fake success are what led to the great corporate scandals of a few years back. There’s no indication that any laws were broken this time — but the public’s trust was nonetheless betrayed, once again.
The point is that the subprime crisis and the credit crunch are, in an important sense, the result of our failure to effectively reform corporate governance after the last set of scandals.
John Edwards recently came out with a corporate reform plan, but it didn’t receive a lot of attention. Corporate governance still isn’t regarded as a major political issue. But it should be.
....WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Housing numbers continue free fall9.2% price drop and 49% volume drop?!?!?Prices keep dropping, but sales still sluggish
By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNALSales of both new and existing homes dropped drastically in October and median prices continue to slide from last year's peak, a local housing analyst reported Wednesday.
Larry Murphy, president of Las Vegas-based SalesTraq, said he talked to a mortgage lender who's processing six or seven loans in one subdivision of the Anthem community in which new home prices were slashed $250,000, or about 30 percent.
"I don't know if it's true or if it's just a rumor, but he said half of them are Realtors and they plan on walking away from their current home, the same home they bought from the same builder last year," Murphy said.
Median new home prices fell 9.2 percent in October to $299,575 while sales plummeted 49 percent to 1,302, compared with the same month a year ago, according to SalesTraq. Nearly all home builders in Las Vegas have reduced prices in new subdivisions around the valley, Murphy noted.
Yeeegads.
It can't help any that on a busy travel day the airport in Vegas looked like this:
This week, Slate's Will Saletan has decided to grace the world with his incredible lack of intelligence (h/t Atrios):
I Forget Where In the Order He FallsBut Will Saletan, no matter what his genetic code says, has got to be one of the top 10 stupidest fucking guys on the face of the planet. Quoth The Racist Fuckwit:
The lowest black IQ averages in the United States show up in the South, where the rate of genetic blending is lowest.
I really picked the wrong week to stop huffing paint fumes. No link as I have no desire to support a business model centered around the courageous notion that black people are stupid.
Continue reading Slate's Will Saletan is one of the dumbest men alive.
The super-wealthy keep on getting wealthier and wealthier, and their taxes go down. Everybody else sees their share of income decline -- but their taxes stay the same.
This is your America -- brought to you by George W. Bush and the Republican Party.
Major League Baseball's DRM change strikes out with fans
Some hardcore baseball fans have been left stranded on third base by Major League Baseball after it decided to change DRM systems. As a result, game footage purchased under the old DRM scheme are no longer viewable, leaving fans with unwatchable footage—and no refunds.
Continue reading Homeownership and race under George W. Bush.
Is Web Video Really Hurting TV?
The current conventional wisdom is that the rise of Internet video may mean the end of television as we know it — a view that extends to the music industry as well, as we’ve seen before. Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against the Google-owned YouTube continues to lumber on, and the TV writers’ strike has led to speculation that the lull in new TV content could drive more viewers to the Web.As Forbes recently pointed out, much of the TV industry’s anxiety is based on the assumption that entertainment viewership is a zero-sum game — i.e., if more people are watching programming online, then fewer are left to watch TV. But not much data has been offered to prove that sites like YouTube are actually responsible for declining TV ratings.
Interesting article out today in the NYTimes: Does Death Penalty Save Lives?
I haven't read the studies cited in the article yet, but I wonder if they indicate deterrence or displacement. I also wonder the extent to which they consider the fact that death sentences are handed out to murderers of white non-Hispanic victims far more frequently than to murderers of black or Hispanic victims (who are far more likely to be murdered).
Kyla Ebbert, pioneer in establishing the right to wear skimpy clothing on airplanes, is cashing in.
Ah, remember the good old days, when the War the War on Christmas didn't start until after Thanksgiving?
Well, it's that time of year again, and the polemicisphere is getting ready to deliver yet another season of holiday cheer.
Lowe's Apologizes for 'Family Trees' in Christmas Catalog
By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor
November 14, 2007(CNSNews.com) - An early skirmish in this year's "War on Christmas" ended on Tuesday when the nationwide home improvement chain Lowe's apologized for referring to Christmas trees in its holiday catalog as "family trees."
Does that make the "War on the War on Christmas" (tm) the war on families?
Continue reading Meanwhile...the War on the War on Christmas Begins.
Army Desertion Rate Highest Since 1980
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Wrong man in jail for 50 days on cyber charge
MUMBAI: In the early hours of August 31, Lakshmana Kailash K was asleep at his home in Bangalore. He was woken up by eight policemen from Pune who came knocking on his door and waved the Information Technology Act, 2000, in his sleepy, terrified face. Get dressed, he was told, we are taking you to Pune for having defamed Shivaji. Lakshmana protested that he didn't know anyone called Shivaji.
Darrell Jackson has played 9 games this season for the 49ers, catching 21 passes for 241 yards -- including 4 for 42 yards against the Seahawks. He's caught one TD pass.
Put another way, D-Jack is the #3 receiver on the worst offense in football.
Deion Branch, meanwhile, has missed 4 games, playing in just 5 (really 4.5). He's caught 22 passes for 343 yards with 1 TD.
Effectively, the Seahawks traded D-Jack and a first round pick for Deion Branch and fourth round pick.
Although Branch has been better than D-Jack, you have to remember that that D-Jack is playing for a terrible offense. No matter how you cut it, a first round pick is not equivalent to a fourth round pick.
At this point, it doesn't look like that great a deal. It's not a Hutchinson-like disaster, but if Branch gets healthy, it might pencil out.
New York officials are pursuing a tax case against Derek Jeter, alleging that the superstar Yankee shortstop skipped out on millions of dollars of taxes from 2001 to 2003.
In court filings, the officials say Jeter falsely claimed residence in Florida, which has no income taxes, to dodge city and state income taxes in New York, where he owns a residence.
What makes this especially galling is that New York taxpayers are paying more than $400 million towards the construction of the Yankees' new stadium.
Continue reading Derek Jeter, Tax cheater?.
I passed on an opportunity to attend the debate tonight, and I kind of regret going; not because the debate itself was interesting, but because watching it on television was agonizing. I never thought I'd say that Brian Williams and Tim Russert could run a tighter ship than anyone else, but this format was terrible -- mostly because of the crowd's involvement (boos and applause). Overall, it was pretty much a non-event, and CNN deserves an extra helping of whoop-ass for putting a partisan Republican analyst and two former Clinton employees on their post-debate wrap-up.
In 1936, when John McCain was born, it might have been acceptable for men to call women bitches. Seventy-one years later, however, times have changed. He should apologize, and we should move on, because I think everybody deserves a second chance, especially the elderly.
After ten weeks, we are just past the mid-point of the NFL regular season, and it's time to make some observations.
First, I'm going to gloat, however. On July 3, I wrote this about the Mariners:
80 games into the season, the Mariners are 10 games over .500.
Yet they have exactly the same number of runs allowed as they do runs scored -- 400.
My inference was that the Mariners would have a weaker second-half of their season -- which they did, going 43-39 the rest of the way. I added this about the Yankees.
Meanwhile the Yankees appear be the only team to have outscored their opponents despite a losing record. Look for them to have a big second half and make a run at the wild card.
They went 54-27 in the second-half -- and won the wild card.
Okay, back to the NFL.
Although they are 6-3, Detroit will not make the playoffs. Thus far, their opponents have had a .432 winning percentage. The Lions' final seven games are against opponents with a combined .667 record.
The Giants are going to have a tough finish to the season as well -- but they still have a decent shot at the playoffs, if only by default. They've faced an average schedule in the first half (.481) but have one of the tougher remaining schedules (.571). They are one of only 7 teams to have outperformed their opponents on both sides of the ball (Team PPG - Opp PAPG and Team PAG - Opp PPG), which says something.
Continue reading Some mid-season NFL observations.
Almost a week after David Brooks' apoplectic and nonsensical attempt to absolve Reagan of racism for his 1980 visit to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the rightwing polemicisphere continues to try to rewrite history.
It is very important to understand why they are so obsessively focused on denying the plain reality of Reagan's 1980 campaign.
To that end, in this post, I address three essential questions:
- Was Reagan's visit to Philadelphia and the Neshoba County Fair a powerful racist appeal?
- Did the Reagan Administration have a negative impact on racial equality?
- So what? Why is it important that Reagan appealed to racism to win the 1980 election, and why don't Republicans want to talk about it?
Continue reading Reagan's revisionists are still lying, and here's why it matters.
Apparently, Alex Rodriguez is finding out that the market for players earning $30+ million per season isn't as big as he and his agent thought -- so he's talking with the Yankees, without the involvement of Scott Boras.
Say it ain't so, Scott. I sure would hate to see you get egg all over your face (sic)!
Are you cool with this?
Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil.
CBS is out with a new poll on the Iowa caucus, showing Edwards back in second place, just two points behind Hillary. I don't put too much stock in polls, but these are good numbers for Edwards and Obama, and bad numbers for Hillary. The key is the weakness of her support.
In Iowa, 33% of her supporters have reservations, compared to 22% and 27% of Obama's and Edwards' supporters, respectively. She trails badly as a second-choice amongst supporters of unviable candidates (Iowa caucus rules require a second ballot, excluding candidates who fall below 15%).
The poll also covers New Hampshire, where despite her strong lead, 47% of her supporters indicate their mind isn't made up.
Politics can be like sports -- it's fun to handicap. Heck, you can even bet on it.
David Yepsen is sort of the David Broder of the Iowa press corps (make of that comparison what you will), and like all junkies, he loves to make predictions about the Iowa Caucuses.
Currently, he's bullish on Barack Obama's prospects:
Yepsen: Obama's superb speech at Jefferson Jackson Dinner could catapult his bid
The six leading Democratic presidential candidates showed up for the Iowa Democratic Party's big Jefferson Jackson Dinner on Saturday night, and five of them gave very good speeches.Barack Obama's was excellent. It was one of the best of his campaign.
The passion he showed should help him close the gap on Hillary Clinton by tipping some undecided caucusgoers his way.
How much predictive value do Yepsen's pronouncements carry? Let's look some of his comments about Howard Dean in the days and weeks before the 2004 Iowa Caucus:
Howard Dean may well be the next president of the United States because of people like Eliot Williamson, Megan Scott, Sally Troxel and Dick Stater. They are part of something called the "Dean Corps" in Iowa, and they are taking politics back to the future by organizing campaign work around community-service projects.
Even if Dean's campaign should bomb, which seems unlikely at this point, people who've worked for him will still come away with something to show for their efforts -- like a cleaner river or the knowledge they helped another human being in some small way. It also highlights Dean's resume. He got his start in politics organizing to get a bicycle trail built in Vermont.
Howard Dean won Tuesday's debate of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa. Wesley Clark came in second.
Dean went into the two-hour gabfest with a new poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers showing he has retaken the lead in Iowa over Richard Gephardt, who has slipped back into second place while John Kerry occupies third. Frontrunners become pincushions in debates, and Dean handled the poking well, by staying above the fray and by not responding to every jab Kerry or Gephardt sought to administer.
By returning to the high-road, Dean goes back to the "non-politician" style that has excited so many Democrats about his candidacy. Based on Tuesday's performance, he's back on top of this game.
As the year begins, Dean is the front-runner, thanks largely to his anti-Iraq war views that enabled him to energize newcomers and much of the party left.
I've really got nothing against David Yepsen, but when it comes time to place bets on who will Iowa, I'm not taking his advice.
I'm not following the polls, either.
(Sources: 10/28/03, 1/7/04, 1/14/04, 1/19/04.)
In fact, I've got no idea who will win -- Clinton, Edwards, or Obama.
Of this, however, I am sure: nobody is inevitable, and if they think they are, then they will lose.
"All-natural" products with names like Stamina-RX and Vigor-25 promise an apothecary's delight of rare Asian ingredients, but many work because they contain unregulated versions of the very pharmaceuticals they are supposed to replace.
Last week, David Brooks fired the first salvo in a desperate right-wing attempt to revise yet another chapter in our nation's history: Ronald Reagan's direct appeal to southern white racists during the 1980 presidential campaign.
Most people know the basic story: in 1980, immediately after the GOP convention, Ronald Reagan visited Philadelphia, Mississippi, where sixteen years earlier, three civil rights activists were murdered.
Merely visiting Philadelphia sent a powerful signal, but while there, Reagan made sure his message of solidarity with southern white racists was completely clear. Reagan discussed welfare reform, referring to welfare recipients as "them" and taxpayers as "the rest of us." Next, he turned to federal involvement in education -- in other words, desegregation -- and proudly declared his support for states' rights, which was then a rallying cry for whites who opposed federal civil rights legislation.
It's really rather simple, and there's nothing to debate about it.
Somehow, however, Brooks and his legion of apparently retarded followers are making the case that Reagan's visit was entirely innocent.
Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert have done a decent job of setting the record straight, but unfortunately Brooks and his merry band of revisionist idiots have had some success in taking Reagan's speech out of context.
To that end, I've posted the relevant portion of the speech online, at YouTube. Have a listen. Unless you are terminally close minded, you'll understand Reagan was making a racist appeal.
Now, clearly, Reagan's speech was no hellfire and brimstone appeal to racism. Rather, he made his meaning clear through a clever deployment of symbolism and code words. The challenge Reagan faced was that he needed to win the support of southern white racists without losing support from whites in other parts of the country.
Most whites aren't racist, or at least don't think of themselves as racist. If Reagan had adopted the language of the Ku Klux Klan (which had endorsed him a few days earlier), he would have lost more votes than he gained. (This explains Brooks hyper-aggressive defense.)
Reagan had a tightrope to walk, and he did so with precision.
dnA at Too Sense is a smart, funny, and prolific blogger on a wide range of subjects.
Today, he hits on Super Mario and John McWhorter on rap.
Ga. Governor Prays for Rain at Capitol
Greg Bluestein, AP WriterATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue stepped up to a podium outside the state Capitol on Tuesday and led a solemn crowd of several hundred people in a prayer for rain on his drought-stricken state.
"We've come together here simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm," Perdue said after a choir provided a hymn.
UPDATE: Why am I not surprised that the AP has withdrawn this story?
AP:
GAUHATI, India (AP) -- With Rwanda off her charity calendar, Paris Hilton has turned her attention to the plight of ... drunken elephants in India.
"The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them," the 26-year-old socialite was quoted as saying by the World Entertainment News Network's Web site.
Good headline for an interesting article about the link between breast feeding and IQ.
Fortunately, the Seahawks mauled the 49ers tonight, because the Monday Night Football broadcast was horrible.
I've got nothing against Tirico, Kornheiser, or Jaworski. They do the best they can with a MNF production that seems to focus on everything but the game unfolding before their eyes.
The worst is when their producers force them to spend half the third quarter with a celebrity from the entertainment world. Tonight, they kibbitzed with Drew Carey about The Price is Right. Is this really necessary? Seriously, live sports is just about the only type of TV show where I actually sit through a good portion of the advertisements. Now it's just one thirty minute advertisement. You can't skip over the ad, so I just don't watch the show, unless I really care about the game, and even then, I put the broadcast on mute. MNF, in just two short years, has become the NFL's worst product; it's worse than Thursday Night Football, and that's saying something.
Still, it was an enjoyable game -- the Seahawks dominated the 49ers thoroughly, and in the end, that's all that really matters.
Ankush takes on Andrew Sullivan at Ezra Klein's blog:
The more novel part of Sullivan's argument goes like this:Whatever you think of Sullivan's argument, it's hardly novel. Obama is making it too:What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy.
...
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?
By James Taub
“If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power,” Barack Obama mused not long ago aboard his campaign plane, “as long as we are also making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergencies, crises and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober way. . . .” He stopped. He wanted to make sure he got this just right, and he had got a little caught up in rebutting the claim, which Hillary Clinton has artfully advanced, that he is not prepared to handle emergencies. Obama stopped picking at his grilled salmon in order to stare out at the sky for a few moments. “I think,” he said, in that deep and measured voice of his, “that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.”
Mike Huckabee's kind of in a no-man's-land on taxes.
Club for Growth types hate this Huckabee.
Everybody else hates this Huckabee.
I wonder how long before the paleo-nutty right starts calling him Mike Taxabee? He better come out with a new tax plan, and fast, because a 23% national sales tax is a dog that won't hunt.
Given that Al Gore isn't running for President, this is exactly what I'd hope he'd be doing:
Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore announced Monday he's joining Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture capital firm to guide investments that help combat global warming.
Health Care Excuses
by Paul KrugmanThe United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured.
Amy Harmon, who covers science and genetics for the New York Times, wrote an important and informative article about the political and socioeconomic implications of DNA research and race.
Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”
As Harmon points out, nearly all of the discussion connecting DNA, race, and I.Q. has been conducted by non-scientists. In my experience, many of these amateur geneticists are deeply ideological, and see their hobby as an developing an important plank of conservatism.
Needless to say, I don't think much of their "research." The reality is that separating genetic from environmental factors from highly social traits like I.Q. is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, this issue isn't going away, and the more people are willing to engage in it, the easier it will be to make sure ideologues don't hijack the truth.
This is a pretty good article on Mike Huckabee, the most electable Republican presidential candidate. He's got a big problem, though:
He bashes the IRS frequently, backing a controversial idea called the fair tax, which would replace all current taxes with a 23 percent sales tax on all goods.
He might make it through the GOP primaries with that tax plan, which would be a boondoggle for the wealthiest 5% of Americans, but there's no way he can get elected president while supporting a 23% national sales tax. It will be interesting to see if and when he drops his ill-advised proposal.
Atrios sums up Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide's CEO: Big Shitpile Blames Minorities.
The article Atrios references is an interesting read and offers a good overview of the risky strategy Mozilo used to propel Countrywide to the top of the lender charts. By aggressively pushing exotic mortgage products, Mozilo grew his companies market share from 5.8% to 13.1% in just five years. At first, he looked like a genius, but now that the whole experiment has blown up in his face, he's blaming minorities.
Of course, along the way he "earned" $410 million, selling his personal Countrywide stock while the company bought it bought it on the open market.
Mozilo's blame-the-minorities attitude is cynical and disgraceful. I'm sure his mother wouldn't be proud.
The choice passages:
For decades, as Mr. Mozilo built Countrywide into the nation’s biggest mortgage lender, his bravado had served him well. But the same traits that helped him create the dominant lender left him off balance as the growing mortgage crisis threatened to engulf Countrywide.
To this day, he says his beleaguered company did nothing wrong during the loose-lending craze that is now unraveling nationwide with record foreclosures and mountainous losses. Instead, Mr. Mozilo considers himself and his company to be victims of financial forces beyond their control.
At a conference sponsored by the Milken Institute about two weeks ago, for example, he explained that borrowers forced lenders like Countrywide to lower their mortgage standards. The industry faced special pressure from minority advocates to help people buy homes, he said. Now, the government must help by increasing loan limits at government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he added.
And:
And until recently, Mr. Mozilo appeared to be playing the game better than many of his competitors, such as Chase Mortgage, CitiFinancial and the IndyMac Bancorp. In late 2006, he received the American Banker’s Lifetime Achievement Award at a dinner in New York. He also became a member of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans that year.
But even as he basked in this recognition, problems were developing in Countrywide’s portfolio. In December 2006, for example, company figures show that 5.02 percent of the loans in its servicing portfolio were delinquent, up from 4.11 percent in July 2006. The industrywide rate of delinquencies in late 2006 was 4.95 percent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. At the same time that delinquencies were rising, Mr. Mozilo accelerated his already heavy sales of Countrywide shares.
As Mr. Mozilo was selling, Countrywide used precious capital to buy back its own shares in the open market. In November 2006, the company borrowed $1.5 billion to repurchase 38.6 million shares for about $39 each. In the second quarter of 2007, it spent $900 million to buy back shares, also at higher prices than the stock’s closing price of $13.83 on Friday.
Equilar, an independent compensation research firm, calculated that since Mr. Mozilo became chief executive of Countrywide in 1999, he has taken home $410 million. That includes $285 million in option gains. Restricted stock awards worth $6.65 million were excluded from the calculation because they have not been sold.
A Countrywide spokesman said that Mr. Mozilo’s sales were in compliance with securities laws and company policy and were conducted according to a planned selling program — not as a result of fears about the company’s future. He also said that none of Mr. Mozilo’s stock sales were “based on any material nonpublic information.”