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?

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.

Yeah.

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.

It's not just a question UNLV students ask presidential candidates anymore.

Update: The question was a plant.

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.

Josh Marshall says it's Mike Huckabee -- now tied for first in Iowa.

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.

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:

1. Was Reagan's visit to Philadelphia and the Neshoba County Fair a powerful racist appeal?
   
2. Did the Reagan Administration have a negative impact on racial equality?
   
3. 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?

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:

September 6, 2003:

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.

November 25, 2003:

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.

January 13, 2004:

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.

Associated Press:

"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 Writer

ATLANTA — 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.

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:

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 Krugman

The 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.”