It’s an all-sports (sort-of) post, since Congress has done what every hard working American does after returning to work in the new year, which is, of course, give itself another 10 days off.
Score number 1: whatever ranking Notre Dame is given by the humans behind the AP writers and USA Today Coaches Polls must now be adjusted by five spots.
I’m pretty sure Alabama would have beaten anyone lined up against them last night who can’t pay players in the daylight, but Notre Dame is a lot more like Boise State or Northern Illinois in terms of the value of its wins than, say, an Oregon or a Stanford.
And the notion that Notre Dame, in the final polls of the season, ranks ahead of Georgia, which damn near beat ‘Bama in the SEC title game, and Texas A&M, which beat them in Tuscaloosa, strikes me as beyond absurd.
Also, too: no moral high ground for Notre Dame, which apparently thinks rape is OK in the service of a return to football glory.
Score number 2: Pro hockey will return to an arena which may or may not be near you.
I’m not a big pro hockey fan. College and Olympic hockey are more fluid and far less marred by fights. But the NHL has managed to toss an entire season (2004-05) into the dumpster, and was perilously close to doing so again.
Here is my favorite snippet from the story summarizing the deal, about the value of some of the captains of industry who own NHL franchises:
More progress was made in early December when some less militant owners joined the talks and Bettman and Fehr temporarily excluded themselves. But the hardest of the hardliners, Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs and Calgary’s Murray Edwards, remained involved and those sessions couldn’t finish off the agreement. Talks came crashing to a halt when the players said they wanted Fehr back in the process, that they were not trained in the art of closing the deal, and having their leader present was something they were certainly entitled to do. Edwards reportedly told them that Fehr’s return would be a deal-killer and things ground to a halt. Following that episode, the league wisely decided against active ownership participation.
I am just guessing here, but there must be something about being able to buy and sell human beings that warps some people sense of place. Every damned professional league has a Jeremy Jacobs or Murray Edwards (and they are lucky if they only have one or two), and they are always the guys who end up making everything worse.
Score number 3: It may be small of me to take some small amount of comfort, or even pleasure, in USC’s fall from a #1 pre-season football ranking to a 7-6 record, an ugly loss in the Sun Bowl, and a level of backstabbing that clouds their immediate future, but I am, at times, a small man.
Still in the glow of the new year, so a pre-noon Friday tunes.
There’s so much win in this clip. First, it’s a young Joni Mitchell, before she smoked herself down to an alto (not complaining – some of her later stuff is spectacular); it’s from the Dick Cavett show, and, um, set design.
Have a great weekend. 2013 starts in earnest on Monday.
Apparently, there is concern that some of the $60 million fine Penn State is paying into an endowed fund to help prevent child sexual abuse and treat its victims might make its way outside the Keystone state.
I’m sure a few more tax cuts for the rich will cover their legal fees.
I despise the NCAA as much as anyone, but seriously – just shut up about the punishment and let the university recover. This just makes the parties involved look small.
And what is it about organizations that implicitly condone sex abuse? First, the Roman Catholic Church imposing its band of “higher justice” – which is to say, ignore the victims and shuffle the pedophiles to another diocese to create a new pool of victims, and now the Boy Scouts, who are, shall we say, zealous in defending their organization:
An Oregon man’s lawsuit alleged that Scouting allowed troop leader Timur Dykes to continue in the group after he admitted molesting 17 boys in the early 1980s.
At the trial in 2010, regional Scouts official Eugene Grant faulted parents for letting their sons go to Dykes’ apartment for merit badge work and sleepovers.
“His parents should have known better,” Grant said of one victim. “I think it’s criminal.”
The jury rejected that assertion, finding the Scouts liable for nearly $20 million in damages….
In 2002, Jerrold Schwartz, a 42-year-old former scoutmaster in New York, admitted abusing a boy in his troop in the 1990s. After being secretly recorded saying he “did something very, very wrong” and apologizing to the boy, Schwartz pleaded guilty to four counts of sodomy and was sent to prison.
Despite the conviction and the victim’s testimony that Schwartz “raped me and forced me to perform oral sex on him,” the Scouts, in a motion to dismiss a subsequent lawsuit, contended that the sex was consensual, records show. [Emphasis mine]
“To argue that an adult scoutmaster in his 30s can have consensual sex with a 13-year-old in his Scout troop is something dreamt up in pedophile heaven,” attorney Michael Dowd told the New York Law Journal in 2006 after a judge rejected the Scouts’ motion. The lawsuit was later settled; terms were not disclosed.
The Boy Scouts don’t have a lot of goodwill in my account anyway. I read this and wonder if anyone involve at the scouts is even partially human.
So, apparently we won’t be going cliff-diving to start the year. Or curb jumping, or slope rolling, or whatever it would be if we were to do it, which we totally may if the House of Representatives holds to its current level of sanity.
One note to NBC News, which had this paragraph in the above story as of this morning:
First, the last time Richard Shelby was a Democrat was before Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, so that’s a solid 18 years ago. Second, it might have been more illuminating to note the actual Democratic nays: Harkin, of Iowa, Bennett, of Colorado, and Carper, of Delaware.
The best thing about this deal is that it extends long-term unemployment benefits. But I’m not sure why the end of the payroll tax holiday couldn’t have been phased in over two years, since that is, in fact, a tax increase on the lower and middle classes – one the GOP was apparently happy to let happen.
Anyway, this has been a stupid process caused by the massive dysfunction on one legislative branch of government. Seriously – does anyone think the last week of House craziness would have happened if Nancy Pelosi were in charge?
Anyway, happy new year. Looks like we have more of this to come.
[Earworm of the year by Owl City with Carly Rae Jepson.]
Vagabond Scholar has taken over for the late Jon Swift’s annual year-end blogger round-up, which presents the best posts of the year, selected by bloggers themselves. Yours truly submitted, but you’ll have to go to Vagabond Scholar’s site to see which one. While you’re there, check out some other small blogs.
I spent a fair amount of time picking the one post I’d submit – not because I think I have so many phenomenal posts, but because it’s hard to put the year into perspective without having actually hopped out into 2013. And I did resist the temptation to select the post where I picked Obama to win the election, way back in February.
Unlike Vagabond Scholar, I have no constraints, so below is my ten baker’s dozen best Mutant Poodle posts of 2012.
Pushback on Howard Fineman’s complaint that Barack Obama hasn’t been aggressively challenged by either Mitt Romney or the press on a series of promises and comments that Obama may or may not have made.
The shocking development that even Washington insiders were getting tired of Mitt Romney’s excuses.
I write mostly about politics, and these all focus on that subject, or its adjunct, the media. And I don’t know if any of these qualify as great insights. But if I wrote them, I felt the need to write them rather than pound the walls of my house and scream incoherently.
More ranting will come, I’m sure, in 2013. Have a happy new year, and peace.
This morning on Weekend Edition we learned that the most oppressed people in the universe are totally those billionaires who selflessly give to political candidates dark-money slush funds and must endure – steel yourselves, people, this isn’t pretty – criticism for doing so.
And, in what I’m sure they feel is an unironic action, they are citing a 1950′s case protecting NAACP members’ identities as relevant.
Yes, Karl Rove fears that our maligned billionaire class will be intimidated and will no longer fund his biannual grifting operation donate to civic-minded groups like, say, Rove’s own Crossroads GPS.
What’s worse, some people mock these benighted mega-rich, suggesting that disclosure hasn’t done anything to actually threaten their well being, if, by well-being, you mean “things other than a potential drop in reportable revenues.”
It’s that sissy liberal media who think people like Malala Yousafzai are courageous, because of the whole getting shot standing up for women’s education, or Victoria Soto, who only put herself between an assault rifle and a classroom full of 6 and 7-year olds. They simply don’t appreciate the fear that one lives with, day after day, when you have to worry about whether people who make far less money than you do have the temerity to criticize you, and if your security staff might qualify for benefits.
It would be unseemly of me to wish on these brave heroes of the moneyed class the kind of real fear that was behind the Supreme Court decision they seek to abuse – the thought that someone might fire a shotgun into your house, and that the someone who did it was the same person taking your statement when you reported this to the local sheriff. Or that people who killed your neighbor for registering you to vote are getting away with it because the “justice” system in your town is part of the group that ordered the hit.
Unseemly, perhaps, but I can’t guarantee that the thought doesn’t find fleeting life in my mind when I let down my guard.
Earlier this fall, on a long drive home, I caught an episode of On Being, and a discussion between David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch. Blankenhorn is founder and president of the Institute for American Values, and Rauch is the author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.
So their initial interactions involved a lot of disagreeing.
Their conversation was fascinating, because it was clear that they had, over the years, actually listened to each other, and Blankenhorn, this past summer, reversed his opposition to gay marriage.
There was one section that stuck out for me, later on on the discussion:
Mr. Blankenhorn: You know, we called what we did achieving disagreement.
Ms.Tippett: Yeah, I like that.
Mr. Blankenhorn: See, because it’s easy to have a false disagreement. I can just say, oh, you’re a bad person and you’re stupid. You’re some kind of religious zealot or something. I can just have a belief. But to actually know where we disagree requires effort from you and from me. We have to have a relationship to do that. And part of achieving disagreement means identifying areas of common ground. It means finding out where we agree.
Otherwise, how do you know where you disagree if you don’t also know where you agree? And that, I’ll tell you, in today’s world of hyperpolarization and the sheer idiocy that is our public debate on most days, 98 percent of the time, you know, the heart just cries out for this kind of, you know, serious effort to achieve disagreement.
Mr. Rauch: Could I just say there’s another element of this which was important to me and I think is for me what started pushing me in your direction is when I believe there’s an element of patriotism about this. I believe that there are higher values ultimately than what each of us wants as individuals.
I discovered in you I thought someone who understood that you’re a multivalue person and that as strongly as you felt about marriage, that you felt even more strongly that we have to share the country.And it is our duty as citizens to find ways to live together, and that that’s a higher value still. I equate that with a form of patriotism. When I see someone who won’t compromise, I see someone betraying the core purposes of our Constitution, which is to force compromise. That’s what James Madison was doing.
Mr. Blankenhorn: Right. Exactly.
Mr. Rauch: And I saw in you someone who is willing to say, you know, being right about marriage is not as important to me as making a pact with my fellow Americans on the other side so that we can share this country.
Mr. Blankenhorn: We can live together, yeah.
Mr. Rauch: There’s nothing soft and squishy about that.
Ms.Tippett: Right.
Mr. Blankenhorn: It comes across that way sometimes, but I do think I agree I think it’s a kind of patriotism. And you write — you know, Jon has written for gay audiences, you know, and said things like he said, like it’s time to like give these religious people a bit of a break and not press our advantage. It’s time — I’m not trying to put words in his mouth, but he says this. He says, you know, sometimes a sweeping court decision to impose gay marriage may be not the best way to achieve the goal. I can only imagine the criticism that comes your way, you know, from your own community about that, but I think on our best days we both sometimes try for that a little bit. [Emphasis mine]
The host, Krista Tippet, then mentioned a separate discussion between Alice Rivlin, founding Director of the CBO and Clinton administration official, and former Republican Senator Pete Domenici. Here’s a small piece:
Ms. Tippett: I mean, did you have a kind of working relationship and political relationship that this seemed like an obvious thing for you to start working together on the debt reduction taskforce? Or how did that happen?
Ms. Rivlin: Yes. And you have to remember that when Pete and I first met, I was the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. He was a freshman senator on the budget committee and I appeared frequently, testifying before the budget committee. And I quickly figured out, this man’s really smart and he really cares about doing it right. So we had a mutual respect that goes back a long way.
Now, we always knew that he was a Republican, I was a Democrat. And later, much later, actually, when I became the budget director in the first Clinton administration and Pete was the chairman of the budget committee in the Republican-dominated Senate, we were on opposite sides. Clearly. And we disagreed on substantive matters, but we never lost our respect for each other. And I think that’s the key to this.
People can disagree on all sorts of things, but if they listen to each other and have respect for each other, they can work things out. And we’ve kind of lost that idea that you have to work things out and compromise and come to a conclusion. Because gridlock, which we have now in the budget, is the worst possible thing, especially with respect to a problem like the budget deficit, which gets worse if you do nothing. Gridlock is fatal for this problem.
Now, I may have issues with Ms. Rivlin (and Paul Krugman would heartily disagree about the danger of our current deficits and debt), but I think she is right that mutual respect is the foundation of successful political compromise, and that compromise is how this country lurches forward.
And therein lies the problem.
I have been thinking, post-election, about the obligations of elected officials. Nationally, at least, they swear an oath to the constitution, so they are not bound by that oath to particular viewpoints; they are not bound to keep us at peace or to keep the hungry fed, or maintain our infrastructure, or make opportunities equally available to all citizens, no matter how much I think they should. And, to be fair, you might get some disagreement on how to achieve those goals from people of good will and different perspectives.
But listening to the over-hyped Fiscal CliffTM coverage made me think back to an actual near-catastrophe: the 2011 debt-ceiling fiasco. This was a time when one could argue that congresscritters unwilling to allow a debt ceiling increase to pass were violating their oaths, if one chooses to read the 14th amendment that way.
Steve Kornacki has a piece in Salon which reframes the Tea Party from a movement to a mindset:
As I wrote back in ’10, the Tea Party essentially gave a name to a phenomenon we’ve seen before in American politics – fierce, over-the-top resentment of and resistance to Democratic presidents by the right. It happened when Bill Clinton was president, it happened when Lyndon Johnson was president, it happened when John F. Kennedy was president. When a Democrat claims the White House, conservatives invariably convince themselves that he is a dangerous radical intent on destroying the country they know and love and mobilize to thwart him.
The twist in the Obama-era is that some of the conservative backlash has been directed inward. This is because the right needed a way to explain how a far-left anti-American ideologue like Obama could have won 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes in 2008….
Thus did the Tea Party movement represent a two-front war – one a conventional one against the Democratic president, and the other a new one against any “impure” Republicans. Besides a far-right ideology, the trait shared by most of the Tea Party candidates who have won high-profile primaries these past few years has been distance from what is perceived as the GOP establishment. Whether they identify with the Tea Party or not, conservative leaders, activists and voters have placed a real premium on ideological rigidity and outsider status; there’s no bigger sin than going to Washington and giving ground, even just an inch, to the Democrats.
It’s hard to look around right now and not conclude that the Republican Party is still largely in the grip of this mindset.
I’d argue that the Tea Party has its explanation for Obama’s election and re-election. It’s the gifts he gives to the “takers”. It’s the less-American so-called “citizens” voting for the un-American President (if he really, legally, IS President).
It is, in short, that Obama’s elections are illegitimate.
That’s less important, I think, than how that translates into action.
Back to the Fiscal CliffTM. If a politician believes that it is terrible to raise taxes – ever – that’s certainly his or her right. If they believe that the national debt is a ticking time bomb, and that deficits are unjustifiable, that’s OK, too. (However, it would help if you hadn’t frittered away your credibility on the subject by exploding both the annual deficit and the national debt when you had power.)
But now it is time for governing, and each side has to make a choice between the policy that will happen (Fiscal CliffTM) if nothing is done and some alternative that might come up to mitigate it.
I, for example, might prefer the cliff to a deal that touches social security, although unemployment extension and other stimulus is likely worth some pain I might not otherwise like.
Republicans, on the other hand, might like the non-defense spending cuts element of the cliff but very little else.
And nobody, apparently, wants taxes to go up on people making under $250,000 a year.
I won’t be heartbroken if no deal is made. (That said, I’ll be surprised if one doesn’t come about by mid-January.) And it’s not any representative’s duty to agree to something they don’t like.
It would be nice if they understood that inaction is a choice, and it would be good if people were held accountable for it. Their choice, after all, is between the best paths available, not between what they want and what is offered.
Sadly, in the world we live in, where people worry about the President being mean to the same Republicans who question his heritage and patriotism while they put the country’s credit at risk, any sort of accountability is for another lifetime.
They’ve somehow simultaneously staked claims on both “love it or leave it” super-nationalism and “hate the Gubmint” anarchism. If you don’t want to either destroy the government or secede, you can’t be a true patriot.
The Tea Party is powerless to stop the United States from transforming itself into the fully diverse, minority-majority nation we are destined to become. Rather than adapt to changing times, they prefer to take their ball and go home. I imagine they would consider Mr. Rauch’s riff on higher values (secular ones, to be sure!) as dangerous collectivism, as opposed to what it really reflects: a desire to maintain a community.
They are, in short, unwilling to share our country: a country, I might add, that they don’t own in the first place. And I think that is why I find the Tea Party – at least as they exist in the governing sphere – so offensive.
Fontella Bass, who sung Rescue Me, died Wednesday at 72. More here, including the gem that the song’s signature humming came about because she lost her lyric sheet.
I live in Southern California, grew up in New York and Minneapolis, and have family scattered in three countries. I am a liberal, and woe be to anyone who says that with any sort of moronic disclaimer (i.e. “I’m a liberal but I’m not crazy” or “I’m a liberal but I still believe terrorism is bad”). I’m a liberal, OK? No apologies. However, I do think, when I hear the word uttered by some people, of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I live in Southern California, grew up in New York and Minneapolis, and have family scattered in three countries. I am a liberal, and woe be to anyone who says that with any sort of moronic disclaimer (i.e. “I’m a liberal but I’m not crazy” or “I’m a liberal but I still believe terrorism is bad”). I’m a liberal, OK? No apologies. However, I do think, when I hear the word uttered by some people, of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
