Someone take Breitbart's DVD of Dr. Strangelove Away from Him

The conservative columnist, Andrew Breitbart, speaking just days ago to a very modestly attended dinner of the Massachusett's Tea Party, says he has been told by "major" military leaders that they "have his back" if violence were to break out between the right and the left in America.





I would be a tad unsettled by his claim if Breitbart hadn't demonstrated such a clear "tell" right after the statement. (1:05)  You're best off staying away from the poker table, Andrew.

Protecting Madison from the Contagion of Soccer

Madison Memorial v. Verona

In the newly released movie "Contagion," the MEV-1 virus is spreading quickly all over the planet, facilitated by globalization and infecting its victims with an incurable course of fever and coughing followed by quick death. The CDC determines that the only way to control the spread of the disease is to isolate people with the disease from coming into contact with those not yet suffering from it, let it run its course, and hope not too many become infected.   The movie provides a parallel for the remedy for protecting American sports fans from the contagion of soccer.  Prevent as many people as possible from any exposure to the sport, in hopes that it will just slowly disappear from the scene.   In the place of epidemiologists, doctors and nurses, the ones responsible at the local level for this "cure" are the TV sportscasters and newspaper sports writers, who prefer to cover virtually any high school sport more than soccer, including golf, tennis, volleyball and cross-country. 

When not working or occasionally blogging, I help my friend John manage the Madison Memorial High School Varsity Soccer Team.

Here is an email I sent this morning to the parents and players of the Memorial Varsity and JV soccer teams, copy to every sports reporter I could locate at the Wisconsin State Journal:

Dear Memorial parents and soccer players:

I am writing to make it clear that I have not dropped the ball (the round one, not the elliptical spheroid one so beloved in Madison)  in trying to get the scores of Memorial’s recent soccer games to appear in the Wisconsin State Journal. 

You will see that I have copied everyone I could think of at the Wisconsin State Journal with this email, because I am frustrated.  I am ignoring the classic admonition:  “never get into a pissing contest with people that buy their ink by the barrel.”

Twice this year our scores have only been published after I called the newspaper back the day after the game to point out that the score did not get in the following morning’s paper.

After the Muskego game on Friday night, I sent the first email attached above to the Wisconsin State Journal staff.  (I have taken to emailing our score as a way of establishing that I got this task done.)  Again, the Muskego score did not appear in Saturday’s paper.   So I waited until after 3:00 PM yesterday, when the sports desk telephone is manned, and called to ask that it get in the Sunday paper.   I pleasantly spoke to “Matthew,” explained to him how much our players appreciated seeing their results in the box scores, and told him I was re-emailing the score to him.  He said he understood completely. The second email attached is what I sent him.  I pressed "send" while he was on the phone with me, and he acknowledged getting the score and promised to get it into the paper on Sunday.  Alas, it didn’t happen. 

We didn’t rate less than one column inch in the Scoreboard section of today’s Sports section.  But if you’re a true sports aficionado, here is what you could have seen in the Scoreboard section at WSJ’s page D15:

1.        Two fellows who got holes-in-one playing golf.  (I am sure they and their two families were happy to see their names in print.)

2.       The three column inch box score from an eight-man football game between Stockbridge and Madison Abundant Life.

3.       Three column inches listing the starting positions for an Indy Racing League event in Motegi, Japan.

4.       Two column inches of the attendance figures for Brewer games.

Matthew also told me on the telephone, apparently by way of assuaging my disappointment, that this week we will see the season preview for soccer in the Wisconsin State Journal.  He was so seemingly upbeat in telling me this I didn’t have the heart to explain that our season was already well past half-way over. 

I have concluded that our local print sports reporting establishment (we’ve made it on TV) has decided that soccer is either beyond their ken, a “wussy” sport, or poses some insidious threat to the established sports priorities in Madison.   It is almost like they are trying to prevent the contagious spread of some “Old World” virus into the pristine but unprotected body of American sports. 

Here is what I would suggest to the State Journal sports staff:  There are more youth soccer players in the Madison area by an order of magnitude than there are youth football players.  This is only going to increase in disparity.  You are fighting against the tide, and when that tide becomes too great to continue to ignore, you are going to find your staff without anyone knowing diddley-squat about soccer.  You are behind the power curve on soccer.

If all of this sounds a tad bitter, you’re reading it right!

Kim Grimmer

OK, so I get this off my chest by 9:45 a.m, and after church settle in for a great day of watching sports on TV.  While searching the State Journal for the non-existent Spartan box score I had been excited to see in the "On the Air" column that Fox 47 would be broadcasting via tape delay the Manchester United - Chelsea English Premier League game right after the Packers game ended.  Only they don't.  Instead, they put on a half hour of post-game gibberish  followed by "Everyone Loves Raymond."  (I don't.)  Now one of the great real football games from England on tap this season will be aired tonight beginning at 10:30 p.m..

American exceptionalism at its finest!

Sarah and Glen - of no consequence

Joe McGinnis' new book about Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Seaching for the Real Sarah Palin, is due to be released in five days 

The blogosphere, particularly the liberal blogs, has been pulsating like crazy over revelations that seemed to begin with the National Enquirer that McGinnis had uncovered that Palin, as a 25 year old cub sports reporter for an Anchorage TV station had been sexual with Glen Rice, then a young University of Michigan basketball star playing in the Great Alaskan Shootout.  People are trying to use this to demonstrate everything from the hypocrisy of Palin's support of abstinence-only sex education to her being Jezebel incarnate to her lack of journalistic integrity!  If the event in fact happened, it doesn't mean a damn thing more than Sarah Palin was young once with normal sex drives and was attracted to a good-looking athletic guy.  Young people like to screw.  Full stop. When they grow older, they often recalibrate their attitudes on sex.  To try to make anything significant out of this alleged incident is the product of Liberali loony-ness or racism.

Sean Pendergast  has an amusing post on the whole silly blow-up at the Houston Press, the Houston Texas version of our own Isthmus, with the headline:  "Glen Rice allegedly slept with Sarah Palin (W/ VIDEO)."  He keeps the whole story in perspective.

Money quotes of Pendergast and the embedded video:

If we want confirmation that this tryst went down, all we need to do is go to some old YouTube footage of Palin's (then under her maiden name of Sarah Heath) sportscasting career in Alaska and the proof is right there. You'll see....

Okay, here are my favorite parts of this video, in chronological order, and when I get to the proof for the Palin-Rice Shootout '87, I'll point it out:


3. For those who espouse the point of view that Alaska really isn't part of the United States, this sportscast leading off with Iditarod coverage should be Exhibit A in their defense.

4. RICE-PALIN PROOF RIGHT HERE: So now that the Iditarod lead has firmly established we are watching an Alaska newscast, we move onto the next story. Keep in mind, this is ALASKA we are talking about, so story number two, after dogs dragging sleds through miles of arctic tundra, should be what? Hockey? Curling? Ice sculpting? Ice fishing? Nope...BIG TEN BASKETBALL! Specifically, Purdue versus Michigan...and star sophomore GLEN RICE! Sorry, but a Michigan basketball game getting the two-spot on a sports newscast in Alaska ahead of hockey is about as random as a story about noodling winding up on the Longhorn Network ahead of a story about Mack Brown. In short, Palin can't quit Glen Rice.

5. At the 0:53 mark..."Purdue is killin' Michigan early on." Killin'. Great word.

6. At the 1:10 mark, Todd Mitchell of Purdue got fouled halfheartedly on a layup by, of all people, GLEN RICE! This newscast would have been a much better retrospective if there had been traces of jilted bitterness from Palin for Rice not ever calling back after the one-night stand. "Todd Mitchell rebounds and just look at that lazy defense by Michigan's Glen Rice...isn't that just like a MAN to not give a shit about anyone or anything!!!"

Is Governor Walker Falling Behind the Power Curve on His Jobs Promise?

The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development's monthly job numbers just came out at noon today, and the month-to-month changes reflected in them are not any prettier than the nation's as a whole, and in some sense less pretty.

The adjusted rate of unemployment for August in the Badger State ticked up a tenth of a percent from 7.8% in July to 7.9% in August, still better than the current national average of 9.1%.  However, the national unemployment rate dropped from 9.6% to 9.1% over the past twelve months, while Wisconsin's employment rate over the same period only improved by an abysmal one-tenth of a percent, 8.0% in August 2010 to 7.9% last month.  The improvement in the U.S. rate looks even better than Wisconsin's when you consider that the labor force in Wisconsin grew by only 6,400 people in that twelve-month period, while the U.S. labor force grew by close to 2,000,000.

I previously suggested during the turmoil back in February and March that if Governor Walker could show, by this November, a solid trend-line towards meeting his campaign promise of 250,000 new jobs by January 2015, it would help to take wind out of the sails of the recall effort.  For many months thereafter, the monthly job numbers favored his being able to accomplish this.  Now they have stagnated for several months, and if extrapolated at the current rate of job creation, the Governor will fall short of his promise by some 50,000 jobs.  Moreover, if you assume that the scoring on total job creation for the Governor should really begin with the improving February 2011 job numbers, based on the seemingly logical concept that his budget policies didn't kick in until then at the earliest, the job creation extrapolation is wretched, with only 125,000 new jobs created by the end of his first term, or half of what he promised.

The Governor's focus on private non-farm job creation also serves to obscure the fact that the DWD figures for total employment reflect that the state actually shed 1,000 total jobs since the governor came to office. Presumably this total loss was caused by a loss in farm employment, which seems strange given that farming is becoming a boom industry now with third-world demand for more protein and caloric diets.

I have to guess that the Governor is now torn between ostensibly toeing the Tea Party/Eric Cantor/Jim DeWine line on the President's new American Jobs Act, and hoping desperately for the bill to pass in its entirety.  Will the President and Governor Walker be strange bedfellows growing out of their similar promises on jobs?  All politicians need to be strange bedfellows when it comes to job creation.

Magnificent Dummies

Dummy:  a feigned reception of a pass in soccer or rugby.

Dummy:  a dolt.

Two Magnificent Dummies:

Pele:




Perry:

Hooray! Gail Collins is Back.

Gail Collins, back in the fold.






After taking the summer off to write a book, Gail Collins returns to the New York Times op-ed page with her take on last night's Republican candidates debate from the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.  Among her observations:

Perry and Romney had an interesting dust-up over who did the better job of creating employment. This is a fight that is going to go on for the next several months. Statistics will be cited, and by the time it is over you will come to understand why young people don’t dream of running away from home to become an economist.

“Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt,” Perry said at one point. “George Bush and his predecessors created jobs at a faster rate than you did,” retorted Romney. Score.  Republicans, do you want to trust your nomination to a guy who makes Mitt Romney look clever? Just think about it.

I was sorry that no one asked Perry more of the really critical questions. For instance, is it true that he saved his daughter’s puppy from being eaten by a coyote? This allegedly happened when Perry went jogging “packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets.” Because, as he says, he is “that kind of guy.” His puppy-rescue is a stirring picture, especially considering that Perry’s chief competitor is the man who drove to Canada with the family dog Seamus strapped to the roof of the car.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder. Where were his bodyguards? How did the puppy keep up with him if he was running? And where exactly was he carrying the Ruger? Many joggers I know have trouble hanging on to a water bottle.

Perry and Romney were not the only debaters. There was Jon (I Believe in Evolution) Huntsman Jr., hoping to be next in the Not-Mitt Sweepstakes. Rick Santorum, Bachmann and Ron Paul ganged up on Perry for trying to get Texas girls inoculated against cervical cancer. This is a big deal for some social conservatives, but it’s still interesting to think that we have presidential candidates who believe that they could score a stunning upset victory on an anti-cancer-prevention platform.

Santorum, ever hopeful, has been telling people that the competition is “like an episode of ‘Survivor,’ ” but I am thinking you need a more depressing image — maybe like an episode of “Dog the Bounty Hunter” or one of the several current television shows about people who bid on abandoned storage bin lockers.

The debate was at the Reagan library, and no matter what you think of Ronald Reagan, this crew makes him look good. It is the genius of the Republican Party in recent decades that it continually selects candidates who make the ones who went before appear better. Remember how great George H.W. Bush seemed once we’d lived with his son for a while? And I have a strong suspicion that whoever the nominee is this time will make us yearn for the magic that was W.

I already agreed on the last point.

"Like a drunk swearing off hooch for the hundredth time;" the GOP really means it this time!

Mike Lofgren is a Republican congressional staffer who retired on June 17 of this year.  He served for some three decades, including stints as an aide to both the House and Senate budget committees .  He cares very little for big "D" Democratic principles or policy.  But apparently he has decided the modern Republican Party has become the functional equivalent of an asylum taken over by the residents.  He wrote an op-ed in the L.A. Times back in June, shortly after resigning in disgust, that made it clear that the nation's deficit problems were, at least in his view, the creation of the GOP, which then used the problems to take the U.S. economy hostage.

Money Quotes:

The failure of our leaders to offer realistic budget proposals was a major reason I decided to retire after 28 years in Congress, most of them as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees. My party talks a good game, railing about the immorality of passing debt on to our children. But the same Congressional Budget Office that punctured Obama's budget also concluded that the major policies that swung the budget from a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion in 2001 to the present 10-year deficit of $6.2 trillion were Republican in origin.

Consider the two signature GOP policies of George W. Bush's presidency: the wars and the tax cuts. Including debt service costs, Bush's wars have cost about $1.7 trillion to date. Additionally, as part of being "a nation at war," the Pentagon has spent about $1 trillion more than was expected in the last decade on things other than direct war costs, which has been a bonanza for military contractors but a disaster for the federal budget. And finally, there has been another trillion dollars spent domestically in response to 9/11, including spending on such things as establishing the Homeland Security Department and increasing the budgets for the State Department and the Veterans Administration.

The Bush tax cuts have added another $3 trillion in red ink. While Republican leaders wail that Americans — particularly their rich contributors — are overtaxed, the facts say otherwise: U.S. taxpayers, particularly the wealthiest, pay far less in taxes than they would in most other developed countries. Today, the 400 wealthiest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 125 million. The GOP insists that those wealthy people use their money to create jobs, and that taxing them more heavily would ultimately hurt the economy. But, if that's so, why was the rate of job creation in the decade after the Bush tax cuts the poorest in any decade since before World War II?

Like a drunk swearing off hooch for the hundredth time, Republicans are now trying to show they are serious about controlling the deficit by saying they won't raise the debt ceiling unless they get through some of their cost-saving projects, like privatizing Medicare. Meanwhile, they want revenue increases "off the table," even though, at 14.8% of GDP, revenues are at their lowest level in 60 years. And the budget passed by the Republican-controlled House further cuts taxes on the wealthy, a fact it glosses over with optimistic growth forecasts.

If that whets your appetite, there is another piece he has recently authored in the progressive on-line magazine Truthout entitled:  "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult."  that makes for even more interesting reading.  It is a much longer piece than the L.A. Times op-ed, but well worth the time to read.


Money Quotes:

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy..

. . .

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

. . .

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black. Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.

 Harsh assessment.  Guess he finally decided not to drink the Kool-Aid.

When You Haven't The Time to Sort Out The Data and Do Some Thinking, Fall Back on Ideology.

Bruce Bartlett, former adviser to Republican Presidents, explains that the time demands of daily living make it easier, for everyone, including politicians, to avoid sorting through facts and simply default to ideological positions.  He takes on Eric Cantor and the Democrats in this piece from his Economix blog on the New York Times website.

Money Quotes:

For those who lack the time, knowledge or education to think deeply about events as they happen, political parties and movements provide predigested ideas, perspectives and remedies.

Unfortunately, people are sometimes led astray by those they trust for insights, information and solutions to problems. This may result from corruption or mendacity, rigidity of thought, simple error or ignorance. And it’s human nature for people and organizations to be reluctant to acknowledge mistakes and to have an almost unlimited capacity to rationalize and force facts and theories to conform to their self-interest.

Does being ideologically pure mean the truth doesn't matter anymore?

Fox News Lies.  Again.  Repeatedly. 

A news organization shown to deliberately distort the truth should lose the trust of all viewers, regardless of their political persuasion.  If we are going to climb our way out of our current mess, we all need to demand accuracy in reporting on both sides of the political spectrum.




Read the truth behind this propaganda at Media Matters. Hoffa did not suggest violence.  He pushed for voter activism.



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