12.  Romney's inability to raise money from small donors shows the lack of enthusiasm for Romney, and will make it hard for Romney to compete in the fall except as a fairly obvious extension of the crowd that funds SuperPACs, because Romney is going to be broke when the campaign ends, and while Obama will have less cash than in 2008 to work with, Romney will have far less. [Read more]

I love basketball, so I love Jeremy Lin.  He's awesome.  I also love to write about basketball, so I was waiting until I had seen more of Lin's play to write a blog about his fascinating rise to celebrity status and into the upper echelon of NBA guards.  I was not waiting to blog about Lin until idiots thought it was cool to use the ugly and out-of-bounds racial slur "chink" in prepared text to refer to him.  Nonetheless, we have been exposed this week to ESPN making wordplay with this racist slur, and to boxer Floyd Mayweather and even columnist Jason Whitlock joining the racist foot-in-mouth comment club.  So before we get back to enjoying the Linsanity where it belongs, on the hardwood (where Lin scored 28 and dished out 14 assists in a nationally televised Knick win over the Mavericks today), let's recognize the teaching moment our culture suddenly finds itself in about the not widely paused upon subject of antiAsian racism. [Read more]

That darn Tea Party is at it again, by saying what it means and meaning what it says.  The February 7 Santorum trifecta, in which the AntiRomney du jour thumped Mitt Romney by 30 in Missouri, 27 in Minnesota, and 6 in substantially Mormon Colorado (wow), is more of what has been the primary point of this 2012 Republican nomination contest:  that the Tea Party wants what it considers a real conservative, and not Mitt Romney, to run against Barack Obama.  While I picked Newt Gingrich to win the Republican nomination because he was the last AntiRomney standing, my error was not in assessing the Tea voters.  It was in failing to notice that the Republican Party still had a viable AntiRomney to whom it could turn -- former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.  Santorum became the eleventh Republican to lead national primary polling during this election season when PPP's national poll released Friday read Rick 38, Mitt 23.  So can the Romney Inevitablists finally pipe down?  How wrong do you have to be before you see it? [Read more]

Dirty Dancing teaches us a lot.  Nobody puts Baby in a corner.  There is joy in the upstate New York summer camp experience.  Sometimes it is possible to hear the pop music of the distant future if you just break into dance during an emotionally charged moment in your upbringing.  Stuff like that.  But the deepest wisdom in this Kahlil Gibran-like wellspring of profundity came from Baby Houseman's dad, Dr. Houseman, when he apologized to Patrick Swayze's Johnny, who he had cruelly misjudged.  Taking back his incorrect assessment of rough-hewn Johnny's pure motives toward Baby, Dr. Houseman set a shining example for us all by saying, "When I'm roo-wawng, I say I'm roo-wawng." [Read more]

One of my favorite Onion headlines is South Postpones Rising Again For Yet Another Year.  As Homer Simpson once said, it's funny because it's true.  And there is a parallel truth in the failure of the Tea Party to control a party in which it seems to command a majority.  How does Mitt Romney, of Romneycare and abortion rights, win a Florida primary?  Because the Tea was strained into two cups -- a Newt, and a Rick.  With Establishment carpet bombs a-bombin', and Newt lacking any defenses against Air Romney, that was just enough.  The RINO beat the Newt.  [Read more]

12. I need to get working on that Newt's-going-to-lose mea culpa (a/k/a The Dr. Houseman Column).  Before doing so, will have to write column explaining that Newt is still helping to re-elect Barack Obama.  It will rest on the recent WaPo polling showing that independents have now flipped from leaning Romney over Obama to leaning for Obama over Romney now that Romney is getting defined.  This, as much as the slow reduction in unemployment, is why Obama is just about even on approve/disapprove, which is bad news for Romney. [Read more]

I told you so.  Back in November, I posited that the primary lens through which one should view this Republican primary cycle was not as a contest among positive options, but as a contest among Romney and whoever was the most compelling alternative to Romney.  (You know, the AntiRomney.)  After Romney convincingly won his home state, I argued again in this space that if Gingrich remained in the teens nationally (which he did at all times), he would win South Carolina.  And now with Gingrich's resurgence through two debates and a decisive triumph in South Carolina, he is well poised to win Florida, and with it, assume the mantle of the front runner in the GOP race.  All of which shows that the Tea Party has taken control of the Republican Party, and also, that Barack Obama is likely to be re-elected nine months or so hence.  Why?  Three reasons: [Read more]

Three weeks into this weird, compacted four month NBA season, the experts who rated the Chicago Bulls less likely than the Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, and even the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship look pretty dumb.  The Bulls are 12-2 (and an eye-popping 7-2 on the road), and are easily the class of the league to this point.  Here's why the Bulls look like they are set to repeat as the best regular-season team, and have the best chance to win the 2012 NBA championship. [Read more]

Recently, I was in New York for business and had a bit of time to spare.  I am never in New York City and had just a bit of time to see sites.  After dashing through MoMA, I took a cab to the 9/11 Memorial and was able to visit the site just as the day was reaching dusk in lower Manhattan.  If you can, I recommend visiting. [Read more]

In Robert Redford's profound Quiz Show, a parable about America in the form of the story of fixing the game show Twenty One, Scorsese in a rare acting turn portraying Geritol executive Martin Rittenhome explains that game show's appeal:  "You see, the audience didn't tune in to watch some amazing display of intellectual ability.  They just wanted to watch the money."   That quote sums up most of the commercial appeal of Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography of corporate titan Steve Jobs:  Americans are obsessed with billionaires.  From the insipid The Social Network to last week's 60 Minutes profiling Warren Buffett's kid (He's not getting most of the billions!  Can you believe it?) to Trump, to Bloomberg, we can't stop watching the money.  The book reflects many of the flaws of our culture, and of celebrity journalism.  While playing to wonderful reviews, it is ok, but could have been much more. [Read more]

In a move that won about as much favorable press as Bud Selig declaring the All-Star Game a tie, NBA Commissioner David Stern tarnished his legacy when two days ago he voided a completely legitimate trade that would have sent star point guard Chris Paul from the New Orleans Hornets to the Los Angeles Lakers, Lakers center Pau Gasol to the Rockets, and three starters and a first round draft pick to the Hornets.  The move was a blatantly illegitimate kowtow to the owners of other franchises.  Stern needs to reverse himself, and with a figleaf of the trade being resubmitted to him modestly tweaked, hopefully will do so imminently. [Read more]

11.  It's bad to eat bluefin tuna.  I'm usually pretty up on not eating endangered things.  I won't order Chilean Sea Bass.  But after reading this piece concerning NYC's Sushi Yasuda,  I have now connected the buttery "toro" I have loved with the endangered bluefin, and will no longer be eating it.  On the other hand, kangaroos are totally not endangered.  I'm going to get some kangaroo to eat for Christmas, in a peppery cherry sauce, with a good Aussie Shiraz.  And thank Go [Read more]

A funny thing happened on the way to the ascendant Tea Party strangling the government in the bathtub.  The strangler accidentally gave away the Presidency, the Senate, and increasingly likely, maybe even the House.  The question of whether the GOP will nominate Newton Leroy Gingrich to run against Barack Obama is the same question as whether the Tea faction would rather blow up the Republican Party it has taken over than win elections.  At the moment, I think the answer to both questions is yes. [Read more]

While in a Starbucks on vacation this week, I was surprised to see that the New York Times placed above the fold a supposed news item about how law schools aren't actually training folks to be lawyers.  This isn't really news to anyone who knows anything about American law schools, much less anyone who incurred three years of debt to attend one.  But the real reason the piece was a supposed news item is that it was in fact a very long, wide-ranging, and thoughtful editorial piece about the many failings of legal academe.  This blog is about why I agree with its many critiques of our broken legal academe. [Read more]

President Obama's re-election is becoming more likely.  While the President's approval rating recently hit an all-time low of 38%, which was lower than most Presidents at this time in their first term, two realities are converging:  (1) his approval has risen in key states, and also five points nationally since then; and (2) approval ratings are not presently as predictive of next November's vote as they used to be. [Read more]

It is an article of faith for some, both on the evangelical right and the secular left, that we live in the end times.  For every millennialist who is reading Nostradamus or prophecies of the end of days in the Bible, there is a secularist waiting for aliens to take their "container" from the Earth, or a Dmitry Orlov prophesying the apocalyptic end of modern culture from the end of our free recourse to oil.  Lost in these more grand hypotheses of abrupt ends to the world we know is a deeper, darker truth with more grounding in science than any of them.  It is this.  With supplies of arable land declining, and the number of dairy cows that can be sustained static or falling, our diets are threatened with chaos.  The science doesn't lie.  The numbers are there.  Dairy wanes, while the planet's gluttony for cheeseburgers and pizzas increases exponentially.  This post tears the roof off of the coming culinary catastrophe our complacent consumption conceals:  Peak Cheese. [Read more]

It has been three years since Barack Obama's near-landslide victory of 2008.  The question of whether he will be the seventh of the last nine elected Presidents to secure a second term (Bush 43, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower, Roosevelt) or the third of the last nine to be a one-termer (Bush 41, Carter) is a close one.  Despite his fairly low approval ratings, Obama is apparently roughly a coinflip to win re-election, with the outcome hinging upon his opponent and whether the economy ticks up modestly in the next year.  This is a first in an irregular series of previews framing that contest and making observations about particular states. [Read more]

It's not nice to compare people to Adolf Hitler.  Hank Williams, Jr. found out that other people think this (though he doesn't) when ESPN pulled his hit theme "Are You Ready For Some Football" from the start of Monday Night Football after Hank compared the 44th President to Der Fuhrer.  Punished or not, Bocephus has lots of company with his Hitler schtick.  So to paraphrase Big Bank Hank (oh, wait, that's a reference to Rapper's Delight -- I didn't mean to start "jiving", Hank Williams, Jr.!), Are You Ready For Some Hitler?  Welcome to Godwin-a-Land, as we explore the empty, omnipresent metaphor that trivializes the greatest evil humanity has ever known, while simultaneously blowing into silly bits roughly half of every serious discussion in the history of the Internet. [Read more]

We love sports because they are narrative.  We organize everything into narratives:  our jobs, relationships, and lives.  Sports can be morality plays of good guys against bad guys, nationalistic narratives of the USA against the Russians, redemptive narratives of comebacks, little guy narratives of the-underdog-become-the-champion.  But they are always narratives.  The 2011 World Series illustrated an immutable law of sports, that is at once a narrative principle and yet entirely true in reality -- that catastrophic, emotional collapses in championship baseball make a series loss inevitable.    [Read more]

Wilt Chamberlain once said, "Nobody loves Goliath."  While stories about Chamberlain's personal life tend to belie that bit of self-deprecation, it is true that sports fans love an underdog.  This explains why there was so much rooting for the Boston Red Sox when in the 2004 ALCS they came the first team in baseball history to come back from a 3-0 playoff deficit and won Boston's first championship since 1918.  It explains how exhilarating the 1980 Miracle on Ice was, when the USA topped the Russian juggernaut in the semifinals en route to a gold medal. [Read more]