So a lot of people, including the President, have been talking lately about remedying the evils of college football. The chief evil that needs remedying is apparently the Bowl Championship System, which isn't enough of a "real" championship and needs to be replaced with a system of playoffs. That's a big surprise to me, because I can think of a lot of other problems with big-time college football, and instituting playoffs would probably make them worse.
 [Read more]

Before the State of the Union address, I'd like to talk about the central issue of the Obama Presidency, which of course none of the talking heads will really get to. Obama's Presidency will hinge on how he handles the economy. More even than the wars, more than health care, more than the political sclerosis of the Senate, it's the economy. The bad news about that?

Barack Obama hasn't thought about the economy.
 [Read more]

2009 was a frustrating year for liberals and progressives, and 2010 is off to a bad start. After electing the first unapologetically liberal President of the United States in forty years, with large majorities in both the House and Senate, liberals have seen our agenda diluted, stalled, and now seriously set back. It shouldn't have happened. And now, of course, there is rage and confusion and we are circling into our old firing squad. But as I see it, there are only three questions, and they all have simple answers.

1) Who should we blame?

A. The Republicans, dummy.
 [Read more]

I'm going to shamelessly repost this from Tim F. at Balloon Juice, because it's good and timely advice. Call your member of the House and tell them to vote for health care reform. Tell them loud, and tell them proud. Here's how:

(1) Use a phone. Email has nigh on zero impact. Trust me on this. Letter mail gets read, but you don’t have time. Reach the House switchboard at (202) 224-3121 .

(2) Remember, this person works for you. You pay his or her salary and you voted for them. You’re the boss here, or at least one of them, and it’s they who should worry about what you think of them. [Read more]

Robert B. Parker died today, in Cambridge, at his writing desk. I turned on my cell after an afternoon class and found that every male member of my family had left a message with the news.
 [Read more]

I don't like to blog about narrowly political horse-race topics often, and whoever wins in Massachusetts today I'll be blogging the same big picture. If Coakley wins, it's still instructuve that she had trouble with a specific breed of Democrats (whom I will call the Big Daddy Democrats), and even if she wins there may be trouble ahead in places like Ohio and West Virginia. If COakley loses, Obama and the Dems will still be in much the same relatively difficult place as before, and the difficulties (and their relative nature) won't change radically. The big-picture advice for progressive Dems will be the same. [Read more]

The dustup between Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, and their corporate masters is mainly an entertaining sideshow, and nothing could make the triviality of these millionaires' personal grievances clearer than the simultaneous disaster in Haiti. O'Brien might have hurt feelings but he also has tens of millions of dollars, all the clean drinking water he needs, and his children safe in his home. Still, the behavior of the NBC executives reveals a lot about how big business thinks in modern America, and it's not pretty. Because it's not just corporations' management blunders that damage the overall economy; the conventional business wisdom of the last two or three decades has become, in itself, pro-recessionary.
 [Read more]

I'm watching the snow through an airport window, thinking about the posts I've meant to get to in the last hectic week or so, and about the things I have to do and the places I have to fly over the next ten days. But for today, it'll have to be a short one, and mostly a metaphor. [Read more]

When Obama's Nobel Prize was first announced, I tried to explain why the Nobel Committee might have chosen him. Today, as he accepts the Prize, seems like a good time to finish that attempted explanation. But first, two quick things I need to say to frame the discussion.
 [Read more]

Exactly three weeks before Christmas, my bank failed.

Everything's fine, at least for humble depositors like me. The FDIC seized my bank and sold it to another, presumably more stable and reliable, bank. My deposits were very, very comfortably under the $250,000 insurance limit. My checks and ATM card still work, and I don't even need to change them for new ones with the new bank's name. The new, out-of-town bank is keeping the old bank's name and running it as a division of the new bank. I can still buy groceries. I had to find out about the bank failure reading Atrios.
 [Read more]

The day before President Obama announced his Afghanistan strategy, Politico published John F. Harris's very important and newsy thumbsucker about the peril that "anti-Obama storylines" pose to Obama's Presidency. The first sentence of the article is, no kidding, "Presidential politics is about storytelling."

Storytelling. Huh. And here I thought it was about the economy and the two wars.

The Obama Presidency could easily founder. But failure is more likely to come from the Afghan highlands or the malarial swamps of Wall Street than from catchy Beltway meta-narratives. I know the media is always telling us how appearance is reality. But actually it only looks like it.
 [Read more]

The Bishop of Rhode Island has told Congressman Patrick Kennedy not to take Communion at Mass any more. They are now publicly feuding about whether or not the bishop ordered his priests not to give it to him. Forty-nine years after JFK promised not to take orders from the Church hierarchy, that hierarchy is sanctioning his nephew for not taking orders. The nominal issue is abortion. The underlying issue is the Church's sexual abuse scandal. [Read more]

Sarah Palin may be very unpopular by any traditional polling standard. However, pundits are eager to explain that the important thing isn't how many people like her, but rather the intensity of her followers' enthusiasm for her. Sure, she may poll like Herbert Hoover in 1932, but the thirty-to-forty percent of the country that approves of her includes a hard core of fanatical support. That intensity, we are repeatedly assured, will give her political power, no matter how many people oppose her. Sarah Palin is officially popular, whether the rest of us like it or not.
 [Read more]

So, the rollout of Sarah Palin's book has led to a flurry of speculation about whether she will someday run for President. That conversation, in itself, is evidence of how little the American political media listens to what it's saying.

Palin is an unpopular politician who badly botched her Vice-Presidential run. But on the other hand, she badly botched her Vice-Presidential run and is unpopular. She will never make a serious run for the White House, because she can't.
 [Read more]

Joe Lieberman has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks making a spectacle of his disloyalty to the Democratic Party. He's gone out of his way to announce that he'll filibuster against the public option, preventing the majority that gives him his committee chairmanship from bringing their most important legislation to a vote. Then, as if it weren't already clear, Lieberman wanted make sure everyone knew he'd be stumping for some Republicans in 2010. Just in case, you know, anyone mistakenly thought he was loyal to the caucus that gives him his power in the Senate.
 [Read more]

So last Sunday I was thinking: could Chris Berman be a political talking head in this country? And would he be any worse than the natterers on cable news, or the morning shows? I mean, Berman is clearly a silly and shallow blowhard, but that never stopped Tim Russert.

My suspicion, fully borne out this week by l'affaire Limbaugh, is that sports are treated far more seriously in this country than politics are, especially by our media. That a comment on the state of our political press and on our national priorities. [Read more]

So, have you heard about President Obama winning the Nobel Prize? If you'd suggested this to me yesterday, I wouldn't have believed it, let alone been able to put forth an argument for it, so I won't pretend it made intuitive sense when I woke up this morning.

I do think this prize makes more sense when you think about the nature of the Nobels for Peace, and for Literature, and understand how they work. If you think of the Nobels, or similar prizes, as straightforward and objective rewards for merit, then it seems obvious that Obama should continue paying his dues, and maybe the Middle East's dues, before it's his turn.
 [Read more]

Near the end of his televised confession Thursday night, David Letterman admitted that the details of his affairs with staffers might be embarrassing, "especially for the women."

That line was a lot of things: a self-deprecating joke, an appeal for privacy, an attempt to position himself as the defender of his former employees and girlfriends. Perhaps it was a disingenuous piece of rhetoric; perhaps it was a sincere moment of protectiveness; it could very easily be both. But whatever else it was, it was the truth.

The most vulnerable people in this scandal are the people who are not rich or famous. That means, as it so often means in sexual scandals, the women.
 [Read more]

In 1977, a publicly-admired man committed a violent crime against a woman, and the actual events are not in dispute. Between his arrest and his sentencing, the man fled the United States and settled in France. Decades later, the French strenuously resisted extraditing him to the States.

I'm talking, of course, about Ira Einhorn. Einhorn was a well-known Philadelphia activist who murdered his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and stuffed her body in a trunk. He turned up living in France, happily married and using another name, in 1997. (h/t to Atrios for the reminder)The French didn't want to extradite.
 [Read more]