Guess What? (For 2008)

William Safire wrote speeches for the political Prince of Darkness, The Trickster. He rehabilitated himself, post-Watergate, as a Times Op-Ed columnist and a grammarian. (Safire derived 10 books from his "On Language" column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine until he retired from the fishwrap in 2005.) Safire is a clever wordsmith and he originated the annual guessing game about the coming year in the NYTimes. Pop quizzes, hated by students and loved by teachers (The power-trip was intoxicating amid a chorus of groans.), can appear anywhere. This blog is no sanctuary. If this is a (fair & balanced) current events search and destroy mission, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Office Pool, 2008
By William Safire

This is the 34th annual office pool in this space, a New Year’s tradition that has become the most excruciating multiple-choice prediction test in world media. Nostradamus himself couldn’t score over 50 percent. Last year, despite a good bet on surging optimism in Iraq, I was mistaken 12 times out of 15. But the audacity of hope springs eternal; here, together with fearless readers, I go. For each item, choose one, all or none.

1. The business headline of the year will be:
(a) Big Bounce to 15,000 Dow After Soft Landing
(b) Recession Has Brokers Selling Apples for Five Euros on Wall Street
(c) Subprime Mess Was Greatly Exaggerated
(d) China Buys Boeing

2. The Academy Award for Best Picture will go to:
(a) “There Will Be Blood”
(b) “Sweeney Todd”
(c) “American Gangster”
(d) “The Kite Runner”
(e) “Charlie Wilson’s War”

(But don’t expect winners to cross picket lines to pick up their Oscars.)

3. The Roberts Supreme Court will decide that:
(a) gun rights belong to the individual, but the Second Amendment’s key limitation is that gun possession should be “well-regulated”
(b) states can require voter ID to prevent fraud even if it reduces access
(c) lethal injection is not cruel or unusual punishment if it isn’t painful
(d) the “ancient right” of habeas corpus applies to Guantánamo detainees no matter what law Congress passes

4. The fiction sleeper best seller will be:
(a) “Missy,” a first novel by the British playwright Chris Hanna
(b) “Shadow and Light,” by Jonathan Rabb, set in prewar Germany

5. The nonfiction success will be:
(a) “American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A.,” by Nick Taylor
(b) “What Do We Do Now?” interregnum advice by Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution
(c) “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History” by Ted Sorensen, President Kennedy’s alter ego
(d) “Basic Brown,” a memoir by Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco
(e) “Human,” by the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga
(f) “Come to Think of It,” by Daniel Schorr

6. The media world will be rocked as:
(a) fizzling ratings for a China-dominated ’08 Olympics induce G.E. to sell NBC Universal to cable-departing Time Warner
(b) “pod push-back” by music customers threatens Apple’s dominance of digital music space
(c) Google challenges telecommunications giants by taking steps to provide both telephone and video on the Internet

7. In United States foreign policy debates:
(a) success in Iraq will embarrass cut-and-run Democrats
(b) failure in Iraq will sink stay-the-course Republicans
(c) Iraq muddling along won’t affect the American election

8. The de facto dictator truly leaving the political scene this year will be:
(a) Hugo Chávez
(b) Vladimir V. Putin (afflicted by the Time cover jinx)
(c) Robert Mugabe
(d) Fidel Castro

9. By year’s end, American diplomats will be negotiating openly with:
(a) Hamas
(b) the Taliban
(c) Iran

10. The two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute appears when:
(a) a free election or civil strife in the West Bank and Gaza brings a unified, neighborly government to the Palestinians
(b) an Ehud Barak-Benjamin Netanyahu rematch results in a majoritarian, rightist coalition victory
(c) the Jerusalem division issue is resolved by expanding the official city limits to embrace two capitals

11. Assuming the Iowa caucuses to be meaningless pollster-media hype, the January primary state with the biggest influence on the outcome of both parties’ nominations will be:
(a) New Hampshire
(b) Michigan
(c) South Carolina
(d) Florida

12. The American troop level in Iraq at year’s end will be:
(a) the present 152,000
(b) the pre-surge 130,000
(c) 100,000 and dropping steadily

13. The issue most affecting the vote on Election Day will be:
(a) immigration: absorb ’em or deport ’em
(b) taxation: soak the rich or lift all boats
(c) health plans: incentivize or socialize
(d) diplomacy: accommodating realism or extending freedom

14. The presidential election will hinge primarily on:
(a) a debate blooper
(b) success or failure in Iraq
(c) Hispanic backlash
(d) a personal scandal
(e) a terror attack on the United States
(f) racism/sexism
(g) the economy, stupid

15. The Democratic ticket will be:
(a) Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama
(b) Obama-Clinton
(c) Clinton-Bill Richardson
(d) Obama-Joseph Biden
(e) John Edwards-Dianne Feinstein

16. The Republican ticket will be:
(a) Rudolph Giuliani-Mike Huckabee
(b) Mitt Romney-Gen. David Petraeus
(c) John McCain-Michael Bloomberg

17. The winning theme in November will be:
(a) time for a change
(b) don’t let them take it away
(c) experience counts
(d) nobody’s perfect

18. The election will be decided on:
(a) charisma
(b) experience
(c) character
(d) sex
(e) money
(f) issues

19. As 2009 dawns, Americans will face:
(a) a leftward march, with the Clintons in the White House and a Democratic Congress feeling no tax, entitlement or earmark restraint
(b) creative gridlock, as President McCain finds common ground with a centrist Democratic Congress
(c) a stunning G.O.P. conservative resurgence, with the equally long-shot Washington Redskins girding for the 2009 Super Bowl

My picks: 1 (a); 2 (a); 3 (all); 4 (b); 5 (a); 6 (b); 7 (c); 8 (d), and I’ve been losing this bet against Castro for 33 years; 9 (none); 10 (all); 11(c) 12 (c); 13 (b); 14 (a); 15 (a); 16 (c); 17 (d); 18 (c); 19 (b). Lose this list.

[William Safire, a former Times Op-Ed columnist, is the chairman of the Dana Foundation.

The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropy with principal interests in brain science, immunology, and arts education. Charles A. Dana, a New York State legislator, industrialist and philanthropist, was president of the Dana Foundation from 1950 to 1966 and actively shaped its programs and principles until his death in 1975.

Safire left public relations to join Richard Nixon's campaign in the 1960 White House race, and rejoined Nixon's staff in the 1968 campaign. After Nixon's 1968 victory Safire served as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew; he is well known for having created Agnew's famous term, "nattering nabobs of negativism."

Safire joined the New York Times as a political columnist in 1973. In 1978, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary on Bert Lance's alleged budgetary irregularities. However, subsequent investigations by Congress could find no wrongdoing.

Since 1995 Safire has served as a member of the Pulitzer Board. After ending his op-ed column in 2005, Safire became the full-time chief executive of the Dana Foundation where he has been chairman since 2000.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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Historical Amnesia Thanks To The Peripheralists?

Professor Garry Wills wrote a provacative monograph entitled, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003). Wills analyzed the political impact of the "3/5 Compromise" that brought Southern and pro-slavery support for ratification of the Constitution before 1789. By virture of counting slaves at a 3:5 ratio in the Census of 1790 and thereafter until the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States in 1865, the slaveholding states gained representation in the House of Representatives by the counting of every 5 black slaves as equivalent to 3 free whites. In the contested election of 1800, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson over John Adams; President Thomas Jefferson was the beneficiary of disproportionate Southern support, thanks to Congressional delegations that were enlarged by the "3/5 Compromise." Wills wrote in the preface to Negro President that a Great Divide separates historians in the United States: historians like Garry Wills and Eric Foner who see slavery as central to this country's history and noted historians like Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby see slavery as peripheral to our history. So, the Centralist Eric Foner calls attention to a void in our fondness for bicentennial celebrations. The Peripheralists would prevail if not for Eric Foner. If this is (fair & balanced) unorthodoxy, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Forgotten Step Toward Freedom
By Eric Foner

We Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that country’s banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences, museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, “Amazing Grace,” about William Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in abolition.

What explains this divergence? Throughout the 1780s, the horrors of the Middle Passage were widely publicized on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1792 the British Parliament stood on the verge of banning the trade. But when war broke out with revolutionary France, the idea was shelved. Final prohibition came in 1807 and it proved a major step toward the abolition of slavery in the empire.

The British campaign against the African slave trade not only launched the modern concern for human rights as an international principle, but today offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character. It remains a historic chapter of which Britons of all origins can be proud.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade.

The American Revolution threw the slave trade and slavery itself into crisis. In the run-up to war, Congress banned the importation of slaves as part of a broader nonimportation policy. During the War of Independence, tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines. Many accompanied the British out of the country when peace arrived.

Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the war and lost the largest number of slaves.

The slave trade was a major source of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. South Carolina’s delegates were determined to protect slavery, and they had a powerful impact on the final document. They originated the three-fifths clause (giving the South extra representation in Congress by counting part of its slave population) and threatened disunion if the slave trade were banned, as other states demanded.

The result was a compromise barring Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until 1808. Some Anti-Federalists, as opponents of ratification were called, cited the slave trade clause as a reason why the Constitution should be rejected, claiming it brought shame upon the new nation.

The outbreak of the slave revolution in Haiti in the early 1790s sent shock waves of fear throughout the American South and led to new state laws barring the importation of slaves. But in 1803, as cotton cultivation spread, South Carolina reopened the trade. The Legislature of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory also allowed the importation of slaves. From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.

By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty.

It is easy to understand, however, why the trade’s abolition appears so anticlimactic. Banning American participation in the slave trade did not end the shipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. Some three million more slaves were brought to Brazil and Spanish America before the trade finally ended. With Southerners dominating the federal government for most of the period before the Civil War, enforcement was lax and the smuggling of slaves into the United States continued.

Those who hoped that ending American participation in the slave trade would weaken or destroy slavery were acutely disappointed. In the United States, unlike the West Indies, the slave population grew by natural increase. This was not because American owners were especially humane, but because most of the South lies outside the tropical environment where diseases like yellow fever and malaria exacted a huge toll on whites and blacks alike.

As slavery expanded into the Deep South, a flourishing internal slave trade replaced importation from Africa. Between 1808 and 1860, the economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the sale of slaves to the cotton fields of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. But demand far outstripped supply, and the price of slaves rose inexorably, placing ownership outside the reach of poorer Southerners.

Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the “democratization” of slavery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves, along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced by South Carolina’s political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.

More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have reinforced Southerners’ demands to annex to the United States areas suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America. Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many Southerners dreamed.

Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of slavery.

[Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. His Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) won the Bancroft Prize in 1989.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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The Truth About Anti-Mexican Immigration Rhetoric

"Baldo" tells the truth about all of the anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant yada yada yada. Sergio (Papi to Baldo and Gracie) talks with his aunt, Tia Carmen (Baldo's and Gracie's great-aunt) over the morning fishwrap. The topic is multiculturalism. If this is (fair & balanced) universalism, so be it.

[x Baldo]

Click on image to enlarge (12/27/07)

[Hector Cantú created his first newspaper cartoon when he was 12. "It was a small-town newspaper that just happened to be owned by my brother, but I think it counts," Hector says. "It's called 'networking.'"

He studied journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and today is Editorial Director at Heritage Auction Galleries, where he's able to personally inspect work by his favorite artists. Yee-uh.

He previously was Production Director at Quick in Dallas, TX, and Managing Editor at award-winning Hispanic Business magazine in Santa Barbara, CA, and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Hollywood Reporter.]

[Carlos Castellanos was always interested in drawing. "I remember my dad always drawing cartoons for me when I was kid," Carlos says. At about age 7, he recalls watching his first episode of "Bewitched." Watching Darrin Stephens sitting behind a large drawing table and working from home, inspired Carlos to do the same.

He began his freelance career as an illustrator in 1981, while still in college. He now keeps himself busy doing work for magazines, book publishers, ad agencies, corporate clients and, of course, "Baldo." To browse through some of his more recent commercial work visit CarlosCastellanos.com.

Carlos lives in South Florida with his wife, Maria; sons Chase, Alec, Ty and family pooch Jet.]

Copyright © 2007 Hector Cantú and Carlos Castellanos

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Hear! Hear!

What a mess! The recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto might open Pandora's box for U. S. foreign policy. What a wonderful beginning for 2008. If this is (fair & balanced) Schadenfreude, so be it.

[x Time]
Enough with Democracy!
By Robert Baer

Benazir Bhutto's assassination Thursday should put a bitter end to the Bush administration's misguided policy of shoving democracy down the throat of the Middle East and Muslim world. Since 9/11 there has not been a single country in that region that has had peaceful and successful elections. Hamas's victory in Gaza, the stalemate in Lebanon, elections in Iraq and now Pakistan — none of them have led to the stability, modernity, and civil society this administration promised us.

The common denominator between Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq is an ongoing war, wars without end, wars that poison democracy. The Bush administration is particularly culpable in creating the chaos in Pakistan because it forced a premature reconciliation between President Musharraf and Bhutto; it forced Musharraf to lift martial law; it showered money on Musharraf to fight a war that was never popular in Pakistan. The administration could not understand that it can't have both in Pakistan — a democracy and a war on terrorism.

The immediate reaction in the United Sates will be visceral: al-Qaeda killed Bhutto because she was too secular and too close to the United States, an agent of American imperialism. It will be of some comfort that the front lines of terrorism are thousands of miles away; that we are fighting "them" there rather than in lower Manhattan; that there are heroes like Bhutto ready to fight and die for democracy, moderation and rationality.

But this misses the point. The real problem in Pakistan undermining democracy is that it is a deeply divided, artificial country, created by the British for their expediency rather than for the Pakistanis. Independent Pakistan has always been dominated by a strong military. And democracy will only be nurtured when the wars on its border come to an end, whether in Afghanistan or Kashmir, and the need for the military to meddle in politics is removed. And never before.

Another irony underscored by Bhutto's assassination is that after 9/11 the Bush administration justified going to war in Iraq to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But as of today all that it has managed to do is invade two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which has weapons of mass destruction, while leaving Iran and Pakistan to fester — two countries that one day very well promise to threaten us with their weapons of mass destruction.

It is high time Americans return a pragmatic president to the White House. When George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and Norman Schwartzkopf decided not to occupy Iraq in 1991 at the end of the first Gulf War, they understood that imposing an American style democracy wasn't going to work.

[Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down.]

Copyright © 2007 Time, Inc.

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Pig Is My Kind Of Historian

Goat is the sensible one and Pig is, well, just Pig. This illustration of Pig's historical acumen came out of the blue after Christmas. If this is (fair & balanced) historicism, so be it.

[x Pearls Before Swine]

Click on image to enlarge (12/26/07)

[Stephan Pastis is a lawyer-turned-cartoonist.]

Copyright © 2007 Stephan Pastis

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No More Slogging Through Class, Now It's Blogging Through Class

The beat goes on. Juco teachers like Kris Seago innovate like the devil. Does blogging cause learning? There are bloggers who are earning bucks from online advertising within their blogs. That might be the only lesson to be learned: a fool and his money are soon parted. If this is (fair & balanced) nonsense, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
ACC Students Blog For Class: Online Assignments Engage Students, Encourage Discussion, Professor Says
By Katie Humphrey

From homes, libraries and coffee shops, Austin Community College students are sharing their thoughts on election primaries, government spending, education and criminal justice policy.

And their online essays, written as blogs and posted for the world to see, fill requirements for class.

ACC professor Kris Seago started requiring students to maintain blogs when he taught an online course about Texas and local government during summer session. Impressed with the students' work and enthusiasm, he now requires blogging of all of his students in Texas and national government classes.

"Prior to this, I would have them write relatively lengthy academic papers, which I could just tell they despised," Seago said. "They weren't fun for them to write, and they weren't fun for me to grade. I thought, 'Why not try to get them to write papers online?'?"

The blogging accounts for one-third of students' grades — class participation and exams make up the remainder — and starts with an assignment to build a blog with links to both traditional and nontraditional news sources. Then the students pick an article on a topic of their choosing, as long as it relates to the level of government covered in class, summarize it and explain to their classmates why they should read it. Subsequent assignments build off of commentary on articles, their own editorials and commentary on classmates' editorials, among other things.

"I'm impressed at how it forces people to be interested or have an opinion ... and you're accountable to it," said Roni Taylor, 31, a part-time ACC student in Seago's fall semester Texas and local government class.

Educators have been incorporating online requirements into classes for years, starting with posts to message boards. They are venturing into blogs and wikis, programs that allow multiple users to produce and edit content, said Paul Resta, a professor at the University of Texas College of Education and director of the Learning Technology Center.

He encourages his UT graduate students to blog, and he also requires them to research and write an entry on an education-related topic for Wikipedia, an online user-written encyclopedia.

"That's much more interactive, much more engaging to students," Resta said. "How motivating is it (to write) something that only the professor reads?"

Brian Morgan, 16, a high school student who is dually enrolled at ACC, said he has been wanting to start a blog, and the class gave him a starting point. He said that he welcomed the opportunity to share his opinions with his classmates and that knowing they would read his essays compelled him to do more research to support them.

"The class ... is not so much about putting facts in your brain and spitting them out on a test or in a paper, but really helping you think about government and engage in it," Morgan said. "Instead of (a paper) being read by one person, or two at most, it's out there for the world."

[Katie Humphrey is a staff writer for the Austin American-Statesman.]

Copyright © 2007 The Austin American-Statesman

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Juiced? Don't Worry, Be Happy

In this season of discontent about performance-enhancing drugs, a pair of academic baseball junkies offer a contrarian view of steroids and HGH. The stuff doesn't work. If this is (fair & balanced) revisionism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
More Juice, Less Punch
By Jonthan R. Cole and Stephen M. Stigler

For those of us who love baseball, this has been a hard time. The Mitchell report named many players past and present it said used steroids and human growth hormone, and the news media had a field day focusing on the lying, the cheating and the betrayal of the game and its fans. Yet no one has asked a fundamental question: Do performance-enhancing drugs improve performance in professional baseball?

These drugs can cause physiological changes and lasting health problems, and they may have pronounced effects in individual sports like cycling, swimming, skiing and track, where the difference between a gold medalist and an also-ran is sometimes measured in hundredths or thousandths of a second.

But in a complex team sport like baseball, do the drugs make a difference sufficient to be detected in the players’ performance records? An examination of the data on the players featured in the Mitchell report suggests that in most cases the drugs had either little or a negative effect.

For pitchers identified by the report, we looked at the annual earned run average for their major league careers. For hitters we examined batting averages, home runs and slugging percentages. We then compared each player’s yearly performance before and after he is accused of having started using performance-enhancing drugs. After excluding those with insufficient information for a comparison, we were left with 48 batters and 23 pitchers.

For pitchers there was no net gain in performance and, indeed, some loss. Of the 23, seven showed improvement after they supposedly began taking drugs (lower E.R.A.’s), but 16 showed deterioration (higher E.R.A.’s). Over all, the E.R.A.’s rose by 0.5 earned runs per game. Roger Clemens is a case in point: a great pitcher before 1998, a great (if increasingly fragile) pitcher after he is supposed to have received treatment. But when we compared Clemens’s E.R.A. through 1997 with his E.R.A. from 1998 on, it was worse by 0.32 in the later period.

Hitters didn’t fare much better. For the 48 batters we studied, the average change in home runs per year “before” and “after” was a decrease of 0.246. The average batting average decreased by 0.004. The average slugging percentage increased by 0.019 — only a marginal difference. So while some batters increased their totals, an equal number had falloffs. Most showed no consistent improvement, several showed variable performance and some may have extended the years they played at a high level, although that is a difficult question to answer.

Some players improved and some declined. But the pattern for the individuals’ averages was consistent, and the variability of players (with the exception of home run counts) was low. There is no example of a mediocre player breaking away from the middle of the pack and achieving stardom with the aid of drugs.

Barry Bonds’s career has been the most scrutinized, and in fact his home run production in the years after he supposedly started taking drugs does show significant average gains. But individuals always vary, and choosing specific cases does not yield general conclusions.

What should not be overlooked is that Bonds’s profile is strikingly like Babe Ruth’s high performance level until near the end of his career, with one standout home run year — a year in which other players on other teams also exceeded their previous levels.

During the last six years of Ruth’s 22-year career he hit 198 — or 28 percent — of his 714 home runs; Bonds, in the last six years of his 22-year career, hit 195 — 26 percent — of his 762. There is no convincing way to demonstrate that Bonds’s performance owed more to drugs than Ruth’s did to his prodigious use of alcohol and tobacco.

Our results run contrary to the prevailing wisdom. One reason might be that most baseball skills depend primarily upon reaction times and judgments, factors unaffected (or even degraded) by these drugs. Also, in a team sport like baseball, other variables affect individual performance: quality of one’s teammates, home ballpark, changes in the strike zone, injuries and pitching. These factors could mask very slight performance changes like the ones we found.

It is possible (but not addressable by these data) that one effect of drugs is to help players compensate for decline as they age, and thus to extend their careers. But there is no evidence in these data for performance enhancement above previous levels.

More study of this question would be valuable. But the results here are intriguing, and could send a simple message to America’s youth who aspire to fame and fortune as professional baseball players: Don’t use these drugs — not only can they increase the risk of serious illness, they also don’t enhance your performance on the diamond.

That might, in the end, be a more effective message than one based solely on ethical and moral injunctions.

[Jonathan R. Cole is a professor of sociology at Columbia. Stephen M. Stigler is a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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If Robin Hood "Works" for K-12, Why Not Higher Ed?

In this holiday season, it is appropriate to observe the words of the greatest Teacher of them all: "Ye blind guides, that strain out the gnat, and swallow the camel!" (Matthew 23:24)

The targets of this charge of hypocrisy were the scribes and Pharisees, but today's target should be those scribes and Pharisees (or their descendants) who inhabit the legislative halls of our civic Temples.

In the Lone Star State, the straining of gnats and the swallowing of camels occurs in the funding of public education. After all of the shuffling of the deck furniture on the Titanic, Texas will still fall billions of dollars short of providing equitable funding for its public schools. Even worse, Texas still languishes at the bottom of the national heap with regard to student performance on standardized tests.

Now, an Wall Street banker calls for a Robin Hood plan to level the playing field for colleges and universities. More straining at gnats will ensue. More furniture will be shoved from one side of the deck to the other aboard our national Titanic.

If this is (fair & balanced) hypocrisy, so be it.

1.
[x Wikipedia]
Robin Hood Plan (TX)

The Robin Hood plan was a media nickname given to legislation enacted by the U.S. state of Texas in 1993 to provide court-mandated equitable school financing for all school districts in the state. Similar to the legend of Robin Hood, who "robbed from the rich and gave to the poor", the law "recaptured" property tax revenue from property-wealthy school districts and distributed those in property-poor districts, in an effort to equalize the financing of all districts throughout Texas.

In 1984, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit against state Commissioner of Education William Kirby on behalf of the Edgewood Independent School District in San Antonio, citing discrimination against students in poor school districts. The plaintiffs charged that the state's methods of funding public schools violated the state constitution, which required the state to provide an efficient public school system.

School finance lawsuits must take place in state court, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that education is not a fundamental right protected by the U.S. Constitution (San Antonio v. Rodriguez). The case, Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby, eventually went to the Texas Supreme Court, which unanimously sided with Edgewood.

In 1993, after the Texas Supreme Court threw out two attempts by the Texas Legislature to write a constitutional school-finance system. The Legislature finally passed a funding plan that was accepted by the Court, in 1995.

But 10 years later, the Robin Hood plan was in jeopardy again. In November, 2005, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that, since the vast majority of school districts were having to tax at the maximum maintenance-and-operations (M&O) tax rate of $1.50 per $100 of property valuation just to raise enough money to meet state mandates, the school-finance system was, in effect, a state property tax, which is prohibited by the Texas Constitution. The Texas Legislature, meeting in a special session in April and May, 2006, passed legislation that met the court's requirements that local districts have "meaningful discretion" in setting tax rates. A series of bills changed the school finance system to cut school M&O property taxes by one-third by 2008, but allowed local school boards to increase tax rates from the new, lower levels, although generally only with voter approval. Some of the local property tax revenue lost by the one-third cut will be replaced by state revenue from a new business tax and higher cigarette taxes, although estimates show that the new taxes will fall $25 billion short of paying for the school-finance plan over the next five years.

2.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Gold in the Ivory Tower
By Herbert A. Allen

The separation of the wealthiest from the rest of the country is alarming. But it would be even more alarming if we recognized that income isn’t the only measure of wealth. Health and education are forms of wealth, too, essential to happiness and a strong society. Yet in the discussion of America’s growing wealth gap, they too often go unnoticed.

Disparities in health care and in education are widespread. In the realm of education, however, there’s a particularly corrosive shift that’s taking place, one that has tremendous consequences for the development of America’s best minds: the growing gap between super-wealthy colleges and universities — and the rest of the academic world. There is a widening division that gives top colleges and universities a huge financial advantage over their poorer counterparts.

America’s wealthiest colleges have endowments that are thousands of times greater than those at the least fortunate schools. The chasm is far deeper than that in other realms. After all, overpaid chief executives and investment bankers pay inheritance and income tax, so their wealth diminishes over time. Heavily endowed colleges and universities, however, suffer no such setbacks.

Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Yale and other top-tier colleges have per student endowments that approach (and in some cases exceed) $1 million. Because they are accredited educational institutions, the gains on their investments go untaxed, adding billions to their coffers each year.

It’s certainly true that these academic institutions have worked hard to be excellent. They deserve to be rich. They should be congratulated.

But should they be allowed to be so protected by the tax code that they can use their disproportionate wealth to raid poorer colleges and scoop up the best teachers by offering better pay, benefits and tenure-track positions? Should they further separate themselves from less fortunate colleges by taking the best high school students and offering them ever richer deals? (This month, for instance, Harvard announced that it would increase the financial aid it offers to middle-class and upper-middle-class students. Other schools are expected to follow suit.)

What to do? Well, here’s one solution: tax the investment income of the wealthiest colleges (though not their endowments). If the endowments of all academic institutions were evaluated on a per student basis, a standard could be set that could begin to allow revenue sharing.

Our graduated income tax system sets varying tax rates based on income levels. Similarly, we could establish standards for the endowments of colleges and universities.

An example: Harvard or Williams (my alma mater) have endowments that are well over $500,000 per student. Why not take the colleges whose endowments exceed that per student amount and tax their capital gains? The tax revenue could then be put into a designated pool and distributed pro rata to colleges under the base level. The college with the lowest per student endowment would get the highest share.

It’s a form of revenue sharing that would allow the poor schools back into the competition for the best teachers and students. The impact on the rich colleges would be minimal.

The investment income from Harvard’s endowment in the last academic year was reported to be nearly $7 billion — a 23 percent gain from the year before. At even the current low tax rates it wouldn’t hurt Harvard to give up $1 billion or so of its gains in order to make the sharing of our intellectual wealth fairer. Other colleges could make such a donation similarly unscathed.

I know it won’t be easy to convince well-off schools to share their wealth. But they should. They should see this act as part of a down payment on their professed mission: to create a stronger, smarter and ultimately more stable society.

[Herbert A. Allen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Allen & Company Incorporated (a privately held investment firm), and has been a Director of The Coca-Cola Company since 1982. He is a director of Convera Corporation. Allen & Company is known for hosting the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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How Much Do You Know (Or Care) About Hillary, Rudy, Barack, yada yada yada?

OK, I'm not up to snuff in this political season. A score of 13 correct out of the 24 questions (15 multiple choice and 1 matching item with 9 pairs) is not going to land me a spot among the talking heads who go on and on about "the campaign." If this is (fair & balanced) lack of self-esteem, so be it.

A Holiday Political Quiz
By Gail Collins

Five days to Christmas and two weeks to Iowa ...

1. Mitt Romney’s real first name is:
A) Mitten
B) Joe-Bob
C) Willard

2. Asked to name his most prized possession, Fred Thompson picked his:
A) Winchester rifle
B) Trophy wife
C) Autographed picture of Ronald Reagan

3. Which Temptations song did Maya Angelou invoke in a recent radio ad for Hillary Clinton?
A) “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”
B) “Treat Her Like a Lady”
C) “My Girl”
D) “The Girl’s Alright With Me”

4. Looking wistfully at the candidates running to replace him, George W. Bush said he liked everything about campaigning for president except:
A) Homesickness for favorite pillow
B) Getting viruses from the press corps
C) The awesome responsibility of preparing to govern the most powerful nation on earth

5. During the campaign, Barack Obama learned that Dick Cheney is:
A) His worst nightmare
B) A distant cousin
C) Not really a bad guy once you get to know him

6. Speaking at a livestock auction barn in Iowa, Hillary Clinton said she expected voters to inspect her, and offered:
A) “You can look inside my mouth if you want.”
B) “You can take a gander at my withers.”
C) “You can examine the stock I came from.”

7. Ratcheting it up in New Hampshire, Romney charged Giuliani with being:
A) A person in a glass house who throws stones
B) A rolling stone who gathers no moss
C) A twice-divorced, thrice-married ferret-hater

8. Giuliani retorted that Romney was:
A) A person in a glass house who throws stones
B) A rolling stone who gathers no moss
C) A flip-flopping ferret lover

9. Somewhere along the line, reporters have noticed, Hillary Clinton dropped:
A) Bill
B) The Celine Dion theme song
C) The black pantsuit

10. Texas Gov. Rick Perry endorsed Rudy Giuliani by comparing him to:
A) A great stallion with one sore hoof
B) A pickup truck with one undesirable option
C) A great date with bad breath

11. BEYOND BARBRA AND OPRAH: Match the candidate with the celebrity backer.

A) “Nature Boy” Ric Flair           1) Hillary Clinton
B) Kevin Bacon                      2) Barack Obama
C) Forest Whitaker                  3) John Edwards
D) The Osmonds                      4) Rudy Giuliani 
E) Melissa Gilbert                  5) Dennis Kucinich 
F) Merle Haggard                    6) Mike Huckabee
G) Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling   7) Fred Thompson 
H) Pat Sajak                        8) John McCain 
I) Sean Penn                        9) Mitt Romney

12. When asked if he ever inhaled, Barack Obama said:
A) “I’m not going to talk about what I did as a child.”
B) “That depends on what the definition of inhale is.”
C) “That was the point.”

13. In Iowa, John Edwards drives:
A) The Man-of-the-People Express
B) The Main Street Express
C) A beat-up sedan formerly owned by his father, the millworker.

14. Among the special interest groups running political ads in Iowa were two nursing associations that said that if Dick Cheney “were anyone else, he’d probably:
A) ... be having Christmas dinner alone.”
B) ... be dead by now.”
C) ... be under indictment.”

15. Mike Huckabee compared his fast rise in the polls to:
A) The miracle of the loaves and the fishes
B) The parting of the Red Sea
C) The battle between Chuck Norris and David Carradine in “Lone Wolf McQuade”

16. In speeches for his wife, Bill Clinton makes fun of the idea that Hillary had a plot to become president that boiled down to:
A) Save Arkansas, then the nation, then the world.
B) Go to a state I’ve barely seen and marry some pale politician who has a $26,000 salary and a $42,000 debt.
C) Help Bill into the White House, endure endless crises and unimaginable embarrassment. Then it’s my turn.

ANSWERS: 1-C, 2-B, 3-C, 4-B, 5-B, 6-A, 7-A, 8-A, 9-B, 10-B, 11 (A-6, B-3, C-2, D-9, E-4, F-1, G-8, H-7, I-5), 12-C, 13-B, 14-B, 15-A, 16-B

[Gail Collins was the Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first woman Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Before the Editorial Page, Collins was an editorial board member and columnist on the op-ed page. On October 12, 2006, she announced that she would step down as Editorial Page Editor, effective this year. Collins took the year off to write a book, and returned to the Times as a columnist starting in July 2007. Her column appears on Thursdays and Saturdays.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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Borked, Craiged, and Vittered?

Back in the 80s, the ultimate epithet for the Right was to accuse someone of "Borking" a nominee for high office. Then came "Nannygate" for those on the Left who hired domestic workers without legitimate resident status in this country. Along comes "Vittered" for someone accused of heterosexual indiscretion and still evades removal from office. Now, there is "Craiged" for someone who is accused of sexual misbehavior with someone of the same sex. My preference is "Bushwhacked" for poor citizens losing civil liberties to a chief executive who disregards the Constitution. If this is (fair & balanced) etymology, so be it.

[x New York Fishwrap]
D.C.’s Latest Verb: To Be Larry Craiged
By The Editorial Board

Washington, D.C. likes its eponyms — taking the names of people in the news and giving them to something larger. And Washington being Washington, it’s often something negative.

Anyone in the cut-and-thrust of capital politics knows what it means to be “Borked.” In the 20 years since Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was voted down by the Senate after super-heated hearings, the word has been recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary and political jargon has never been the same.

A “Zoe Baird problem,” named for the failed Clinton Administration Attorney General nominee, means that a nomination is in danger because of the nominee’s failure to pay taxes for a nanny or other domestic worker.

The latest eponymous coinage is being “Larry Craiged” ­– caught in a men’s room sting by the vice squad and accused of illicit homosexual activity.

Senator Craig is, of course, still vehemently proclaiming his innocence and his heterosexuality. The TV drama Boston Legal gave Mr. Craig the benefit of the doubt on a recent episode. In it, a senior partner was caught in a men’s room dragnet even though he was innocent of any misbehavior. He was “Larry Craiged,” his defense counsel argued in court.

The defense attorney ticked off assorted crimes and misdemeanors in the capital and wondered why Mr. Craig became notorious while Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, suffered no such fate after his phone number appeared in the records of a woman known as the “D.C. Madam.”

The lawyer was right. While Mr. Craig is the subject of an ethics committee investigation, and will likely soon be leaving the Senate, Mr. Vitter has not suffered for his apparent (heterosexual) misconduct.

Which suggests another word. “Vittered” — to be let off the hook, for no apparent reason, for conduct at least as bad as those who are being punished.

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times

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The Truth Will Out—Condi Rice?

First, it was Roger Clemens, now it's Condoleeza Rice. The latest of Condi's bios wss just published: Condoleezza Rice: An American Life: A Biography by Elisabeth Bumiller (2007). Of course, Roger merely juiced up. Condi disregarded the intelligence estimate in August 2001 that warned that Al Qaeda (and Osama bin Ladin) were determined to strike the U. S. The stakes were much higher for W's foreign policy expert. Perhaps Condi ought to juice up. If this is (fair & balanced) libel, so be it.

[x The Sunday Times]
Gay rumours eclipse Condi’s glory moment
By Tony Allen-Mills

It should have been Condoleezza Rice’s finest hour as US secretary of state: at last President George W Bush was hosting a Middle East peace conference that she had been struggling to organise for months.

Yet when Rice’s photograph appeared on the front page of America’s bestselling weekly newspaper last week, it had nothing to do with her peacemaking efforts. She had been dragged into a National Enquirer article headlined “Who’s Gay and Who’s Not”.

The article revived long-standing Washington gossip about Rice’s sexuality and sparked off the usual flurry of internet chatter about her high-profile role in a Republican administration widely regarded as hostile to gays.

It also underlined the increasing friction in American politics between a high-minded media establishment disdainful of bedroom gossip and the no-holds-barred, consumer-driven world of instant internet scandal. A Google search of the words “Condoleezza” and “lesbian” last week yielded 146,000 hits.

Rice was not alone in falling victim to what the US media elite invariably decries as corrupted journalistic standards but what the rest of America seems to regard as the real story in Washington: who is sleeping with whom?

While most leading US newspapers were preoccupied with serious policy issues such as Iraq and illegal immigration, New York tabloids were feasting on startling new details about Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s former mayor, who is alleged to have concealed the cost of the security protection he needed while on secret trysts with his then mistress.

Giuliani dismissed the allegations as a “political hit job” and “dirty trick” that just happened to pop up hours before a key televised debate between Republican presidential candidates. Although it appeared that Giuliani had done nothing illegal, the fuss refocused attention on his colourful private life and may damage his appeal to conservative voters.

Political insiders also noted that the detailed allegations, including documented evidence of the accounts used to hide Giuliani’s potentially embarrassing expenses, were published not by a newspaper but by Politico.com, an increasingly influential website.

The mainstream US media also managed to ignore one of the most read political stories on the internet last week, an account in The Times about a dirty-tricks campaign in South Carolina, including anonymous allegations that Senator Hillary Clinton is having an affair with Huma Abedin, a female member of her campaign staff. Democrat officials dismissed the allegations as an obvious attempt to smear the frontrunning presidential candidate.

The former senator John Edwards, Clinton’s Democratic rival, felt the tabloid lash when the Enquirer claimed he too was having an affair with a campaign aide while his cancer-stricken wife campaigned on his behalf elsewhere. Edwards denounced the story as “false, completely untrue, ridiculous” and said the Enquirer had failed to produce evidence “because it’s made up”.

The steady flow of salacious and often thinly sourced sex-related stories is causing headaches for US newspaper editors, who have been bludgeoned by shrinking circulations and internet competition yet are still clinging to values described by one blogger last week as “snoozy, prissy and haughty”.

The drift towards internet-fuelled sensationalism was deemed to be so serious earlier this year that the Columbia Journalism Review, a bastion of US media elitism, convened a panel of top editors to consider whether the government should step in to subsidise serious newspapers as a valuable public service, along the lines of the BBC.

The Enquirer described its article as “the ultimate guessing game among Hollywood fans - trying to figure out which big-name stars are gay”. The report went on: “According to the buzz among political insiders, it’s an open secret that... Rice is gay.”

The piece quoted an unnamed “in-the-know” blogger as saying that during her years as provost of Stanford University in California, Rice was “completely out as a lesbian and it was not a scandal, just a reality”. The paper referred to reports that in 1998 Rice bought a house with a “special friend”, another unmarried woman, a film-maker named Randy Bean.

It was far from the first time that she had been linked to lesbian rumours. In a recent biography of Rice, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, noted that Bean, described as a “liberal progressive”, was her “closest female friend”. It was Kessler who discovered from a search of property records that Rice and Bean owned a house together.

Rice does not comment on her private life, and she is not an elected official, so her sexuality has never been a campaign issue. But the gay community has long been troubled by her association with conservative Republicans opposed to gay marriage, and with evangelical Christians who regard homosexuality as a sin.

At one point last year Rice was regarded as a possible Republican candidate in the 2008 White House race. Yet most commentators agreed that she was reluctant to run, and a Washington Post columnist concluded that she was “the longest of long shots”, as it indeed turned out.

The columnist Chris Cillizza made no mention of Rice’s sexuality, and it took an internet reader named Anne Roifes to remind the Post that high journalistic standards sometimes miss the point.

“It is widely believed in gay circles that Condi is a lesbian,” Roifes commented. “That could be one reason she will not run.”

[Tony Allen-Mills writes for The (London) Sunday Times from New York.]

Copyright © 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd

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Shoot The Juice To Me, Bruce (Or Roger Or Andy Or Barry...Or Bill)!

In the Age of Performance Enhancing Substances, we have reached the Brave New World of Half-Man, Half-Syringe. O, for the halcyon days of the spitter when life was simple. In the Good Old Days of baseball, no one cheated. No one uttered a discouraging word and the skies were not cloudy all day. Babe Ruth hit home runs for little boys in the hospital and Ty Cobb was eligible for sainthood before he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Given the pecuniary bent of Major League Baseball, the Hall of Fame could provide corporate sponsorship to drug companies. If this is a (fair & balanced) prescription, so be it.

[x Time]
Confessions of a Juiced Journo
By Bill Saporito

Yeah, it's true about me and steroids. I have to admit it now. Even though the Mitchell report didn't have a section on sports writers, ask yourself this: the Senator's staff spends months to produce a 400-plus page report documenting his investigation of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball, and within 24 hours a relatively small group of journalists produces 400,000 pages of newspaper stories, wire service copy and website reports. And just how do you think that gets done? Let me tell you, dear innocent reader, there's only so much coffee a laptop-toting journo can drink in a day.

Me and Roger Clemens. We started down that dark road the same year. It was '98. Clemens was in the middle of an awesome Cy Young season in Toronto: 20-6 with a 2.65 ERA. I'd been at TIME for two years, having been traded by Fortune for a features writer and an editor to be named later. I got off like a house afire — cover stories, features, business news, plane crashes, you name it. But in middle of the '99 season the managing editor pulled me aside for a little talk. I knew what was coming. "Your story starts are down," he said. "And your clich count is out of sight. " I reminded the boss that I had led the league in snappy adjectives the year before. And early in the '99 season I'd hurt my right index finger trying desperately to pound out a deadline piece on the Super Bowl. I was playing hurt. But you know how managers are. This is the news weekly pal, he said with some disdain. What have you done for me next week?

That's how it started. I was injured, the competition was getting tougher — Internet thing was starting to make big noise — and I needed to stay in the starting lineup. Don't get me wrong, I'd always kept myself in good shape. Worked out at the Journalists' Gym on the West Side: I could already bench press four Webster's International dictionaries. But there were too many guys who were stronger, yet they didn't seem to be working out any harder. And they were racking up the bylines. I'm talking about economics writers who couldn't lift a comma. What were they doing? Hey, I am a reporter, right? A couple of phone calls later and I got it figured. They were juiced, in capital letters. I make the connection: the source is a beat-up wire service guy who spent too much time in South America in the '70s. All the top journos are doing steroids, he assures me. He names names. Pulitzer winners. Celebrated columnists.

That's when I gave in to the competitive pressure. There are only so many news magazines and so many years to produce. If you are a journalist, you live to see your name in print. It's a simple as that. Besides, I rationalized, once I got my game back together I'd ease off the stuff.

The results were immediate. I started knocking 10,000-word cover stories out of the park like they were baseball game summaries. Slick word combinations were jumping off my keyboard. I could stretch a one-pager into a double truck with ease. Man, I was feeling it. But so were some of my colleagues. Roid rage. It's as ugly in the newsroom as it is in the locker room. One night, I almost took a copy editor's head off for questioning my use of antecedents. My boss had to know, but he steered clear. That's how they are in the bigs — they just want to fill the pages with sensational stories. That's what brings in the readers. It's a business. But at home the kids noticed that I'd changed. I'd become a monster: I started sending their homework back for rewrites. I hate myself when I think of that now.

I've been clean now for years, just like a lot of those baseball players. I'm glad the truth has come out and Major League Baseball is finally owning up to what everyone in the game has known for years. As for the writers, they're busy fulminating about how the game and the fans have been betrayed by the players that everyone looked up to. It makes me laugh thinking about how much outrage they can conjure, about how quickly their thoughts are turned to print and posts. Much too quickly. Me, I'm trying to type as fast as I can. The mind is willing, but the fingers just won't fly like they used to. That's why I'm able to cut the Rocket a little slack, just like Senator Mitchell suggested. As for the rest of my fellow journalists, well, maybe we need the Senator to continue his work.

[Bill Saporito became TIME’s first editor-at-large in March 2001. A 17-year Time Inc. veteran, Saporito joined TIME in 1996 as a senior editor where he has directed the magazine’s coverage of business, the economy, personal finance, and sports.]

Copyright © 2007 Time Inc.

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Oprah: High Priestess Of The Civil Religion?

Professor Robert N. Bellah of the University of California-Berkeley wrote in the early 1970s that this country observed a civil religion. This religion is not secular and it is not denominational. One of the great priests of the civil religion in our past was Abraham Lincoln. He belonged to no denomination and never proclaimed the United States to be either a "Christian nation" or a "Judeo-Christian nation." Today, we have presidential candidates who proclaim themselves the "Christian candidate for President" or talking head political operatives speaking in behalf of their candidate and seem to confuse "Obama" with "Osama." Abraham Lincoln disavowed the xenophobic, anti-immigrant elements in his party in the late 1850s. Lincoln's GOP descendants cannot bash non-Protestant immigrants often enough today. Many Democrats lack Abraham Lincoln's faith in our civil religion and contribute to the idea that Senator Barack Obama is a "radical, ideological Muslim." Obama's Democrat opponents may not mouth such stuff themselves, but their campaign staffers are not as circumspect. Frank Rich notes that religion has become a cardinal issue in the 2008 election process. If this is (fair & balanced) demagoguery, so be it.

[NY Fishwrap]
Latter-Day Republicans vs. the Church of Oprah
By Frank Rich

This campaign season has been in desperate need of its own reincarnation of Howard Beale from “Network”: a TV talking head who would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Last weekend that prayer was answered when Lawrence O’Donnell, an excitable Democratic analyst, seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltway’s more repellent Sunday bloviathons, “The McLaughlin Group.”

Pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America,” Mr. O’Donnell branded the speech “the worst” of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romney’s Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was “an officially racist faith.”

That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized co-stars dropped around him, Mr. O’Donnell then raised the rude question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didn’t Mr. Romney publicly renounce his church’s discriminatory practices before they were revoked? As the scion of one of America’s most prominent Mormon families, he might have made a difference. It’s not as if he was a toddler. By 1978 — the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was elected governor in Arkansas — Mr. Romney had entered his 30s.

The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didn’t fight his church’s institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that’s his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.

Concern for minorities isn’t a high priority either. The Christian Science Monitor and others have published reports that Mr. Romney has said he wouldn’t include a Muslim in his cabinet. (He denies it.) In “Faith in America,” he exempted Americans who don’t practice a religion from “freedom” and warned ominously of shadowy, unidentified cabalists “intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism.” Perhaps today, in his scheduled turn on “Meet the Press,” he will inveigh against a new war on Christmas being plotted by an axis of evil composed of Muslims, secularists and illegal immigrants.

As Mr. O’Donnell said in his tirade, it’s incredible that Mr. Romney’s prejudices get a free pass from so many commentators. “Faith in America” was hyped in advance as one of the year’s “big, emotional campaign moments” by Mark Halperin of Time. In its wake, the dean of Beltway opinion, David Broder of The Washington Post, praised Mr. Romney for possessing values “exactly those I would hope a leader would have.”

But Washington is nothing if not consistent in misreading this election. Even as pundits overstated the significance of “Faith in America,” so they misunderstood and trivialized the other faith-based political show unfolding this holiday season, “Oprahpalooza.” And with the same faulty logic.

Beltway hands thought they knew how to frame the Romney speech because they assumed (incorrectly) that it would build on the historical precedent set by J.F.K. When they analyzed the three-state Oprah-Obama tour, they again reached for historical precedent and were bamboozled once more — this time because there really was no precedent.

Most could only see Oprah Winfrey’s contribution to Barack Obama’s campaign as just another celebrity endorsement, however high-powered. The Boss, we kept being reminded, couldn’t elect John Kerry. Selling presidents is not the same as pushing “Anna Karenina.” In a typical instance of tone-deafness from the Clinton camp, its national co-chairman, the former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, said of Oprah, “I’m not sure who watches her.”

Wanna bet he knows now? Even before Oprah drew throngs in Iowa, the Des Moines Register poll showed Mr. Obama leading Hillary Clinton among women for the first time (31 to 26 percent) in late November. Now his surge is spreading. In New Hampshire, the Rasmussen poll after Oprah’s visit found that the Clinton lead among women had fallen from 14 to 4 percent in just two weeks. In South Carolina, where some once thought Mr. Obama was not “black enough” to peel away loyal African-American voters from the Clintons, he’s ahead by double digits among blacks in four polls. (A month ago they were even among African-Americans in that state.) Over all, the Obama-Clinton race in all three states has now become too close to call.

Oprah is indeed a megacelebrity. At a time when evening news anchors no longer have the reach of Walter Cronkite — and when Letterman, Leno, Conan, Stewart and Colbert are in strike-mandated reruns — she rules in the cultural marketplace more powerfully than ever. But the New York Times/CBS News poll probably was right when it found that only 1 percent of voters say they will vote as Oprah asks them to. Her audience isn’t a pack of Stepford wives, and the message of the events she shared with Mr. Obama is not that her fame translates directly into support for her candidate.

What the communal fervor in these three very different states showed instead was that Oprah doesn’t have to ask for these votes. Many were already in the bag. Mr. Obama was drawing huge crowds before she bumped them up further. For all their eagerness to see a media star (and star candidate), many in attendance also came to party. They were celebrating and ratifying a movement that Mr. Obama has been building for months.

This movement has its own religious tone. References to faith abound in Mr. Obama’s writings and speeches, as they do in Oprah’s language on her TV show and at his rallies. Five years ago, Christianity Today, the evangelical journal founded by Billy Graham, approvingly described Oprah as “an icon of church-free spirituality” whose convictions “cannot simply be dismissed as superficial civil religion or so much New Age psychobabble.”

“Church free” is the key. This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations. The pitch — or, to those who are not fans, the shtick — may be corny. “The audacity of hope” is corny too. But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.

Race is certainly a part of the groundswell, but not in a malevolent way. When I wrote here two weeks ago that racism is the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign, some readers wrote in to say that only a fool would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American president, no matter what polls indicate. We’ll find out soon enough. If that’s the case, Mr. Obama can’t win in Iowa, where the population is roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent white.

I’d argue instead that any sizable racist anti-Obama vote will be concentrated in states that no Democrat would carry in the general election. Otherwise, race may be either a neutral or positive factor for the Obama campaign. Check out the composition of Oprah’s television flock, which, like all daytime audiences, is largely female. Her viewers are overwhelmingly white (some 80 percent), blue collar (nearly half with incomes under $40,000) and older (50-plus). This is hardly the chardonnay-sipping, NPR-addicted, bicoastal hipster crowd that many assume to be Mr. Obama’s largest white constituency. They share the profile of Clinton Democrats — and of some Republicans too.

The inclusiveness preached by Obama-Oprah is practiced by the other Democrats in the presidential race, Mrs. Clinton most certainly included. Is Mr. Obama gaining votes over rivals with often interchangeable views because some white voters feel better about themselves if they vote for an African-American? Or is it because Mrs. Clinton’s shrill campaign continues to cast her as Nixon to Mr. Obama’s Kennedy? Even after she apologized to Mr. Obama for a top adviser’s “unauthorized” invocation of Mr. Obama’s long-admitted drug use as a young man, her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was apparently authorized to go on “Hardball” to sleazily insinuate the word “cocaine” into prime time again. Somewhere Tricky Dick is laughing.

But it just may be possible that the single biggest boost to the Obama campaign is not white liberal self-congratulation or the Clinton camp’s self-immolation, but the collective nastiness of the Republican field. Just when you think the tone can’t get any uglier, it does. Last week Mike Huckabee, who only recently stood out for his kind words about illegal immigrants, accepted an endorsement from a founder of the Minutemen, whose approach to stopping the “illegal alien invasion” has been embraced by white supremacists and who have been condemned as “vigilantes” by President Bush.

For those Americans looking for the most unambiguous way to repudiate politicians who are trying to divide the country by faith, ethnicity, sexuality and race, Mr. Obama is nothing if not the most direct shot. After hearing someone like Mitt Romney preach his narrow, exclusionist idea of “Faith in America,” some Americans may simply see a vote for Mr. Obama as a vote for faith in America itself.

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.

From 2003-2005, Mr. Rich had been the front page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section's redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to The Times's culture editor on the paper's overall cultural news report.

Mr. Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 he became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page.

From 1999-2003, he additionally served as Senior Writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for The Times and allowed Mr. Rich to explore a variety of topics at greater length than before. His columns and articles in each venue have drawn from his background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics.

In addition to his work at The Times, Mr. Rich has written about culture and politics for many other publications. His childhood memoir, Ghost Light, was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to Ghost Light have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich's drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, was published by Random House in October 1998. His book, The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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Hoop It Up! Basketball Is 116 Years Old Today!

It's hard to believe that the only men's basketball coach at the University of Kansas who did not have a winning record (55W-60L) was the inventor of basketball and the first KU hoops coach, James Naismith. The irony of it all is that the KU supporters would be calling for Dr. Naismith's firing. According to Naismith biographer Bernice Webb, Naismith was "noticeably uninterested" in coaching basketball and was more concerned with building players' character and physical fortitude than he was with winning games. Naismith was apparently also unhappy with many of the changes which were occurring in the game he invented. He is quoted in the "Century of Basketball" section of the University of Kansas basketball web page as saying "Oh, my gracious. They are murdering my game ... " in response to the physical play he witnessed in a 1910 game between Kansas and Missouri. In 1907, Naismith handed the coaching reins over to Forrest C. "Phog" Allen, a former Jayhawk player. Naismith returned to the classroom at KU until his retirement in 1937. If this is (fair & balanced) jock history, so be it.

[x The Free Dictionary]

Invention of basketball


In 1891, while working as a physical education teacher at the YMCA International Training School—now Springfield College in Springfield, MA— James Naismith was asked to make a game that would not take up much room, was not too rough, and at the same time, could be played indoors. He had no idea he would invent what would become the most popular indoor sport in the United States.

Inspired by a game he played as a child in Canada called "Duck on a Rock," Naismith's game started December 15, 1891 with thirteen rules (modified versions of twelve of those are still used today), a peach basket nailed to either end of the school's gymnasium, and two teams of nine players. On January 15, 1892 Naismith published the rules for basketball. The original rules did not include what is known today as the dribble. They initially only allowed the ball to be moved up the court via a pass. Following each "goal" a jump ball was taken in the middle of the court. Although it was not a rule, players would commonly use the dust of coal to cover the palms of their hands, allowing them to get a better grip on the ball. The coal palm was used up until the early 1930s. Also interesting was the rule concerning balls out of bounds - the first player to retrieve the ball received possession.

Basketball became a popular men's sport in the United States and Canada very quickly, and spread to other countries as well. Additionally, there were several efforts to establish a women's version with modified rules. Naismith himself was impressed with how quickly women caught onto the game and remarked that they were quick to understand the nature of the teamwork involved. He observed some women playing at a college in Springfield, MA, and was instrumental in promoting the sport for women in New England. This met with great resistance in some circles and was consequently far slower to become truly widespread.

The men's sport was officially added to the Olympic Games program at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. There, Naismith handed out the medals to three North American teams; United States, for the Gold Medal, Canada, for the Silver Medal, and Mexico, for their Bronze medal win. Women's basketball finally became an Olympic event in Montreal during the 1976 Summer Olympics. Previously, there had been a men's basketball competition, in connection with the 1904 Games at St. Louis, USA.

Naismith moved to the University of Kansas, in 1898, following his studies in Denver, becoming a professor and the school's first basketball coach. University of Kansas went on to develop one of the nation's most storied college basketball programs.

Naismith is the only Kansas coach to have a losing record (55-60) during his tenure at the school. Nevertheless, Naismith has one of the greatest coaching legacies in basketball history. Naismith coached Forrest "Phog" Allen, his eventual successor at Kansas, who went on to become one of the winningest coaches in U.S. college basketball history. The actual playing surface of Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, Kansas is named the James Naismith Court. Phog Allen was the college basketball coach of Dean Smith and Adolph Rupp, who are two of the winningest men's college basketball coaches, and won a combined total of six NCAA championships. Adolph Rupp was the college basketball coach of Pat Riley who is one of the winningest coaches in NBA history and has coached five teams to the NBA championship. Dean Smith went on to be the college basketball coach of hall of fame coach Larry Brown (who also coached at the University of Kansas), current North Carolina coach Roy Williams (who also coached for 15 seasons at the University of Kansas previous to that), and basketball great Michael Jordan. In the late 1930s Naismith played a role in the formation of the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball, which later became the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

In August 1936, while attending the Berlin Olympics, he was named honorary President of the International Basketball Federation.

Naismith was a star gymnast, lacrosse player and football player at McGill University, where he graduated among the top 10 in his class with a B.A. Honours in 1887. In 1885-86 he won the Wicksteed Silver Medal as the gymnastics champion of the school's junior class. In his graduating year, he won the prestigious Wicksteed Gold Medal as the top athlete of the university's senior class.

Naismith married Maude Sherman in 1894 and they had five children. Naismith was also a Presbyterian Minister and became a naturalized American citizen on May 4, 1925. In 1939 he was awarded his Doctor of Divinity from The Presbyterian College, Montreal. After Maude's death in 1937, he married Florence Kincade on June 11 1939, less than six months before his own death, in Lawrence, Kansas, where he is buried, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

He has been honored extensively in his native country Canada and also in other nations. He was the founding inductee when on February 17, 1968 the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, named in his honor, opened in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was also an inaugural inductee to the McGill University Sports Hall of Fame in 1996. In 2007, he was enshrined in the FIBA Hall of Fame.

In 2005 James Naismith's grandson, Ian Naismith, planned on selling the original copy of the thirteen rules. The rules were passed down on Naismith's death to his youngest son, James Naismith, who was Ian's father. James lived in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Naismith was a Freemason and a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.

In Lawrence, James Naismith has a road named in his honor, Naismith Drive. It is a separated, four-lane road that runs North-South from 24th street all the way into the KU campus. Naismith Hall, a college residential dorm, is located on the Northeast edge of 19th and Naismith.

13 Rules of Basketball (as written by James Naismith)

1. The ball may be thrown in any direction with one or both hands. The ball may be batted in any direction with one or both hands, but never with the fist.


2. A player cannot run with the ball. The player must throw it from the spot on which he catches it, allowance to be made for a man running at good speed.


3. The ball must be held by the hands. The arms or body must not be used for holding it.


4. No shouldering, holding, pushing, striking or tripping in any way of an
   opponent.


5. The first infringement of this rule by any person shall count as a foul; the second shall disqualify him until the next goal is made or, if there was evident intent to injure the person, for the whole of the game. No substitution shall be allowed.


6. A foul is striking at the ball with the fist, violations of Rules 3 and 4 and such as described in Rule 5.


7. If either side makes three consecutive fouls it shall count as a goal for the opponents (consecutive means without the opponents in the meantime making a foul).


8. A goal shall be made when the ball is thrown or batted from the grounds into the basket and stays there, providing those defending the goal do not touch or disturb the goal. If the ball rests on the edges, and the opponent moves the basket, it shall count as a goal.


9. When the ball goes out of bounds, it shall be thrown into the field and played by the first person touching it. In case of dispute the umpire shall throw it straight into the field. The thrower-in is allowed five seconds. If he holds it longer, it shall go to the opponent. If any side persists in delaying the game, the umpire shall call a foul on them.


10. The umpire shall be the judge of the men and shall note the fouls and notify the referee when three consecutive fouls have been made. He shall have power to disqualify men according to Rule 5.


11. The referee shall be judge of the ball and shall decide when the ball is in play, in bounds, to which side it belongs, and shall keep the time. He shall decide when a goal has been made and keep account of the goals, with any other duties that are usually performed by a referee.


12. The time shall be two fifteen-minute halves, with five minutes rest between.


13. The side making the most goals in that time is declared the winner.

Copyright © 2007 Farlex Inc.

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