From a skating rink in Everett, Wash., to New York City’s schools to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, interest rates on some bonds have soared since late May and could rise even further because money-market investors are less willing to buy some of the $17 billion in municipal bond deals backed by Dexia SA, a Belgian-French bank shaken by its exposure to government debts in Greece.

The Greek debt crisis is hitting dozens of U.S. cities and towns even though they are thousands of miles away and don’t own any of the country’s bonds.

“We are far from Wall Street or Greece, but the impact is being absorbed to the core in small-town America,” said Kate Reardon, a spokeswoman for Everett, Wash., a city of 104,000 people, where interest costs are rising on a local rink and concert arena.

In the Perris Union High School District in Perris, Calif., which already was furloughing workers and considering pay cuts, borrowing costs have risen by $30,000 a month, or about two-thirds of the cost of a first-year teacher, who earns about $46,700.

When times were good, Dexia gave governments across the U.S. easy access to the same cheap financing tapped by homeowners and companies by agreeing to backstop their municipal bonds. In turn, the interest rates on more than 100 municipal bonds fluctuate through daily or weekly sales called remarketings, in which big investors can either roll over their holdings at market rates or opt out.

Few public officials knew about the lender’s vulnerability to Greece; Dexia has €4.3 billion ($6.11 billion) in direct exposure to the country’s debt, according to ratings firm Standard & Poor’s Corp.

This article doesn’t exactly trod new ground. We know from what happened in 2008 that the interconnectedness of the world financial system can be exposed in times of great stress and, before you know it, an investment bank fails and corporations have problems financing their day to day operations. Or, to go back a bit further, the housing market takes a dip and it turns out that one of the world’s largest insurance companies was selling credit default swaps for securities that contained all sorts of crappy mortgages whose value was somewhere between zero and unknown and thus the insurance company requires some $85 billion in emergency government assistance.

What the Journal’s article shows well is that the problem is with Dexia, that it loaned money to an irresponsible corrupt government and there is now a substantial risk that it will be caught holding the bag. To blame the Greeks for the fact Perris, CA’s borrowing costs have gone up $360,000 a year at current rates wouldn’t make much sense. Now, it could be the Perris government’s fault for not doing their due diligence on Dexia, but then again, Dexia is supposed to have all the smart people and know what the risks of lending money to the Greek government is.

As a committed defender of TARP and bailing out financial institutions in order to avoid mass misery, I could see myself being OK with some sort of bailout or deal that ended up rescuing Dexia from the full consequences of its bad judgement, but at the same time, I would be very clear that the banks are at fault and it’s the banks exposure to Greece that makes one not-so-large country’s fiscal madness an international concern.

There are two ways to deal with the opportunity problem. One is to revitalize the areas that have high concentrations of poor people so that they are safer, more prosperous and have better schools. The other is to break up areas with high concentrations of poverty so that poor people can take advantage of the greater opportunities in relatively more wealthy communities. Insomuch as Democrats think about poverty policy, they tend to adopt one of these approaches or a mixture of the two.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to see poverty as a cultural problem that is due to poor people not having the bourgeois values of thrift, prudence and advance planning that are the real roots of prosperity. If this is why people are poor, you make sure they don’t die in the streets, but it means that government policy is not likely to accomplish much and might even backfire. And so conservatives are not very interested in anti-poverty policy. If they are, it’s in things like “no excuses” charter schools whose explicit purpose is to inculcate these values. But then again, the charter school movement is nearly entirely run, staffed and funded by liberals and Democrats.

Then there’s the third theory of poverty, which is both more nuanced but quite simple. Jamie Holmes, in a piece for TNR, suggested that one problem poor people have is over-taxed reserves of willpower. The insight here is from psychologists who have shown that willpower is a depletable resource and that exercising will in one area means that one is less able to do it in other areas. Poor people have to think about things that non-poor people do not. For the poor, “anything more than a muffin,” requires a taxing financial decision, not a relatively non-taxing preference decision. Holmes summarizes the problem:

Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost

Another psychological insight into the persistence of poverty is the “bee-sting problem.” As Drake Bennett explained in a Boston Globe piece from 2008, imagine getting six bee-stings. If you have one bee-sting, you will do something about it, if you have seven, then you might as well not bother. The poor, then, live in a world of constant deprivation, where it simply may not appear worthwhile to make long-term investments in their well-being. The philosopher Charles Karelis puts it like this: when we’re poor “our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated.” If you have so many financial problems — bills, rent child support, etc — such that paying even half of them still leaves an objectively large amount of other problems to deal with, then it may really be rational to not even pay that half. It may make more sense to acquire a drug habit. More simply, as Karelis argues, if your car has ten dents in it, why just fix one? This phenomenon explains why the poor engage in all sorts of behavior that appears self-defeating even when the incentives seem so clearly to mitigate against it:

Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

This third theory of poverty does not deal with the “root causes” of poverty the same way the liberal and conservative ones do. As Karlelis puts it, ”The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity…the cause of poverty has been poverty.” The solution then is both radical and simple: give the poor money. With more money, they can get out of the trap of “poor economics” that Karelis describes and be freed from having to make the willpower sapping decisions that Holmes describes.

Now, the politics of giving the poor more money are tricky. Democrats are loathe to make it appear like they are just cutting checks to what conservatives see as lazy, undeserving people who are culturally alien to the mainstream of American society. It was this fear that lead to seeing welfare reform’s strict time limits and work requirements as the only way for welfare and the Democratic party to survive politically. In bad economic times especially, cutting checks to the poor is an unpopular idea.

However, perhaps just giving the poor more money can appeal to people’s anti-paternalist feelings, along with antipathy towards public sector unions. If ones social services money weren’t going to employing more dreaded unionized nurses or social workers or teachers, but instead just straight to people’s pockets, then maybe more voters would feel OK about it.

But at the very least, it’s something that liberals, who tend to be the only ones interested in poverty, should be looking into.

(Also, see Matt Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie).

Landry Fields is one of my favorite players in the NBA. He doesn’t jump the highest. He doesn’t dunk the hardest. He doesn’t score the most. In fact, he doesn’t score much at all.

None of these things detract from the fact that Fields had a remarkable season. He averaged around 10 points per game, which doesn’t sound impressive, but did it while shooting 50% from the field, an extremely high number for a guard. He plays solid defense and is a willing passer, averaging 2 assists per game. Fields lead the entire league in rebounds per game as a guard, clocking in at 6.4 a game. 6.4 rebounds is an outstanding total for a shooting guard. Landry outrebounded 7-foot center Brook Lopez, Shaquille O’Neal and other starting centers, even though he is only around 6 foot 6. And Landry is doing all of this as a rookie.

Landry was drafted 39^th overall in the 2010 NBA draft. Which means every single team passed over him in the draft, some doing it multiple times. And yet Landry has had a better season than almost any other rookie. ESPN’s John Hollinger has the PER stat, which is an advanced statistical formula created to measure a player’s productivity. PER has Fields as the 10^th best rookie in the league this year. The wins produced measure, created by 3 professors of economics at the Wages of Wins blog has Fields producing 13.5 wins this year. How good is that? Well it would be the 13^th best season by a record since 1977. Only the magical Blake Griffin had a better rookie season this year than Fields under this stat.

Why is Fields so good according to Wages of Wins? Well, wins are not just determined by points. Although people believe the players who score more are better players (leading to the ‘Derrick Rose for MVP’ consensus), it’s the players who score efficiently who are worth more. Shooting a higher percentage and getting the to free throw line are critical. It’s a large part of what makes a player like Lebron James so much better than Carmelo Anthony. Even though they both average 25-27 points per game, Lebron scored his points at a 51% clip, while Melo shot just 45.5%.  Lebron produced 23 wins this year, while Melo produced closer to 10. So how does this apply to Fields?

Well, as previously mentioned, Fields is a very efficient scorer, especially for a guard. Wages of wins also highly values rebounds; simply put, more rebounds mean more shots for your team and less shots for the other team. Finally, Fields performs fantastically in another category, turnovers. He averaged 1.3 per game. If you take care of the ball, your team gets more chances to shoot.

Anyway you look at it, Fields has had a great season and is certainly one of the better players on the Knicks. Certainly, it would be fair to say that he is unappreciated, most of all by his coach. Mike D’Antoni has reduced Fields’ playing time at the most critical juncture of the season, the playoffs, in lieu of more experienced players like Roger Mason and Bill Walker. These players shot a combined 1-15 in a game the Knicks lost by 3 while Fields played just 15 minutes.

OBAMA AND CIVIL LIBERTIES – Anton

Upon Obama’s election in 2008, liberals (and many independents) expected him to be a transformational president.  We expected action on the economy, healthcare, energy policy, immigration and more. Were expectations too high? Absolutely, and anyone who knows how Washington works was not surprised that Obama signed a health care bill, but immigration and cap and trade never made it to his desk.

What I am surprised by is Obama’s lackluster record on civil liberties. While he is no Bush, who was a truly transformational president in terms of setting us back on civil liberties, Obama is much, much closer to Bush than we thought he would be, or that he ought to be. Did he end torture? Yes, by executive order in January 2009. But after this (albeit extremely important) step, he has consistently failed. The practice of rendition, the transfer of prisoners to other nations, has not been halted. New rules governing the treatment of domestic terror suspects allow them to be held longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, even if they are American citizens. This rule flies in the face of decades old precedent.

Other expansions of executive power at the expense of civil liberties include Obama’s support for the successful extension of the Patriot Act, even though he was skeptical as a senator. Allowing the government to continue to survey individuals with no terrorist connections is plain and simple an abuse of our civil rights, as are roving wiretaps. Gitmo will remain open and indefinite detention will continue and recently the administration abandoned any attempt for a civilian trial. We have that little faith in our own justice system?

His policies have encountered very little opposition, which is the saddest part of it all. Where is the outrage? Where is the tea party? Don’t Republicans and the tea party champion limited government? What happened to all the democrats going crazy over Bush’s actions? It is a shame when a President enters us into a war intoLibyawithout a congressional vote or debate and only Rand Paul and Dennis Kucinich voice opposition. It’s sad how little outrage is sparked when the Obama administration says that the president is allowed to order the extra-judicial killing of any American citizen, regardless of location.

The erosion of civil liberties is one of the most important problems in our society that does not receive enough media attention. I don’t see Obama reversing course on many of these issues, so the onus falls elsewhere. The left and the right must come together to demand that our civil rights be respected and halt the progress of executive power. People must demand that their representatives work for their rights and not against them. Whether this happens remains to be seen.

- MZ

Who Is Gary Johnson?

-Anton 

Any day now, Gary Johnson will be announcing his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Who is Gary Johnson? Well, he was the governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003. He cut taxes and the size of government and promoted a school voucher program. He balanced the budget, leaving the state with a 1 billion dollar budget surplus. He competently handled the devastating 2000 Cerro Grande Fire and was called an excellent leader by Democratic congressmen Tom Udall. Johnson never raised taxes over his 8 years in charge and started his own construction business that made him a multi-millionaire.

So what’s the problem here? Well there are a few roadblocks to a Gary Johnson candidacy. First, he has very little name recognition and does not poll very well. He has been out of politics for a few years and will have trouble raising money.

Second, he may be way too reality-based for the current republican electorate. You don’t hear him spouting birther theories or calling Obama a socialist. He has a longstanding respect for civil rights. His skepticism towards foreign wars puts him at odds with the majority of today’s republicans. Further, support for marijuana legalization and gay marriage puts him on the wrong side of social conservatives. Johnson himself used pot for pain control after a 2005 paragliding accident nearly killed him. This brings us to the third problem: the mainstream media has essentially deemed him ‘the pot candidate’. Almost every article about Johnson prominently features his position on marijuana and/or past use.

Is there a path to victory for Gary Johnson? Doubtful. A Ron Paul endorsement would go a long way towards raising his name recognition and viability. Johnson’s record seems to be something that the supposedly libertarian tea party would love. However in reality, I suspect the tea party is just not serious enough to endorse such a responsible and credible candidate. It’s a shame.

While this does capture the views of some stat-oriented basketball writers, who really do think that shot creation is a black box and that we should weight efficiency uber alles, it seems a little dubious to put things that way when you could simply state the case for Dwight Howard as: “he has an amazingly high shooting percentage and is arguably the best defender in the league, moreover, he makes his team’s defense much better.” This, of course, is what Simmons is saying to — plus/minus captures defensive contributions and true shooting is the best way to measure shooting — but it does not connote the kind of stat-fetishism that anti-stat people tend to attribute to those who like to used advanced statistics. Simmons is making the rhetorical moves of the most retrograde stat-bashers who everyone stopped listening to a long time ago.

The reason Derrick Rose is not indisputably the MVP is because defense is very, very important. And evaluating defenseive contributions in anything like a rigorous way is very complicated and requires using stats that, when talked about, have the air of numerical fetishism about them (“adjusted plus-minus”).

The thing is, everyone has always known defense is important, even the most anti-advanced statistics, intuitive basketball writers and fans all know this, but whenever I try to tell my Rose-besotted friends that Howard’s defensive contributions make him arguably the second best player in the league (behind Lebron, of course), I’m just a “stat-geek.” Simmons, who is something of a forward thinker on these issues, or who is at least open to the arguments made by stat-types, should be above this silly rhetorical flourish.

In an article on Fredette’s potential as a pro, Pete Thamel canvassed NBA scouts and front-office personnel, and they said that Fredette was unlikely to be a star at the professional level and would likely be a “solid rotation player in the N.B.A.” Who did they compare him to?

Stardom, however, is unlikely, the scouts and front-office personnel said. Comparative players that came up were Jeff Hornacek, Steve Kerr, Kyle Korver and Jason Kapono.

“I think he’ll be a really good pro, but not great,” said a Western Conference executive, who would not be named because he is not permitted to talk about prospects. “He’ll be a guy who is a better Steve Kerr, a better Kyle Korver. A better Kapono. Both those guys can’t put the ball on the floor.”

Fredette, of course, only shares specific basketball attributes with Kapono, Korver and Kerr. This is why those front-office personnel made those specific comparisons. There are no other superficial similarities between them that may be influencing these scouts’ analysis. The only reason the Jazz faithful want Fredette so much is because of his exceptional skills and that he plays  in Utah.

And Adam Morrison is the next Larry Bird.

A really obvious fact whose implications are systematically under-noticed and under-realized is that women are slightly more than half of the world’s population. The first thing this realization leads to is putting into sharp relief gender disparities in all sorts of consequential fields , especially politics and business, where women are heavily underrepresented. There is reason to believe that, in both fields, society at large would benefit from a political and corporate system that was able to reach something closer to gender parity.

Inasmuch as women are excluded and are in the upper echelons of these fields in low numbers — whether due to blatant discrimination, institutional sexism, or a prevailing notion among women that they would rather not go into those fields — we all lose. Even if you don’t think there is something about women that makes them better, say, traders (even though there is evidence that women are much less risk hungry, which might be nice in finance) it is quite simply the case where 50% of the population is for some reason not getting into a certain field or line of work, we are missing out on some of the most talented people out there.

The other major takeaway from the simple numerical predominance of women is to scramble our ideas of what “women’s issues” are. In American political discourse, advocating for women in politics in general or for specific policies aimed towards female advancement and protection is viewed as “identity politics” as something akin to policies to benefit specific racial or ethnic groups. And while the latter types of policies may very well be required by justice or just good ideas, the case of women as a political or interest group is of a different kind.

Because of a long history of social and institutional patriarchy, we tend to see women as a group whose political power is quite small and so we talk about them as if their numbers are small. But this, of course, is not the case, and if you can think of policies that benefit women specifically, you are not only fighting back against centuries of injustice and unfair treatment, you are ipso facto benefiting a huge number of people.

Communism reigned supreme for 45 years between Siberia and Berlin. Fascism had Germany and Italy, with an affiliate in Japan. Islamism has an amorphous non-state group whose leaders are constantly being killed by drones; Iran; and quasi political terrorist organizations in Hezbollah and Hamas. And it’s unclear what the relationship between the first one of those and the last three are.

But still, Herf wants Obama to stop all this pansy “engagement” with the Muslim world and make it clear that we have an ideological battle with Islamism to fight:

And the Islamists’ response has been as follows. Iran has made a mockery of “negotiations,” which it is clearly using to play for time as it continues to seek the bomb. It has also sent tens of millions of dollars and tons of weapons, including longer-range missiles, to Hezbollah and Hamas, placing larger areas of Israel in jeopardy. In Iraq, Iran has managed to exert influence over the Maliki coalition government. Islamists in Pakistan keep the Taliban afloat and threaten the political stability of Pakistan itself. Al Qaeda’s efforts to attack the West continue unabated, as indicated by the recent terrorism alerts in Germany and in this country—as well as the arrests in Sweden, Denmark, and Britain. Islamists continue to slaughter their fellow Muslims in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and have now added Iraqi and Egyptian Christians to the list of those they are eager to murder.

In truth, since the attacks of September 11, the U.S. government has refused to call a spade a spade and has not waged a full-scale war of ideas against the Islamists and against radical Islamist ideology. What Obama’s predecessor called a “war on terror” and what he calls a fight against “the forces of organized extremism” is in reality a war against terrorists and terrorist regimes inspired by varieties of an ideological tradition called radical Islamism. It really is the third great totalitarian tradition in world politics after Nazism (or fascism) and Communism. Like its two famous predecessors, it too emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. It drew bits and pieces from both—more from the Nazis than from the Communists—but it is the one that has persisted while the other two have largely lost their inspirational power. It is an autonomous ideological tradition with its own internal compass, and passions that are not primarily a reflexive response to what the president of the United States does or does not do. This is why Obama’s gestures of goodwill and empathy are met with the Islamists’ contempt and hatred.

I want to put aside the bigger questions about how many Muslims are actually blood-thirsty Islamists who respond to American engagement with “contempt and hatred” and just deal with the more concrete claim about how big a threat political Islam, and Islamic-inspired terrorism, is to the United States. Herf, while trying to show how salient a concern Islamism and Islamic terrorism are, actually gives away the game.  Although we obviously prefer a stable Pakistan to an unstable one, Herf doesn’t actually have an argument that the Pakistani Taliban is going to seize the government and their nuclear weapons anytime soon. And while Iran seems to be pretty desirous of a weaponized nuclear capacity, its actual weapons program isn’t going anywhere fast. And, most importantly, as Herf points out, Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies are doing a good job stymieing actual terrorist attacks! It’s not the efforts that matter, it’s the actual sucesses, which appear to be few and far between.

Fascism and Communism were not bad not because, as ideas, they were uniquely terrible ones (even though they were). They were bad ideologies because they were the presiding ideologies of large alliances of nations who wanted to expand their power over the globe, which in one case precipitated a global war that lead to some 50 million deaths, and in the other case, a huge portion of the world’s population living under dictatorship for nearly half a century, and, again, tens of millions of deaths due to state violence in Ukraine, the Gulags, China and Cambodia.

Intellectual history is interesting and important, but it’s capabilities that matter.

But Rick Reilly, who is famously character obsessed, doesn’t even want to talk about the qualitative aspects of Rdogers’s greatness, which he describes in typical overly-cute Reilly fashion — “Houdini feet” “rifle-scope accuracy” “freakish arm,” and finally, “courage while the land around him burned.” But no, Reilly wants to talk about “how he lives.”

Reilly wants to remember Rodgers for not publicly bashing Brett Favre and for throwing to Jordy Nelson even though Nelson dropped a few passes. So Rodgers, instead of getting credit for having some of the best playoff statistics ever and, through his short career, the best efficiency ratings ever, is supposed to be remembered for playing some part in a soft-focus, violin-scored Ebersol production about the power of forgiveness? Really? Because would anyone care about his lack of public vitriol towards Favre if he hadn’t outplayed the ageing sexter the last three seasons? What if Rodgers kept on throwing to Nelson, but instead of hitting him in the hands, overthrew him on some key plays (as actually happened)? What if quarterbacks were largely instinct driven and worked through their progressions and automatically threw to the first open receiver they saw, and were not obsessed over the last play in a way that only sportswriters can be?

It’s weird to see that Rick Reilly, such an anachronism whose insights about sports are so impoverished, so overdetermined and so irrelevant to how most fans experience and evaluate the game, is still given top-bill treatment from ESPN, when they have people who are pushing forward sports analysis and writing (John Hollinger, Bill Simmons, etc) or old-school sports writers like Mike Wilbon, who, despite their inability to fully adapt to the new stats-driven world , at least have something more than half-baked Lindsey Lohan jokes to push their columns forward.

At least, anyone who has actually watched Aaron Rodgers play will know that Reilly’s “analysis” is, at best, superfluous and does not risk impoverishing the singular experience he so poorly captures.

Leinart stayed at USC for another year, losing in the national championship game to Vince Young and the Texans and got drafted tenth overall by the Arizona Cardinals. He was the second quarterback drafted behind Vince Young. Leinart was cut by the Cardinals at the beginning of this season. That same season, Cal was ranked number four going into the final voting. Despite having only one loss to the eventual national champions, Texas leap-frogged the Golden Bears and Rodgers in the Coaches Poll, snatching the four spot and an automatic BCS bid to the Rose Bowl. Cal would go on to lose the Holiday Bowl to Texas Tech.

Aaron Rodgers declared himself eligible for the 2005 draft and was picked 25th by the Packers. Despite overall praise, ESPN draft guru Mel Kiper Jr said that Rodgers “can be a bit mechanical in his throws” and “on basically a gut feeling” said Smith was the (slightly better pick). Rodgers was the second quarterback selected and was 24 picks behind Utah’s Alex Smith, who the 49ers drafted first overall.

Aaron Rodgers’s most prestigious award in college was either his first team all-Pac 10 his junior year or the honorable mention All-American nod from Sports Illustrated. He was not recruited by any major schools and transferred to Cal after a year at Butte Community College. He spent three years backing up Brett Favre as his play declined and he tormented the Packers with his endless indecision about whether, and where, to continue his career.

Now Aaron Rodgers has the highest regular season quarterback rating in NFL history and the lowest interception percentage of all time. He is Super Bowl MVP. His career playoff record is 4-1. This year in the playoffs, he had nine passing touchdowns, two rushing touchdowns and two interceptions. He did not make the Pro Bowl this season.

It is unclear if any of Matt Leinart, Carson Palmer, Vince Young or Alex Smith will be a starting quarterback next season. Aaron Rodgers will be reigning Super Bowl MVP.

As far as injuries go, Ellis gets the edge. He’s had one significantly injury shortened year — 2008-2009, when he was suspended for tearing a ligament in his ankle in a low speed moped accident — but considering the amount of minutes he plays and how hard he plays for those minutes, he is surprisingly resilient. He is, however, 25 and in his sixth NBA season. Curry, on the other hand, is in his second year of starting professional ball, is 23 and has had a nagging ankle problem which has limited him this year and kept him out of seven games.

And then the stats. Although one is tempted to ignore their frontline stats like points per game, Ellis’s ability to be able to play 40 minutes a game is noteworthy because it means the Warriors have someone who can create his own shot in for all but eight minutes and he keeps their defensive bench out of the game for even longer is noteworthy. Curry, however, is no slouch, and gets 35 minutes a game.

But when it comes to advanced stats, on most counts it’s a wash or Curry with a slight edge. All stats from basketball Reference.

Curry’s true shooting percentage this year is .592, Ellis’s is .539. Curry’s Win Shares this year is 4, Curry’s is 3.7. Ellis’s points produced per 100 possessions is 107, Curry’s is 115. Ellis’s estimated defensive rating per 100 possessions is 112 and Curry’s is 111, although this can be attributed to Curry often having to guard the better scoring guard on the opposing team. There’s also the fact that Curry, despite being only three years younger than Ellis, is only in his second season, and has seen his offensive efficiency go up since his rookie year and will probably continue to rise, whereas Ellis can probably continue his current production and this rate for a while longer, but has probably plateaued.

Another thing to keep in mind is that effective point guards are a rare commodity, but then again, so are high powered scorers like Ellis. And, more than anything, the Warriors need a defensive-minded, big center who can patrol the lane, block shots and get easy boards. But then again, who doesn’t?

Another problem is with commentators like Michael Wilbon who won’t Cutler for complying with his coach’s and medical staff’s instruction that he not go in and instead let players do it, sometimes anonymously. Even though Wilbon gets on the record tweets and quotes from Derrick Brooks, Deion Sanders, Darnell Dockett and Mark Schlereth criticizing Cutler, he also has a quote from “A lineman who played more than a dozen years and won multiple Super Bowls” who was “was stunned Cutler was standing on the sideline, not on crutches, receiving no treatment while his team played on” (but if it was thought to be an MCL injury, it’s not like in-game treatment would have done anything). Wilbon doesn’t give a reason why this player had to be anonymous — it’s not like he was telling Mark Mazetti about Duane Clarridge’s private spy ring — but still we have this silly, unsubstantiated criticism that Wilbon probably wouldn’t make himself.

The problem with Jay Cutler that’s unique to Jay Cutler — he is, after all, an above average starting quarterback who’s rarely hurt, plays behind a porous offensive line and lead the Bears to a division championship and an NFC championship game — is that he isn’t like liked, and he’s especially despised by the media. Sure, we hear all sorts of little things about why teammates don’t love him, but isn’t part of the reason his own peers so quickly turned on him is because people like Wilbon and Rick Reilly are telling them to?

“All Things Shining” offers fascinating readings of works of literature chosen to illuminate this narrative — from Aeschylus, Dante and Melville to David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert — as well as passionate glimpses of the attitudes toward the world the authors urge us to regain.

Clearly, Susan Neiman is grouping Aeschylus, Dante and Melville together and then Wallace and Gilbert. Superficially, this makes sense. Aeschylus, Dante and Melville are all authors who are mostly read in academic settings and whose works are in stately Penguin and Norton editions, while Wallace and Gilbert were/are bestselling authors. Julia Roberts has never portrayed Beatrice Portinari or Clytemnestra; she did star in an adaption of Eat, Pray, Love. But chronologically, and even stylistically, this is a bizarre.

Aeschylus died in 456 BC, some 16oo years before Dante’s birth in 1265, whose death proceeded Melville’s 1819 birth by around 500 years. Melville, however, is a mere 143 years older than Wallace and is writing in roughly the same form — the long, sprawling philosophical novel — and even has an interesting mirror image relationship to literary Modernism, which Moby Dick proceeded by about 70 years and Infinite Jest follows by about 50 . Dante, on the other hand, wrote the Divine Comedy almost three hundred years before the publication of Don Quixote.

And while Moby Dick is an intentional pastiche of literary styles and has hints of the epic and Biblical literary traditions, it is still very clearly a novel, a form that’s totally foreign to Aeschylus or Dante. And yet, because of the fact that the typical reader tends to only engage with anything besides contemporary, 20th century and some British 19th century literature in an academic setting, we get this weird feeling that Melville must be somewhat like Shakespeare or Dante, because we read Moby Dick in sophomore year English and Hamlet in junior year English and were forced to recite the themes in crafted, five paragraph essays; whereas we read (well, some of us) read Wallace for fun.

But just because books get academicized due to their age and influence should not let us make lazy connections and groupings that obscure more than they illuminate. Well, maybe we can be lazy, but the Times should not be.

So 13th ranked Virginia Tech lost to lowly James Madison, meaning that Boise State’s likely only top 25 opponent now has an ignominious lost that will make it very difficult to maintain any type of high ranking throughout the year and will likely doom Boise State’s national championship hopes, because if they go undefeated, they will have only one decent win. In some ways, this strikes me as completely unfair. It’s not Boise State’s fault that they aren’t in a major conference and so can’t automatically schedule good competition, and because they’re so good, major conference teams are wary of playing them in their non-conference season, as there is a high chance that they’ll end up losing to a non-major team. But on the other hand, strength of schedule matters — losing one game in the SEC of Big XII really is more impressive than going undefeated in the Western Athletic Conference. And if you’re going to have the current rankings/national championship game system, then not taking strength of schedule seriously is not an option.

But, it’s not like strength of schedule disparities are only a problem in college football. The 49ers have a much better chance of not only making the playoffs, but playing at least one game at home than the Vikings or the Falcons, because the 49ers get to play six of their games against the Seahawks, Cardinals and Rams. But the NFL, because of its relatively generous wildcard allotment, can equalize these strength of schedule disparities through a playoff. So if you think Boise State is getting a raw deal, advocate forcefully for some sort of playoff system, but recognize that without one, strength of schedule is indispensable.

Not to get all James Frazier on you, but the model for hybrid heroes whose uncertain and mixed ancestry allow them to both have a foot in two different societies or even levels of being while standing slightly outside both of them is very, very old. The myth of Theseus, who saves Athens from Cretan domination, has as its hero a man of uncertain, outside-of-Athens origin that’s a combination of human woman, Athenian king and Poseidon. As an adult, he comes into Athens, volunteers for the suicide mission of killng the minotaur, through his strength, wits and assistance of a beautiful young woman, he kills his enemy (who, of course, is Theseus’s bizarro mirror image, himself a  powerful hybrid) and saves Athens – though (spoilers!) inattention to the color of his ship’s sails leads to his father throwing himself into the ocean.

And then there’s the hybrid-hero to end all hybrid heroes, Jesus Christ. He too is of uncertain parentage, descended from a King but raised by commoners and only realizes his true origins at adulthood and because of his unique, hybrdical identity, is able to save a group that he is only somewhat a part of (though he is, of course, all human and all divine).

And then there’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which is basically the same story.

But here’s the nut of it, where he explains that if we take American identity to be fundamentally creedal — based around shared ideas and values, as opposed to shared ethnic identity, shared religion or shared historical experience — then we have to except that, in effect, there’s no stable definition of Americanism or genuine Americanness:

Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on.

A cursory look at contemporary America and our history will quickly bear out the fallacy of saying that any ideas that are currently being professed by any sizable group of Americans is any less American than any other one. America is a huge country, with people of different faiths, ethnic groups, countries or origin and a vast array of microcultures all across a huge geographical area. Drake — a half Jewish, Canadian rapper who whines about how rich he is — is a pop star, and so is Brad Paisely, and so is Lil Wayne and so is Lady Gaga. Katy Perry, an evangelical sexpot from Santa Barbara married to a British comedian, had a number one album. Three weeks earlier, the Arcade Fire, a seven member indie rock group primarily influenced by Bruce Springsteen fronted by a husband-wife duo consisting of a  toweringly tall descendantof Alivo Rey and a pixie-like Haitan-Canadian, were perched atop the Billboard chart. Kid A was a number one album and so was Kamikaze by Twister.

In four years, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan won presidential elections. Woodrow Wilson was the driving force behind the League of Nations, oversaw massive Progressive reforms, was perhaps the most racist president and was eventually undercut by an isolationist Congress. Then in 1945, we spearheaded the founding of the United Nations and one of our two parties totally disdains the institution. We have some of the most extensive protections for the accused in the Western world and have also seen the Palmer Raids, Guantanamo, and Japanese internment. We overwhelmingly elect a man who is outwardly cool, collected and intelligent, and less than two years later, a weepy Mormon former shock jock holds a massive spiritual revival on the Mall that’s a thinly-veiled opposition rally. In 1912, Eugene Debs got over 900,000 votes for President and nearly 6% of the popular vote, Ed Clark and David Koch got just over 900,000 votes in 1980. Jamie Whitten and Adam Clayton Powell served in Congress together for 26 years in the same party.

I could go on.

The point is simply that just about anytime a political figure or commentator claims that their political vision is genuinely American and their opponents’ is not, they’re basically full of it. Ron Paul is as American as Barack Obama, John Boehner, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Glenn Beck and Michael Bloomberg. We’re all Americans and we all disagree about stuff. Let’s talk about that stuff.

So while Serwer is obviously right that X’s suspicion of integration and liberalism was justified by the obvious abuses of the white power structure and that Beck’s paranoia on behalf of the majority is quite ugly in comparison, what Salam is saying doesn’t seem that far afield of Christopher Hitchens’s argument that Beck’s popularity is due to some people’s concern with the fact that “white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority” or as Salam put it, “Palin, like Beck, was talking about a spiritual restoration, a return to time-tested virtues that had been celebrated by the more homogeneous America of the past, in which non-traditional families were stigmatized and relatively rare, church attendance was far more common, and the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture was unquestioned”

Now, I part ways with Salam here, but only slightly. What Palin and Beck seem to echo most is not X per se, but the entire Afrocentric politico-academic-ideoligical tradition that arose in response to the (re)emergence of political black nationalism in the 60s and 70. Gerald Early’s excellent essay on Afrocentrism, “Understanding Afrocentrism: Why Blacks Dream of a World Without Whites,” clearly draws a connection between Afrocentrism and the other white nationalist passion, the Lost Cause, the dream of a genteel, orderly antebellum Southern planter society destroyed by the Civil War and instantiated in romantic heroes like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Here’s Early:

Today, Afrocentrism is not a mature political movement but rather a cultural style and a moral stance. There is a deep, almost lyrical poignancy in the fantasy of the Afrocentrist, as there is in the white Southerner’s What would I have been had I not lost the war? The Afrocentrist is devoted to his ancestry and his blood, fixated on the set of traditions that define his nobility, preoccupied with an imagined lost way of life. What drives the Afrocentrist and the white Southerner is not the expression of a group self-interest but concern with pride and honor. One group’s myth is built on the surfeit of honor and pride, the other on the total absence of them.

Like the white Southerner, the Afrocentrist is in revolt against liberalism itself, against the idea of individual liberty[...]this is what the Afrocentrist wihses to retrieve, a place for himself in his own community…Afrocentrism is a historiography of decline, like the mythic epic of the South.

Obviously the correspondence between the Lost Cause, which has a very specific historiography, and the Beck phenomenon is not total, but it shows the general similarities between a spiritualized history of past greatness that can be restored that animates Afrocentrism, the Lost Cause and Glenn Beck. But it’s hardly a surprise that Beck’s rally was absolutely lathered in adoration of the military, just as the Lost Cause worships Lee and black nationalists idolize the Black Panthers.

Beck’s idolization of the Founders, who in his view, represent a lost age of political wisdom and personal virtue and who are responsible for everything good about America while sundry 20th century Progressives are responsible for everything bad is reminiscent of the Afrocentric treatment of pre-imperialism Africa. Academic Afrocentrism, which of course is deeply entwined with spirtual and ideological Afrocentrism, rests on a nostalgic view of a lost Golden Age of Black African cultural power.

Afrocentrists make two central assertions about African history. That Ancient Egypt was a “black”  society and that the Western intellectual tradition is deeply indebted to Egyptian thought and culture. What’s good about Africa and the West is what was good about Egypt and what’s bad about Africa and the West is due to Western perversion of Egyptian ideas and cruel domination of Africa.

And so Tea Partiers dress up in 18th century costume and purport to treat the Founders like saints, while Afrocentrism gave birth to Kwanza, which dates back to 1970s America, just like Beck’s political vision is, at best, copped from paranoid populist right-wingers of the middle of the 20th century. Cleon Skousen, Maulana Karenga (the inventor of Kwanza) and Glenn Beck have more in common with each other than Beck does with, say, Thomas Jefferson.

Of course, all cultural nationalisms are, in some important sense, imagined. But some are more imagined than others and, whether they are black or white, those nationalisms will always look strange, silly and even a bit dangerous to the liberal mainstream. And sometimes they are.

And then there’s the possibility that some of these people just have substantively wrong views and shouldn’t be listened to because they’re wrong.  Ben Smith quotes Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot whose plane crashed into the Pentagon and is a leader of families opposed to the project, saying some things that indicate that she’s just another conservative hawk who we ought not to take very seriously:

Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame was the pilot of the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon and who serves on the board of Keep America Safe, agreed that there is an emotional component but rejected the notion that the mosque issue is a “feelings” concept instead of part of a larger debate about different cultures and how the U.S. should engage with Muslim culture within the country.

“I do ascribe to the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory now,” said Burlingame, who has been among the main voices questioning the funding behind the proposed mosque, and the intents of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind it. She said, as she did after Obama’s speech, that many Muslims have practiced peacefully in the U.S. before and after the attacks, but that Rauf has made statements supporting radical elements of Islam, and that the location was chosen to be provocative.

She criticized those, mostly led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who are defending the project under freedom of religion, saying, “That’s a Western concept.”

“This is a different model,” she said, arguing that in the United States people “for generations had been raised on this concept of separation of church and state, and that you don’t trash someone because of their religion … but that’s not what we’re dealing with here.

If you think that Burlingame sounds a lot like Mary Cheney, or any conservative who wants to portray Islam not as a religion but instead as a political ideology, that’s because they co-founded Keep America Safe together. If you don’t agree with Mary Cheney or William Kristol on these types of matters, you don’t agree with Deborah Burlingame and her status as the sister of Charles Burlingame doesn’t make these opinions any more valid or worth heeding.