Link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/5/181751/2590

I describe myself as a progressive libertarian on my blog and when I discuss politics with people. I have already been informed by several posters on discussion boards that apparently I am not supposed to be in favour of concepts like social justice, personal freedom and regulated markets if I want to be a libertarian. I am instead supposed to believe in the primacy of "free markets" (as if there was a single valid example of a large free market anywhere in the world...) and the primacy of business. Extreme exponents of that worldview (anarcho-libertarians) scare me, because they seem to have a touching faith in the ability of unfettered capitalism to solve all known problems. They appear to have never read the observation that capitalism is a terrible economic system that just happens to be better than all of the other systems tried to date. If that statement is true (and I believe it is) then capitalism could use some improvements.
I see no intrinsic issue with embracing personal freedom within the framework of equitable treatment of human beings, in a society organized on the basis of an appropriate level of government and legal regulation. Not all government is evil, excessive government definitely creates problems, and the right answer (as is usually the case for a complex societal issue) is somewhere in between.
Here is an article that does a reasonably good job of reflecting many of my current opinions.

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/branded_b_13272.html

...in which an author of a book about President Bush finds himself on a Watch List, with public servants refusing to explain how or why he was put on the list, and what he can do to have himself removed from it...
This is a slippery slope towards an authoritarian state watching all citizens with the presumption of innocence neatly ignored. Unacceptable. This one reason why I want the current GOP administration out of office.

Link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060104-3.html

..announced by the White House today. This process was originally supposed to allow the President discretion to appoint people where quick decisions were required, and Congress was not in session. However, looking down this list, none of these appointments fall into that category. These are vacancies that have existed for some time, where Congress would normally hold confirmation hearings.
IMHO this is yet another example of the phenomenom of the "Imperial Presidency" - an executive branch that is acting as if it is above scrutiny by either the legislative or judicial branches. This is another in a disturbing pattern of behaviour which further convinces me that BushCo cannot be trusted to run the country according to the fundamental principles defined in the Constitution.
These people need to be removed from office, preferably by the electors that put them there.

Dick Vermeil (Kansas City) - Retired
Dom Capers (Houston) - Fired
Jim Haslett (New Orleans) - Resigned? Fired? (same result)
Steve Mariucci (Detroit) - Fired in November
Mike Martz (St. Louis) - Fired
Mike Sherman (Green Bay) - Fired
Mike Tice (Minnesota) - Contract not renewed (Note to media - not fired)
Norv Turner (Oakland) - Fired

plus:

Bill Parcells (Dallas) - retiring?

Now it's time to watch the Annual Head Coach Hiring soap opera play out. Several of these vacancies may not be filled until after the Superbowl because clubs cannot talk to coaches on the staff of teams that are still in the playoffs.
One candidate who has already disappeared from the market is Redskins' defensive co-ordinator Gregg Williams, who has signed a new 3 year contract to remain with the Redskins. The assumption is that the contract may contain a clause making him the next Redskins head coach when Joe Gibbs retires...

Link: http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-dec29-05.html#wikipedia

...is this article which attempts to explain what really happened late last year when Wikipedia adjusted some of its article update processes in response to a complaint that an article was factually incorrect.
Leaving aside the fact that the mainstream media (once again) seem to be either too lazy or disorganized to spend the time actually reporting correctly, I have one question for the Wikipedia-bashers; how long do you think it would have been before Encyclopedia Britannica was updated if a similar issue had occurred with that publication?

One of the main differences that I noticed when I came to live in the USA was the propensity for public figures in this country to invoke references to their religious faith in speeches or public comments. For example, it appears that it is not possible to run credibly for public office in many parts of this country unless you are prepared to emphasise your religious faith and use the word "God" frequently in speeches and other communications.
I even had to watch Jeff Gordon invoking assistance from "the Lord" in his otherwise almost content-free, cliche-ridden interviews after he won NASCAR races. This was really weird. It sounded like his car was sponsored by God in addition to DuPont, Pepsi-Cola etc.
Of course, we have also had to grow used to finding out that many of those same publicly elected officials have not been living their own lives or conducting their roles exactly according to many of the tenets in reference works such as The Bible...
My fellow Well poster Doug Masson has coined a term for this use of language and rhetoric. He calls it "Christianesque". This entry on Wikipedia cross-references the term to The Sermon On the Mount, which is a fairly concise exposition of Christian values by Jesus himself.
I would suggest that next time you detect Christianesque language by a public figure, you run the actions of that person past the Sermon On The Mount to see if that person is walking the walk or simply talking the talk...

The contrasting fates of Doug Flutie and the Buffalo Bills were on display on Sunday.
While the Bills managed to lose to the New York Jets, likely cementing the demise of GM Tom Donahoe (and possibly costing head coach Mike Mularkey his job also), Flutie, ever the improviser, scored a single point off a drop kick in the Patriots' game at Miami. This is the first time a point has been scored off a drop-kick in the NFL since 1941. The play fell into disuse after the shape of the ball was changed in the 1930's, which made bounces more unpredictable.
Flutie may well retire after this season, and if he does, the drop-kick will be a suitable book-end to a career that started at Boston College in the 80's, included his winning the Heisman Trophy due to the infamous last-second "Hail Mary" pass, and took him on a long journey into and out of the NFL, on to the CFL and back to the NFL with the Bills.
If Tom Donahoe is fired this week by the Bills, it will be hard to not see his dismissal through the lens of his quartback personnel decisions, which involved Doug Flutie.
When Donahoe joined the club in 2001, the team was divided between factions supporting Flutie, the unorthodox little guy who had twice come off the bench to salvage seasons that were slipping away, and Rob Johnson, the quintessential good-looking California athlete, signed on a big trade deal from Jacksonville, a man with a great arm but no survival skills beyond running around and taking sacks whenever a play broke down.
Donahoe and new coach Gregg Williams decided to keep Johnson, and let Flutie go. It is fair to say that ever since that decision, the Bills quarterback position has been a mess. Johnson was never the answer; he lacked pocket awareness, and held onto the ball too long. His answer to the survival skills issue was simply to train harder so that he could run faster; lost in the mist was any consideration of Doing Something Smart With the Ball.
The Bills then traded for Drew Bledsoe and hailed him as their saviour, only to decide after 2 seasons that he was also not the answer either, seemingly because he was not mobile and also took too many sacks (which begs the question of why they traded for him in the first place. After all, it's not as if anybody watching the NFL for the last 10 seasons would have confused Drew Bledsoe with a mobile quarterback).
More recently the Bills dumped Bledsoe and gambled a first-round draft pick on J.P. Losman, who may well be an excellent quarterback eventually, but who is not yet ready for prime-time. The Bills have played more consistenly this season under Kelly Holcomb, who may be the most underrated #2 quarterback in the league.
Using the military maxim of 20:20 hindsight, the Bills would have been better keeping Doug Flutie and selecting a young quarterback in the draft to ultimately replace him. Instead, Donahoe confused youth, athleticism and "potential" with results, with negative consequences for the Bills.
Although he is totally unorthodox compared to Jim Kelly, Flutie could run a no-huddle offense just as well as Kelly, and, as Peyton Manning as shown, running a no-huddle offense can be very effective at keeping opponents off-balance in a game. Flutie was probably not a long-term solution at age 37, but as Bill Parcells always likes to point out, saying a player "has potential" is merely a polite way of saying that he hasn't done anyting yet.
So, the Bills will probably be starting over at the GM position, and they might also be starting over with a new head coach. Some of Mike Mularkey's play-calling decisions have been incomprehensible to the outside world, and his approach to the Eric Moulds incident bore the stamp of a man who was insecure and over-anxious to impose his authority. The long-term result of the incident was that Moulds ended up looking like the class act, and Mularkey looked like a macho posturer.

Here is a note that I drafted for a discussion forum in May 2005 about the prospects for an OW merger. I pulled it out and read it this evening. Sadly, the situation has not changed very much, despite the optimistic noises and suggestions that occasionally emanate from commentators such as Robin Miller. Here goes:

One idea that I have seen floated on a message board in the last few days is for a merger between the two competing OW series along the lines of the F1 arrangement where the FIA controls the regulatory and safety side, and the F1 teams (via Bernie Ecclestone’s corporate structure) control the commercial and operational side.
In F1 that arrangement evolved over time because Bernie Ecclestone proved that he could take a raggle-taggle collection of poorly-structured races contested by enthusiastic semi-amateurs, and convert it into a highly-organized, highly lucrative, high-profile series. The FIA ended up with the regulatory side because (a) they had no real competence in the commercial side, and (b) both sides, after the infamous 1980-81 battle over regulations, realized that a working peace was better than consistent skirmishing, and made peace (a peace largely regulated in the Concorde Agreement).
Unfortunately, the situation here in American OW is not quite the same. Currently we have a battle between a venue owner, (who, infuriated by what he saw as a lack of respect, started his own race series using his inherited family businesses as collateral), and a group of self-made entrepreneurs who bought the remains of a rival series.
Whichever way you look at it, Tony George, in terms of his motor racing track record, is not fit to shine Bernie Ecclestone's shoes. He has spent a godawful sum of money over the last 10 years on the IRL, and does not have a series in any meaningful sense of the word. One great race doth not a series make. In the meantime, OW racing has been split from top to bottom at all levels - drivers, teams, sponsors, and (dare I mention it because we need to be yelling this from the rooftops), THE FANS.
I am reserving judgement on the OWRS principals, except to note that KK and GF do seem to be trying to adhere to the Roger Penske principle of keeping fairly quiet, working to a well-structured plan, and putting their money down to show that they are serious.
Of course, while all of this is going on, NASCAR continues to consolidate its position as the #1 form of top-line autoracing in the USA...
One other thing. At the moment people are focussing on the possibilities of a merger (of some sort) between the IRL and OWRS. What we need to realize is that it's not just the top flight of American OW racing that is broken. The whole ladder series system is also broken. At the second level, we have Toyota Atlantic, which has been sliding towards life support, and IPS, which, bluntly, is a joke right now. If there is no clearly-defined ladder series through which talented young drivers can progress, then fixing the top-flight will not address one of the major complaints of OW racing fans; namely that the OW series are currently dominated by foreign drivers. They are, but that is because racing in a European or South American OW feeder series will equip you far better for OWRS and the IRL than racing in the US feeder series.
So...it's all fine and dandy for folks to be burbling about a merger of the top OW racing series, but here are some conditions that must be met for this to have any chance of success:

1. The merger must result in a durable peace. It will be worthless if, as soon as an issue arises, the two sides start battling again. Sponsors, business partners and the fan base will not stand for it.
2. Any merger must not result in one party having veto control over any strategic aspect of the system (which means that TG's demand for 51% is a deal-breaker. Does he think that OWRS came down from the hillside with the last rainstorm?). If no one party has veto control, then everybody will have to work together, and dirty words like compromise and win-win may just become working principles instead of quaint notions for wimps.
3. The merger must result in a new set of ladder series in the US to allow US-based drivers to work their way up through the motor racing ranks and arrive at the top level of American OW racing equipped to succeed in and outside the US.
4. The merger ought to be accompanied by some mea culpas on behalf of the key OW players. We (the fans) have had to sit and suffer as a dysfunctional drama has been played out in front of us for 10+ years. This has been a long, and distressing series of events to witness. I am pissed with the outcome, and I hold a lot of people partially responsible for this mess. I want to hear some contrition.

Since I wrote that note in May, there have been some improvements. Atlantics is being revamped with a new car/engine package for 2006 and beyond, and early indications are that the series will prove popular. Also, the IRL has reverted to a single engine supplier (Honda) after both GM and Toyota withdrew at the end of 2005. How that move fits in with "The Vision" I have no idea, except to note that if the IRL Vision was an I.T. Solution Delivery project, it would have been cancelled a long time ago.

Link: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/football/more/01/01/clarett.robbery.ap/index.html

The saga of the human train wreck that is Maurice Clarett continues...except that one of the victims of the robbery apparently cannot positively identify Clarett. This saga looks like it has some more unfolding to do in the coming days.

Link: http://sport.independent.co.uk/cricket/article335900.ece

The recent death of Kerry Packer created some interesting obituaries. Packer was a one-of-a-kind business figure. He was the son of Frank Packer, an aggressive, take-no-prisoners Australian newspaper and magazine owner. Kerry, being the second son, was not even expected to take over the businesses, but his elder brother Clyde Packer fell out with their father and ultimately moved to live in the US. This left Kerry Packer to take over the business once Frank Packer retired.
And history will show that Kerry Packer, despite a rather robust business approach and an occasional public charm deficit, did very well in business. Many of his deals were exceptionally shrewd, none more so than the deal he did to sell his Channel 9 empire to fellow Australian tycoon Alan Bond. Less than 5 years later he was able to buy back the whole business for less than a quarter of what he sold it for when Bond, whose grasp of PR was not matched by his ability to finance and run a business empire, was forced into an asset fire-sale to stave off bankruptcy.
However, in the UK, Kerry Packer's name was often used in vain in the 1970's, because of World Series Cricket.
The backdrop to World Series Cricket was the fact that at the time, leading cricket players were little more than indentured servants in most of their home countries. They played in the Summer for regional or county sides that paid them little more than the salary of a middle-ranking white-collar manager. In return, they were tied to long contracts that could be terminated at any time. Some of the top players could supplement their earnings by commercial endorsements for cricket equipment such as bats, pads, caps and clothing. However, the sums earned were still relatively paltry.
In England, the the poor salaries paid to county cricketers were partially offset by what was known as a "Benefit Season". Each year, one long-serving player for a county would be permitted to organize fund-raising events throughout the season, the profits of which would be given to him at the end of the year. For a player approaching the end of his career, the benefit season became one of the main ways in which he could move on to the next phase in his life with at least some money in the bank. However, there was always an undercurrent of charity associated with the practice. Lost in the enthusiasm for Fred's benefit season was the answer to the question "why are we having to do this for Fred? Why isn't he paid properly?"
A few top cricketers who were playing for their country could look forward to year-round employment, since their country would usually be touring overseas in their Winter. For the rest of the players in a country, Winter was a time when you either took another job, went overseas to play or coach, or collected unemployment benefit. I was amazed to watch an interview in the early 1970's with Alan Knott, who at the time was regarded by many people as the best wicketkeeper in the world. In the interview, Knott explained that if England were not touring, he would sign on for unemployment in the winter in the UK. He had no other work and no other source of income.
All of this treatment of the players was sympomatic of a more fundamental fact that the sport was poorly managed worldwide. Television broadcast rights, which are one of the main revenue streams for most professional sports, were, at the time, captive to monopoly host broadcasters and were sold for next to no money. As a result, there was relatively little money coming into the game. The players were getting a low percentage of that money, but the overall revenues across the world were shockingly low for a sport whose regular viewer numbers could reach the tens of millions in the UK for the Ashes series between England and Australia.
The early 70's also saw the appearance of a new breed of cricketer in Australia and England. The new cricketers were impatient at what they saw as the amateurish way that the game was run, and they hung out with other professional athletes enough to know just how badly most cricketers were paid by comparison with other professional sports.
This was also a time when many talented cricketers in South Africa were denied an opportunity to perform on a world stage (with the resulting increase in their incomes) because of the ban on South Africa imposed after 1969 due to apartheid. Because of the international ban, a number of emerging South African-born players utilized nationality and eligibility loopholes to play overseas and become eligible to play for other countries. One of the leading "expatriate" South Africans was Tony Greig. Although born and brought up in South Africa, his part-English ancestry allowed him to claim eligibility to play for England. He subsequently became the England captain, but his working relationship with many of the leading figures in English cricket was poor. Greig regarded many of them as amateurish has-beens, and probably did not do a very good job of hiding his contempt.
The situation in England was parallelled in Australia, where a new breed of cricketer (led by the Chappell brothers, and including the fearsome fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson) had emerged in the early 70's. These players were a new breed - they were buccaneering, hard-living types with no patience for what they saw as stuffy ceremony and antiquated management approaches.
Enter, stage left, Kerry Packer. Packer saw an opportunity to re-cast the game of cricket. His vision for cricket was an exciting sport, based on one-day matches (not the 3 and 5-day games that still dominated the sport), and utilizing modern television production techniques including instant replay, and more camera angles.
Since he owned the Channel 9 network in Australia, Packer had a ready-made TV platform. He started out by playing the game the way it was currently played, by bidding for the rights to show Australia's international cricket matches. When his bid was summarily rejected in favour of a much lower bid by the incumbent Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Packer concluded (probably correctly) that he was not being taken seriously. At that point, it was "game on".
Packer proceeded to act dramatically by doing something that at the time seemed impossibly audacious. He simply set up his own cricket series. He won over a significant number of the world's leading cricket players very quickly by offering them something that most of them were not getting at the time; guaranteed contracts for proper salaries.
In England, Tony Greig was instrumental in persuading a number of England's best players to join the series. The South African players were also able to take part, since the international ban did not apply as far as Kerry Packer was concerned. He simply wanted high-quality cricket teams, and the more top players the better. The format was Australia vs. The Rest Of the World.
Predictably, the reaction of the international cricket authorities was to circle the wagons. In the UK, the TCCB announced that it would ban WSC players from playing for England for 3 years after the series ended, and even announced that it would ban World Series Cricket players from county cricket, which would have forced many players to permanently live and play overseas. This proposed county cricket ban was swiftly dropped after it was ruled in court to be an illegal restraint of trade. However, there was a lot of bitterness in the UK about WSC, and since the series took place on the other side of the world, and was not televised in the UK, people in England had little knowledge of what was actually happening. As far as many cricket fans were concerned, the players had "sold out" to the God of Commerce, and they could go hang. Many of the English WSC players did not help their image, particularly in the UK, by being defensive and unwilling to discuss their motivations. In part this was because they had been sworn to secrecy when WSC was being set up; the fans and cricket authorities felt blindsided and deceived. Only Tony Greig was prepared to be up-front about his views and motivations once World Series Cricket became a public reality, and his divorce from English cricket was cemented by his unrepentant attitude as much as his time in WSC. After the series ended he settled in Australia and remains employed to this day as a commentator by the Channel 9 network.
The bitterness over World Series Cricket continued for some time. Graham Gooch, one of the English cricketers who joined WSC, would abruptly terminate interviews for several years if asked any questions about WSC and his subsequent ban from playing for England. Other players were similarly defensive and uncommunicative.
Packer ultimately recruited over 50 players from the leading cricket countries to play in the series. Despite the bans on international play enacted by the ICC countries, many players still joined because they were being offered the chance to be paid properly and respected as athletes and performers, instead of being treated as little more than indentured servants.
When the World Series Cricket series got under way in 1977 (complete with a corny theme song for the Australian team, multi-coloured uniforms, and cricket played, in some matches, under floodlights), initial reactions from traditional cricket fans were ones of horror and ridicule. Just about every feature sacred to the game seemed to have been sacrificed for commercial and television expediency. The start of the series was not helped by the fact that most of the cricket stadiums in Australia were closed to WSC, so the series was forced to use a large number of non-cricket arenas, including Australian Rules football grounds, where a temporary mat took the place of the typical impeccably maintainted crease. However, the players, who, despite cynical predictions that they were merely non-trying mercenaries, played hard and played to win. In part this was because Packer himself took a keen interest in how his money was being spent; as John Snow, one of the English cricketers, recalls, "KP turned up when we first landed on Australian soil. He said to us: 'You're getting paid well for this and I expect you to take it seriously. If you want to bugger about you can get back on the plane'". The competitive nature of the players soon resulted in exciting matches, and many of the innovations from World Series Cricket were rapidly adopted by other domestic cricket competitions and by television broadcasters.
World Series Cricket came to an end in 1979 as part of a compromise that saw Packer obtain a significant level of control and influence over the direction and revenues of Australian cricket. The compromise was probably fuelled in part by the poor performance of the Australian "official" test side during the 1977-79 period. Having lost the nucleus of their side to WSC (including the Chappell brothers, Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson) Australia were forced to assemble a patchwork team including captain Bobby Simpson, who had not played at international level in 8 years, and they were losing test matches regularly to other countries.
Wolrd Series Cricket changed the game significantly. One big change was that international cricket match fees leaped upwards; players started to be paid properly for representing their country. Packer's lead in aggressive TV coverage was followed in the UK by Sky's purchase of international cricket broadcast rights, which brought more money into the sport at all levels and allowed for more professional coaching and management.
Ultimately WSC was a wake-up call for a sport that was in danger of simply fading away. For that, Kerry Packer, despite not having the purest of motives, deserves credit.