Tyranny-oh it comes in many shapes and sizes...Tyranny-but when it comes, it comes with no surprises

There are people, maybe even you
Who think opinion polls equals democracy
'Round here the grownups talk of should or should we not
Meanwhile the kids, they know we're going to war...

Dan Bern, "Tyranny" from My Country II

Tonight brings news from Congress on Iraq, both good and bad, though I still suspect that a scary number of the Democrats have their head stuck up where the sun don't shine. Republicans, frankly, aren't worth discussing at the moment, having abandoned reality a while back. The best idea I had heard from in a while for dealing with the Iraq disaster came from Jack Murtha, who decided that it might be best to actually require that our troops be ready before they go back to Iraq for future rotations. In case you missed it, it went something like this:

He's [Murtha was] proposing a law that bars the President from sending troops in Iraq back to the war zone until they have spent one year being retrained at their home base. It forbids troops from being kept in Iraq longer than the one year tour they were promised and prohibits any troops from going to the war zone until they are fully trained and have the proper equipment.

Sounds like a pretty good idea for a bill, especially in the House, where we have a majority and majorities can force through whatever they like. The plan was fiendishly clever in a way. When it got to the Senate, the Republicans would certainly try to filibuster, but the military needs a supplementary appropriations bill because Bush has spent the past few years cooking the books by not including the costs of the war. Thus, Republicans are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Block the bill, and they block the funding for the troops because they refuse to mandate that the troops are adequately prepared. Vote for the resolution and they get wedged away from their base. It was beautiful, but sadly too beautiful for this world. Even though something like 60% of Americans or so have turned against the war, Democratic moderates seem not to have quite come around (again, no need to mention Republicans, who still haven't realized the inevitable result of drinking the kool-aid). From Friday's Washington Post:

House Democrats have pulled back from efforts to link additional funding for the war to strict troop-readiness standards after the proposal came under withering fire from Republicans and from their party's own moderates. That strategy was championed by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
...
But that approach may be all but dead, according to several Democratic lawmakers. Murtha doomed his own plan in part by unveiling it on a left-wing Web site, inflaming party moderates.

"Congress has no business micromanaging a war, cutting off funding or even conditioning those funds," said Rep. Jim Cooper (Tenn.), a leading Democratic moderate, who called Murtha's whole effort "clumsy."

Seriously, it's hard to resist the urge to tell the Congressman that he should consider performing an unspeakable act upon himself. Who gives a flying monkey crap where Murtha unveiled the plan? If it's a good idea, then fight for it, and keep fighting for it. There is a time for process, and a time for action, and way too many people in Washington have absolutely no idea how to distinguish the two. A hint: when people are dying, try action, not process. When naming a building or declaring National Brotherhood Week, process is swell. Congress has every business in determining how funds are used, because they're frickin' Congress, capital-C, one of our three co-equal branches of government. It's just not that hard, especially given that the war is deeply unpopular and getting more so.

Shockingly enough, according to the WaPo it's the Senate that may take the lead on this one:

Senate Democratic leaders intend to unveil a plan next week to repeal the 2002 resolution authorizing the war in Iraq in favor of narrower authority that restricts the military's role and begins withdrawals of combat troops.
...
"We gave the president that power to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, if necessary, to depose Saddam Hussein," Biden said of the 2002 resolution in a speech last week before the Brookings Institution. "The WMD was not there. Saddam Hussein is no longer there. The 2002 authorization is no longer relevant to the situation in Iraq."
...
The new framework would set a goal for withdrawing combat brigades by March 31, 2008, the same timetable established by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Once the combat phase ends, troops would be restricted to assisting Iraqis with training, border security and counterterrorism.

Seriously, Hell Yes! This war was a Republican creation from the beginning, and it's time to hang it around their necks for good. If they choose to block it, so be it, but it will crush their election hopes in 2008, having to explain why we've been for war for 5 years in Iraq and SEVEN in Afghanistan, without signs of things improving, all of our former allies having basically deserted us. This past week, Britain announced that they were pulling troops from Iraq, and no one, and I mean no one, believed it when the administration tried to claim it was a "affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well", to quote the Veep. By now all of realize exactly what happened: the British have no control whatsoever over Basra, and saw no need to continue getting their ass handed to them, deciding that since their troops are desperately needed in Afghanistan, where they can still do some good, they needed to redeploy them.

I have to admit, the people running the show have actually done a pretty good job so far, but this is the time to start hammering away, for the good of the nation and the good of the Democratic party. Courage!

And it don't work out so fine, on this side of the white lines

Ok, that's a baseball reference, but we'll ignore that for now. For the moment, it's about time I mention my ridiculous addiction to sports. I watch freaking timber sports and curling when they're on tv, and I haven't yet touched on football even though college has one game left and the NFL playoffs begin in two days.

Like it or not, sports are a huge industry in America, and in many ways they represent a bizarre combination of progressive values (Jackie Robinson is rightfully considered a civil rights legend) and knee-jerk conservatism. In the latter category, we'll include the biggest evil of sports, the fleecing of taxpayer dollars for stadium construction by greedy owners when the money would be better used on public services, as well as the relatively overt racism contained in Native American-themed team names (Redskins), logos (Cleveland Indians), and mascots (our very own Chief Illiniwek and his supposedly dignified "Indian" halftime dance). Why do we put up with these blatantly racist symbols? Because it's tradition, I'm often told. look, slavery was a tradition, as was segregation, as was keeping Jews under quotas at universities, as was any number of other things. A wrongheaded tradition is not justified because it is longstanding; all that it indicates is that sometimes people are way too slow to change.

Besides the larger team-specific issues, it is useful to see how college football plays a role in University life across the nation. At UIUC, as with most Division 1 schools, football/basketball are the dominant non-academic social activities in town. Faculty may not in all cases pay so much attention, but there is an Illini poster in every administrative office in the building, and a huge percentage of both the student body and city population live and die with the team. It's a good thing people are so devoted, in a sense, because athletics programs cost universities a tremendous amount of money. From an article in CFO Magazine:

According to an analysis by the Indianapolis Star newspaper of the 2004-05 budgets of 164 public universities, just 9 percent of these Division I schools had athletic departments that were able to support themselves. The rest received a total of more than $1 billion in student fees, general school funds, and other subsidies.

Without the financial assistance, the average school would have lost $5.7 million, according to the Star.

"Except for a handful, they are all losing money," confirms Daniel Fulks, a professor of accounting at Transylvania University in Kentucky. Fulks, who analyzes athletic budgets for the NCAA, adds that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting wider. Many have-nots are trying to keep up, he says, but are destined to fail. "It's not so much difficult as it is impossible," says Fulks. "I call these schools 'the pretenders.'"

Athletics aren't some sort of fringe benefit of a college town, they are a choice to spend valuable resources on entertainment rather than academic endeavors. It can easily be debated if this makes sense or not, but the fact that universities make sacrifices for their sports teams is a vitally important missing piece of the national discussion. Let's just say that when Stony Brook announced a move from Division 3 to Division 1 (small athletics programs to larger ones) at a time when the nationally ranked Physics Department was facing a multi-year hiring freeze back in the late 90's, very few of us really agreed with the administration that the increased publicity would really make our degrees more valuable. Let's compare shall we, Nobel Prize winner on the faculty vs. a football team that has trouble beating Central Connecticut State on a regular basis: which is better for the students?

A clear example of the ridiculous scope of collegiate budgets is the hiring of football coach Nick Saban by the university of Alabama, a contract that will run $32 million over 8 years, going up to $35 million depending on bowl performance. Such a contract is big (very comparable to what the NFL pays), but not out of line with what big universities pay. The problem seems to be, in part, that many universities across the country see themselves as natural powerhouses (offhand list: USC, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Florida, Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Tennesee, LSU), but there are only ten premier bowl spots out there, along with a bunch of minor bowls that only bring in a fraction of the attention. Thus, many universities pay huge amounts hoping to shoot the moon, only to come up short by millions of dollars at the end of the year, having often compromised their ethical guidelines regarding students when it came to recruiting, class attendance, and treating them as amateurs. There's a running joke I have: when people unfamiliar with college football ask me if the players are paid, I generally answer "Not as much as in the NFL", which may be more true in reality than the official answer, "no". Even sadder is that many college athletes really do blow off college, including the ones with no hope of a pro career. Let's face it, maybe one or two of the Illini from this year's crop will make the NFL, if that; I can't believe 98% of the team was intensely focused on academics during their time here. The rest probably wasted the best free ride they are going to get for the rest of their lives.More later on whether college athletes should be paid officially, rather than under the table.

For the meanwhile though, I should note that for all its problems, college football can be among the most exciting sports to watch in the known world. See the end of the Boise State cinderella upset for the most recent example, featuring a hook-and-lateral on 4th and 18 to tie the game in regulation, and a Statue of Liberty Play (?!?) to win it in overtime. It was amazing to watch.

Ohio State by 17, BTW, 34-17 over Florida for the championship.

Field goal / Lightning Jazz / Daily Kos (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #2)

Friday Catblogging
The kick is up, and it's GOOD!!! The Giants win the ballgame and claim the final playoff spot in the NFC!!!

Friday's Concert Clip
Having started out the week on a rather blasphemous kick (Monday we looked at how our independence seems to vanish in the haze; Wednesday we tried imagining there's no heaven; Tomorrow we're going Across the Universe), this week's musical clip seemed pretty obvious, and no, it's not actually going to be a Beatles song. Instead, we're going with Dan Bern's "Lighning Jazz", a.k.a. "Hey God, How's It Hanging Tough Guy?". If you're browser is being kind, you can go to his

March 28, 2004 show

at Joe's Pub in NYC, which is available, free and completely legal, from Archive.org's etree service, and try track 15 using the embedded player that should open up in the upper right corner of the page. If that fails, you can download the song directly using

this link to the MP3 file.

Again, this is completely legal; many smaller folk artists encourage people to tape their shows and distribute them, and they encourage you to spread their music as widely as possible. Honestly, check out all the songs from this set. I'd name my favorites, but I love most of them, and much of the fun is in the discovery. If you like his stuff, you can buy it here.

Better Know a Blog
Well, I put it off for a week, but this week we go with the grand-daddy of them all: Daily Kos. To explain the name, "kos" is the online handle of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who created the blog after being a prominent poster at MyDD, which is also in our blogroll to the right. Daily Kos, though, cannot be defined by just one person; it has grown to be the largest liberal political blog in the country, if not the largest of any political stripe, because it is a community effort. Thanks to an amazing software package known as "Scoop", anyone can register for an account at dKos and post one diary per day about anything they want. If you like what someone else has written, you can comment on their diary, or on one of the main page stories, leading to active discussion threads that can reach up to hundreds of comments. You can quickly make online friends (or enemies, I suppose), finding kindred spirits who share your particular interests. Several prominent diarists are chosen each year to be "Frontpagers", who, along with Kos himself, get to post stories to the main page, typically about politics, but not exclusively. One of last year's frontpagers, DarkSyde, rose to prominence by writing a weekly popular science column, and throughout last year had a bigger science readership than just about any other writer in the nation, hundreds of thousands of readers per week.

Separating dKos from many of the other liberal political blogs is its focus on electoral politics. Simply put, it is not really a policy forum. Long-term strategies and position papers are often mentioned, but the organizing principle behind the "Kossack" community is electing Democrats, primarily those from the progressive wing of the party, and trying to grow a grass-roots progressive movement that can become a force in American politics. This is not just a pipe-dream; a collaboration between dKos, MyDD, and the Swing State Project helped to raise $1.5 MILLION dollars last cycle through the online Democratic fundraising website Act Blue. The approach they take, which encourages debate and embraces partisanship, strongly frowning on Democrats who attack other Democrats (paging Joseph Lieberman!), stands in marked contrast to traditional democratic single-issue groups (NARAL; Sierra Fund, etc.) that try to acheive policy goals through a bipartisan approach that failed pretty miserably under the previous Republican leadership, since moderate Republicans often gave nice speeches but supported a leadership that blocked any pro-choice, pro-environment or pro-labor bill from ever seeing the light of day.

Dkos takes some getting used to, as it is a pre-existing and tight knit community, but it does contain more content than just about any other blog out there, admittedly with a lower signal to noise ratio than most. If you are feeling unadventurous, check out the Recommended Diaries in the upper right; these are the diaries from the past few hours of which the community itself thinks most highly (they're chosen by you, the viewer!). If you like what you see, lurk for a while and then sign up for an account. Heck, I may even cross-post some of the entries from here over there sometime, to reel in more unsuspecting innocents into our dastardly schemes, just as soon as I figure out what we're dastardly scheming.