The first half just ended. As if I needed another reason to hate Ohio State (I already have many), they embarass the conference by going out there in the first half and getting their asses handed to them by a Florida team that need luck to beat friggin’ South Carolina. And what egregiously awful coaching. When was the last time you saw a team start playing prevent in the first quarter? Half the time, only six or seven Ohio State defenders are on the screen. A three-in-the-box strategy just doesn’t work all that often, Mr. Tressel!
And what horrid officiating! The “roughing the passer” call that led to Ohio State’s only offensive touchdownwas complete bogus. Why not play two-handed touch, or make them wear skirts back there? And on at least three occasions, I’ve seen Florida linemen tackle their defensive counterparts. Apparently, there’s no such thing as holding, nor any such thing as an illegal block in the back. But if you even look at a quarterback funny, fifteen yards, bub.
Full disclosure: As much as I hate Ohio State, it’s against my religion to ever root for a Florida team. Any Florida team. Gators, Seminoles, Hurricanes, Golden Knights; doesn’t matter. I hate ‘em all. So this game sucks for me: Team I hate versus team I hate even more.
OK, now that that little rant is out of the way, a question for the readership. Set aside conference and team loyalties, and ask yourself this: which is more embarrassing for the B(C)S? Ohio State getting its ass kicked and having one Division I team undefeated (and not the national champion)? Or Ohio State pulling it out, and the season ending with two undefeateds?
January 8th, 2007
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Sports, College FB |
16 comments
The blogosphere lost another good blogger today — Michael Berube is hanging it up. Berube is one of two blogging professors (Jeff Cooper was the other) of whom I ever thought, “it would be fun to take a class from him”. I am going to miss reading him. I guess now I have to buy his book ….
January 8th, 2007
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Bloggin, Culture, Books |
no comments
Tax cut proponents (like W) always like to parrot about how tax cuts actually increse revenues. Publius has a good post on why this is actually BS. The Readers’ Digest version is that such proponents always compare revenues in absolute dollars, rather than in inflation-adjusted dollars, or as a percentage of GDP. The latter two are still below pre-cut levels.
It’s a good read, but there’s something he misses. There’s simply not a shred of evidence — zip, zilch, zero — that even the increases in absolute dollars are the result of the tax cuts. It seems that these “increases” happen in spite of the tax cuts. My bet is that the revenue increases would have been even greater if we had not implemented the cuts.
January 8th, 2007
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Politics, Economics |
22 comments
On Easter Sunday, 1873, white men — mostly former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, surrounded the courthouse where a group of black men where holed up. The black men represented the legal government of the county, the white men represented the absolute refusal of whites in Louisiana to treat blacks as anything even resembling human beings. The white men attacked the out gunned blacks and beat them back into the court house, where they used a captured black to set fire to the building. The black men were allowed to burn to death. Most of the captives were executed the next day.
In 1921, the town of Colfax put up a monument to the battle. It read:
In Loving
Remembrance
Erected
To the Memory
Of the Heroes
…
Who Fell in the Coulfax
Riots Fighting For
White Supremacy
April 13, 873
I left the names of the three whites who died in the massacre. After reading this book, you would too. It is the tale of how the civil war was finally lost, at least in Mississippi and Louisiana. In essence, Whites in the South refused to treat freed slaves as anything other than, well, slaves. They expected their former chattel to behave as if the chains still existed, and when Blacks attempted to claim for themselves the rights all people are entitled to, Whites killed them. They killed them without provocation, without reason, without mercy. They killed for the explicit reason of making sure that Blacks could not vote, could not participate as the equals of Jim Crow was not a system of laws; it was the pale reflection of the violent will of the White South. Former Confederate soldiers and the cream of Southern society banned together ot impose its will upon the
Nicholas Lemann tells this story through the history of Adlebert Ames, former war hero and eventually Senator and Governor of Mississippi, and tells it well. His research is impeccable; events are told with the backing of a wealth of period source documents. His prose is sparse and clear and the more powerful for it. And Lemann never flinches from the true horror of the period. This is an infuriating book. If your blood doesn’t boil over the depredations described in this history, then there is something wrong with you. Leman does a good job not only of cataloging what happened but also what it meant to the people involved. The horror of the time is abundantly clear. If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not always do a good job of making clear how much the events in Mississippi mirrored those in other parts of the South. The book leaves the reader with the impression that Mississippi was representative of the Reconstruction South, but it doesn’t always prove the contention.
The impression, though, is reinforced by history. In the end, the murders and terrorists won all over the South — the North was too tired of war and too racist itself to beat back the Klan and other White Supremacy organizations like the White Lines. Despite the struggle of people like Ames and others from the North — the “carpetbaggers” so reviled in Southern mythology — the North was unwilling to force the surrender at Appomattox to mean both Union and Freedom. In the end, the noble Lost Cause, the heritage that I am told over and over again I should respect, degenerated into barbarism, murder, terrorism, and the explicit goal of making sure that no Black would ever live a life of anything other than complete and abject subservience to Whites. That fact and the mythology that grew up to excuse that fact dominated American politics until at least the 1980s. You can see the outline of almost every piece of racial politics in this country in Reconstruction Mississippi, especially in the refusal of Whites to accept that Blacks were full human beings and in the easy recourse to violence by Whites in service of that bigotry.
Lemann has written a depressingly comprehensive history of how the Civil War was lost to the forces of racism and hate in Mississippi. If you want to understand the Reconstruction — and thus the last hundred and forty years of American history — you should read this book.
January 8th, 2007
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Reviews, Books |
5 comments
