#I blame hbo for not campaigning hard enough

[lesbianpizza]

Lizzie was ROBBED of that Emmy nomination. The academy can fuck all the way off. That’s all.

[thebreakfastgenie]

AT LUNCH WITH: Alan Alda Hawkeye Turns Mean, Sensitively

By Elizabeth Kolbert May 18, 1994

THE first thing Alan Alda wants to know when he arrives is whether everything is O.K. He has chosen the restaurant, Orso; he hopes that's O.K. He has asked for a table outside, on the patio. Is that O.K.?

In Hollywood, it isn't easy to get a reputation as a nice guy, but somehow Mr. Alda has managed. Perhaps it is because he spent so much time playing Hawkeye Pierce, that superficially snide but deep-down-lovable scamp. Or maybe it is because he has been married to the same woman for more than three decades and campaigned for the equal rights amendment years before the sensitive guy was even invented.

Or maybe it's just because he's the kind of star who, when he arrives for an interview, seems genuinely concerned that things are O.K.

Whatever the reasons, Mr. Alda has had enough. Over the last few years, he has set about refashioning himself, on screen at least, into something of a jerk. First, in the Woody Allen film "Crimes and Misdemeanors," he played a vain television producer whispering his brilliant insights into a pocket tape recorder. Then, in "And the Band Played On," he portrayed Dr. Robert Gallo as an egomaniacal character more interested in getting credit for discovering the AIDS virus than in curing it.

Now, in "White Mile," which will have its premiere on Saturday on HBO, Mr. Alda is Dan Cutler, a hard-charging advertising executive whose reckless enthusiasm for male bonding results in the deaths of five men.

He made the shift to beat what he calls the "type thing" but has found that he quite enjoys villainy. "The reason that actors like to play bad guys is that you get to do things they won't let you do in real life," he said. "You have people fired, you hit on women, you tell people off, you have them killed. It's very nice to have people killed and not have to go to jail for it."

For lunch, Mr. Alda was wearing a silky maroon shirt, a blue sport jacket with a faint white check and a pair of steel-gray pants. At 58, he is still as lanky and trim as in his "M*A*S*H" days, but his hair, once black, is now completely gray. To read a menu, he now puts on a pair of round-framed bifocals.

Although on television and in movies Mr. Alda tends toward the wry -- whether he's playing nice or not so nice -- in person there are few quips and not a lot of irony. It's not that he is sincere, exactly, but he seems to want to be. "I tried not to come in today with a line of talk," he said. "I tried not to come in to sell you some idea. I'm bored with that."

"I'm not trying to look like I'm a certain type of person, or trying to sell you on 'White Mile,' " he continued. "If you like it, you like it; if you don't, you don't."

"White Mile" follows a team of advertising executives who embark on a rafting trip with their clients as a kind of high-stakes adventure. The head of the agency, played by Mr. Alda, does not want anything to interfere with the bonding experience, so all the men end up piling into one raft, with dreadful results. After five men have drowned, Mr. Alda's character is unrepentant: "I didn't motivate them enough" is the closest he comes to blaming himself for the disaster.

To film "White Mile," which is based on a true story, Mr. Alda and the rest of the cast, including Peter Gallagher and Robert Loggia, spent most of December on the American River in northern California. Mr. Alda described the work -- flailing around while being swept down the river -- as not only strenuous, but also frigid.

But unlike his character, he was not given to machismo in the face of danger. "In every meeting we had," he said, "I asked them how many river people we were going to have. I think they got the message. Everywhere you turned, there was somebody to pull you out of the water."

Mr. Alda has been acting for almost half a century now, ever since his late father, Robert, the original Sky Masterson in "Guys and Dolls" on Broadway, started to use him in vaudeville routines in the 1940's. He credits all the hours he spent hanging around his father and his father's friends with giving him a sense of how much serious work it takes to be entertaining.

"When my father was in vaudeville, I would stand in the wings and watch the magician," he recalled over a plate of penne with vegetables. "I could see how he made the audience think there was nothing in the box. I was seeing him from the side; I'd see how he'd reach under the table and put the pigeons in the box.

"Standing on the side -- watching and hearing the reaction of the audience and seeing the performers five feet away, reading their thoughts, watching them time their performance -- is an education that you can't get from the other side of the footlights. You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it."

Over the years, Mr. Alda has performed just about every role in show business. He has written, directed and starred in four films, the first of which, "The Four Seasons," was a commercial success and the last of which, "Betsy's Wedding," was a flop. He has acted on Broadway, most recently in the Neil Simon play "Jake's Women," tried his hand at writing sitcoms and appeared in commercials. But as he has grown older, he has become pickier about the projects he takes on, and as a result, his schedule these days is . . . let's just say pretty loose.

In a few months, he will be seen as an inept President who orders the invasion of Canada in a new movie from Michael Moore, the director of "Roger and Me." But beyond that, he said, he has not been offered any roles he felt compelled to take. "It's an interesting problem I have," he said. "I want to be able to use the years I have left to have the richest kind of fun I can have."

Ever since "M*A*S*H," Mr. Alda has split his time between the East Coast, where he has houses in the Hamptons and Leonia, N.J., and the West, where he owns a house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He and his wife, Arlene, a photographer, plan to pass this summer on Long Island, spending time with their three daughters and three grandchildren.

Mr. Alda, who in the 1970's became feminism's poster boy -- or should it be poster man? -- no longer spends much time on politics. "I think I put in my time," he said of his days campaigning, unsuccessfully, for the equal rights amendment. "I just got tired of making speeches."

Perhaps. But when he gets going on the subject of women's rights, his voice changes timbre and he comes perilously close to speechifying.

"I don't think we've gotten as far as we can go," he said. "But I think we've gotten much, much farther than anybody imagined we would. I mean, I just read yesterday that the Navy -- it wasn't big news -- that the Navy was going to start making more space for women with increased combat responsibilities.

"That was the main argument for not passing the equal rights amendment: that women would have to be in combat. Well, it turns out they didn't need the equal rights amendment to have the Navy do that, and it's not even big news. So the mind-set has changed enormously, and it has plenty to go."

It was "M*A*S*H" that made Alan Alda a household name -- and an enormously rich man -- and with reruns of the show broadcast practically continuously, it is "M*A*S*H" that in many ways continues to define his public image. The show, which ran for 11 years, is still regarded as the gold standard in the world of sitcom production, and its last episode, on Feb. 28, 1983, was one of the highest-rated entertainment programs ever. But Mr. Alda said the series, which he does not watch in syndication, seemed very distant to him now.

"I'm very happy that I've done something that gives people pleasure still after all these years," he said. "Not that they remember: that they still see it. But for me, as a personal experience for me, it's as though it happened to somebody else."

As for the fame that went with "M*A*S*H" and has been slowly dissipating since then, he maintained that he was just as happy to see it go. At lunch passers-by seemed to notice him, and occasionally paused to greet him, but they did not surround him or even seem particularly impressed by his presence.

"I never was comfortable being as famous as I was," he said. He recalled one evening during the heyday of "M*A*S*H" when a woman who saw him at a restaurant was so overcome that she started to sob. To this day, he said, he regretted not having gone over to comfort her.

All of which again presents the question of being a nice guy. Mr. Alda insisted that it was the press that defined him that way.

"I never was as wonderful a person as everybody said I was," he said. "It occurred to me a couple of days ago that it's too bad that I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few good people like that."

[365days365movies]

February 24, 2021: Annie Hall (1977) (Part 1)

Well...Woody Allen.

I, uh...OK, look, I could get into the whole Woody Allen thing, but INSTEAD of me doing that, I’ll just say this: look into it. Because there is a LOT on this subject, and it’s controversial as HELL. At the end of the day, I’ll recommend this upcoming series on HBO, and just recommend that you look into it.

Because, uh...yeah, it’s not great. That’s all I’m gonna say, because I need to educate myself on it more as well. Instead, let’s talk for a few seconds about divorcing the art from the artist. But ONLY for a few seconds.

I understand why some of you might be surprised I’m doing this one. Because, again...Woody Allen. But, yeah, I always try to do my best to divorce the art from the artist. Because some people suck, but they still make nice things, or at the very least, things that should be open to interpretation and appreciation.

“Superfreak” is a classic song of 1981, and everybody’s heard at least some of it, but Rick James fuckin’ kidnapped two women and kept them in his basement, WHERE HE TORTURED THEM. Edgar Degas made beautiful paintings of ballet dancers, and was also A MASSIVE ANTI-SEMITE. And before he was (RIGHTFULLY AND JUSTIFIABLY) outed as a roofie-ing piece-o-shit...I grew up with - and genuinely enjoyed - this guy’s comedy.

And you can judge me for this, but...I still think his stand-up was and is genuinely funny, and I still appreciate the cultural impact that The Cosby Show had on society’s perception of African-American families, divorced from the stereotype of the ghetto. Fact of the matter is, works themselves deserve to be separated from the artist who made them. That’s my philosophy, and I’m sticking with it Entirely fine to disagree with me, by the way, I get it.

But in that spirit, I’m watching Annie Hall, despite its creators likely transgressions. After all, this is technically his magnum opus, and it’s a good look into the man himself. And so, with that in mind: Annie Hall! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap (1/2)

Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) is talking directly to us about his outlook on life, and his view on the potential future. He tells half of a joke, then an amusing anecdote, and a bit more until telling us that he’s broke up with Annie, and he’s still thinking about it, trying to figure out exactly where things went wrong. He goes back to the beginning, which is punctuated with flashbacks.

He grew up in Brooklyn in World War II, and a young Alvy (Jonathan Munk) is with his mother (Joan Newman) at the doctor’s. He’s depressed after learning that the universe will one day end after a period of expansion, and is having his first real existential crisis. I had mine around the same age, actually, went I learned that the Earth will one day get swallowed by the sun. And THEN came the realization that I’d be dead by that point. AND THEN came the realization that I’d die one day, and that was a WHOLE NEW crisis to...anyway.

He grew up under the Coney Island rollercoaster according to him (although his analyst says that he exaggerates), and that’s what he blames for his “nervous personality. He’s also got an active imagination, often blurring fantasy and reality. His Dad ran the bumper cars on Coney Island (a place that I’ve never been, but desperately want to go).

He continues on talking about his former schoolmates, and not really that well. While in class, young Alvy kisses a...little girl...ahem. And then, when reprimanded by the teacher, current Alvy notes that he was always...like that...and he also says this to the little girl, and they talk about Freud’s latency period, and Alvy said he never...had...one...that’s uh...that’s fuckin’ SOMETHING, now isn’t it?

OK, well, shoving that forcefully aside as hard as I can, Alvy wonders aloud on where his classmates now, and one of them says this:

This also involves a little girl saying she’s “into leather,” which is...awkward as FUCK, but WE’RE GONNA MOVE THE FUCK ON. Alvy recounts his paranoia, and was so even after he became a famous comedian (which we say after a VERY good joke about qualifying for the army as a hostage). He speaks to a friend, Rob (Tony Roberts) about potential anti-Semitism from a person in a passersby meeting, then heads to meet Annie.

Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) arrives at a movie theater, late and in a bad mood. The two are late to their intended film, argue briefly, then head to another film that they’ve already seen, The Sorrow and the Pity. In line, they’re in front of a man loudly soliloquizing on film, much to Alvy’s annoyance.

Annie and Alvy continue to argue a bit, while Alvy openly berates the casual film critic. In the middle, he talks to the audience about it, only to be followed by the crtiic himself, who also acknowledges the audience! Huh! Anyway, he’s a professor at Columbia, and starts continuing his line speech, this time on the work of Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important early media theorists ever. And then, Alvy brings out Marshall McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan) to debate him on it, only for Alvy to turn to the audience and wish aloud that life could really be like this!

I’m beginning to understand why people like this film. It’s metacontextual before metacontextuality was really a thing in film. It’s a fourth-wall breaking movie in some fantastic ways. But will it still hold its muster after breaking the fourth wall’s become so commonplace? we’ll see, I guess.

After a showing of the film, the two return home, and Alvy tries to initiate sex. But Annie’s not really into it at the moment, and Alvy complains that they used to have sex all the time, and it’s been a while since. So, I guess that retroactively awkward scene at the school was meant to foreshadow Alvy’s high libido, that will probably cause some conflict in the film. Anyway, Annie notes that Alvy once went through something similar with Allison, his first wife. Who’s Allison? Flashback!

Allison Portchnik (Carol Kane) is a graduate student in political science, working for a campaign that Alvy’s about to perform for. He’s nervous, as he’s going on after another comedian. She comforts him by saying that she thought he was cute, and he does well. But we flash-forward to a night after they’re married, shortly after the death of JFK, which Alvy’s obsessing over, entertaining various conspiracy theories.

However, Allison rightly points out that his obsession is simply a way for him to avoid having sex with her, which mirrors the present-day situation him him and Annie. Flash forward TO Alvy and Annie, and there are just lobsters...everywhere, on the floor in their kitchen. After that commotion, they talk about Annie’s past romances.

And by talk about, I mean they LITERALLY WALK THROUGH her memories. And I gotta say...I fuckin’ love this method of storytelling. One of her previous boyfriends is an actor (John Glover), and his over-dramatic prose sickens Alvy. We see a second marriage of Alvy’s to New Yorker writer Robin (Janet Margolin), who’s dragged him to a stuffy high society party of intellectuals that he has no interest in going to. Same her, Alvy. I bet the caviar’s canned.

He tries to initiate sex with her - in the middle of the party, mind you - and she turns him down. later, when they get to it in their apartment, she’s unable to, uh...reach satisfaction. From there, we flash-forward after that marriage ends to a tennis match with Rob, where he meets one of his mutual friends: Annie Hall.

And for the record, Annie’s pretty obviously got a crush on him, and she’s adorable as fuck. Also, that outfit, real talk...that outfit rules. She offers to give Alvy a list, during which he’s quite worried about her driving, but the two still get along well enough. Annie’s an amateur photographer, during a time period where photography is considered a relatively new art form. The two go to her apartment, and share familial anecdotes and personal stories about themselves. And as they talk, we also see a set of subtitles on top of each of them that betray their inner feelings and thoughts.

I do genuinely like the stylings of the movie, goddamn. This conversation leads to Alvy asking her out on a date, although they end up scheduling it after Annie auditions at a nightclub as a singer. And while it doesn’t go great, Alvy tells her she was fantastic, and they share a kiss before they head to dinner. They head to her place afterwards, and we cut to later that night, post-coitus.

And then, we get a flash-forward back to the next day, where the two are at a bookstore, and Alvy speaks on his personal philosophy of life.

I'm obsessed with uh, with death, I think. Big - big subject with me, yeah. I have a very pessimistic view of life. You should know this about me if we're gonna go out. You know, I - I feel that life is - is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories, you know. The - the horrible would be like, um, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. You know, and the miserable is everyone else. That's - that's - so - so - when you go through life - you should be thankful that you're miserable because you're very lucky to be miserable.

Iiiiinteresting.

Shortly into their relationship, they admit they’re in love (or “lurve”, as Alvy says). She moves in with Alvy, which he initially isn’t the biggest fan of, having been burned in two previous marriages And already, their relationship is showing a few bumps. Alvy’s also always trying to push her to take college classes, while she uses mariuana whenever they have sex, which Alvy doesn’t agree with.

But as they have sex one night, without the marijuana at Alvy’s urging, Annie’s mind wanders - LITERALLY.

This film...this film has a VERY unique style of visual storytelling, and I am HERE for it! Seriously, I genuinely love this method of storytelling and comedy, it’s extremely engaging to me.

Soon enough, Alvy gets an interview to write for a talk show host, which he ABSOLUTELY despises. But in doing so, he decides to go into stand-up for himself, and is actually quite successful at it! But before we get to that, we’re at the halfway point! See you in Part 2!

[billyagogo]

The Color of His Presidency

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/02/11/the-color-of-his-presidency/

The Color of His Presidency

Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, the liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative strategist and pundit Bill Kristol had a brief spat on Maher’s HBO show, putatively over what instigated the tea party but ultimately over the psychic wound that has divided red America and blue America in the Obama years. The rise of the tea party, explained Maher in a let’s-get-real moment, closing his eyes for a second the way one does when saying something everybody knows but nobody wants to say, “was about a black president.” Both Maher and Kristol carry themselves with a weary cynicism that allows them to jovially spar with ideological rivals, but all of a sudden they both grew earnest and angry. Kristol interjected, shouting, “That’s bullshit! That is total bullshit!” After momentarily sputtering, Kristol recovered his calm, but his rare indignation remained, and there was no trace of the smirk he usually wears to distance himself slightly from his talking points. He almost pleaded to Maher, “Even you don’t believe that!”

“I totally believe that,” Maher responded, which is no doubt true, because every Obama supporter believes deep down, or sometimes right on the surface, that the furious opposition marshaled against the first black president is a reaction to his race. Likewise, every Obama opponent believes with equal fervor that this is not only false but a smear concocted willfully to silence them.

This bitter, irreconcilable enmity is not the racial harmony the optimists imagined the cultural breakthrough of an ­African- American president would usher in. On the other hand, it’s not exactly the sort of racial strife the pessimists, hardened by racial animosity, envisioned either, the splitting of white and black America into worlds of mutual incomprehension—as in the cases of the O. J. Simpson trial, the L.A. riots, or Bernhard Goetz.

The Simpson episode actually provides a useful comparison. The racial divide was what made the episode so depressing: Blacks saw one thing, whites something completely different. Indeed, when Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murder charges, whites across parties reacted in nearly equal measure: 56 percent of white Republicans objected to the verdict, as did 52 percent of white Democrats. Two decades later, the trial of George Zimmerman produced a very different reaction. This case also hinged on race—Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen from his neighborhood in Florida, and was acquitted of all charges. But here the gap in disapproval over the verdict between white Democrats and white Republicans was not 4 points but 43. Americans had split once again into mutually uncomprehending racial camps, but this time along political lines, not by race itself.

A different, unexpected racial argument has taken shape. Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history, has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world. Liberals dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable. Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right.

If you set out to write a classic history of the Obama era, once you had described the historically significant fact of Obama’s election, race would almost disappear from the narrative. The thumbnail sketch of every president’s tenure from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton prominently includes racial conflagrations—­desegregation fights over the military and schools, protests over civil-rights legislation, high-profile White House involvement in the expansion or rollback of busing and affirmative action. The policy landscape of the Obama era looks more like it did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, when Americans fought bitterly over regulation and the scope of government. The racial-policy agenda of the Obama administration has been nearly nonexistent.

But if you instead set out to write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the day-to-day experience of political life, you would find that race has saturated everything as perhaps never before. Hardly a day goes by without a volley and counter-volley of accusations of racial insensitivity and racial hypersensitivity. And even when the red and blue tribes are not waging their endless war of mutual victimization, the subject of race courses through everything else: debt, health care, unemployment. Whereas the great themes of the Bush years revolved around foreign policy and a cultural divide over what or who constituted “real” America, the Obama years have been defined by a bitter disagreement over the size of government, which quickly reduces to an argument over whether the recipients of big-government largesse deserve it. There is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.

It was immediately clear, from his triumphal introduction at the 2004 Democratic National Convention through the giddy early days of his audacious campaign, that Obama had reordered the political landscape. And though it is hard to remember now, his supporters initially saw this transformation as one that promised a “post-racial” politics. He attracted staggering crowds, boasted of his ability to win over Republicans, and made good on this boast by attracting independent voters in Iowa and other famously white locales.

Of course, this was always a fantasy. It was hardly a surprise when George Packer, reporting for The New Yorker, ventured to Kentucky and found white voters confessing that they would vote for a Democrat, but not Obama, simply because of his skin color. (As one said: “Race. I really don’t want an African-­American as president. Race.”) Packer’s report conveys the revelatory dismay with which his news struck. “Obama has a serious political problem,” he wrote. “Until now, he and his supporters have either denied it or blamed it on his opponents.” Reported anecdotes of similar flavor have since grown familiar enough to have receded into the political backdrop. One Louisiana man told NPR a few weeks ago that he would never support Senator Mary Landrieu after her vote for Obama­care. After ticking off the familiar talking points against the health-care law—it would kill jobs and so on—he arrived at the nub of the matter: “I don’t vote for black people.” (Never mind that Landrieu is white.)

We now know that the fact of Obama’s presidency—that a black man is our ­commander-in-chief, that a black family lives in the White House, that he was elected by a disproportionately high black vote—has affected not just the few Americans willing to share their racism with reporters but all Americans, across the political spectrum. Social scientists have long used a basic survey to measure what they call “racial resentment.” It doesn’t measure hatred of minorities or support for segregation, but rather a person’s level of broad sympathy for African-Americans (asking, for instance, if you believe that “blacks have gotten less than they deserve” or whether “it’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough”). Obviously, the racially conservative view—that blacks are owed no extra support from the government—has for decades corresponded more closely with conservatism writ large and thus with the Republican Party. The same is true with the racially liberal view and the Democratic Party: Many of the Americans who support government programs that disproportionately offer blacks a leg up are Democrats. But when the political scientists Michael Tesler and David Sears peered into the data in 2009, they noticed that the election of Obama has made views on race matter far more than ever.

By the outset of Obama’s presidency, they found, the gap in approval of the president between those with strongly liberal views on race and those with strongly conservative views on race was at least twice as large as it had been under any of the previous four administrations. As Tesler delved further into the numbers, he saw that race was bleeding into everything. People’s views on race predicted their views on health-care reform far more closely in 2009 than they did in 1993, when the president trying to reform health care was Bill Clinton. Tesler called what he saw unfurling before him a “hyperracialized era.”

In recent history, racial liberals have sometimes had conservative views on other matters, and racial conservatives have sometimes had liberal views. Consider another measure, called “anti-black affect,” a kind of thermometer that registers coldness toward African-Americans. Prior to 2009, anti-black affect did not predict an individual’s political identification (when factoring out that person’s economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism). Since Obama has taken office, the correlation between anti-black affect and Republican partisanship has shot up. Even people’s beliefs about whether the unemployment rate was rising or falling in 2012—which, in previous years, had stood independent of racial baggage—were now closely linked with their racial beliefs.

Racial conservatism and conservatism used to be similar things; now they are the same thing. This is also true with racial liberalism and liberalism. The mental chasm lying between red and blue America is, at bottom, an irreconcilable difference over the definition of racial justice. You can find this dispute erupting everywhere. A recent poll found a nearly 40-point partisan gap on the question of whether 12 Years a Slave deserved Best Picture.

In 1981, Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native working for the Reagan administration, gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. In it, Atwater described the process by which the conservative message evolved from explicitly racist appeals to implicitly racialized appeals to white economic self-interest:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ ”

Atwater went on to run George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, where he flamboyantly vowed to make Willie Horton, a murderer furloughed by Dukakis who subsequently raped a woman, “his running mate.” Atwater died three years later of a brain tumor, and his confessional quote to Lamis attracted scarcely any attention for years. In 2005, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert picked out the quote, which had appeared in two books by Lamis. In the ensuing years, liberal columnists and authors have recirculated Atwater’s words with increasing frequency, and they have attained the significance of a Rosetta stone.

A long line of social-science research bears out the general point that Atwater made. People have an elemental awareness of race, and we relentlessly process political appeals, even those that do not mention race, in racial terms.

In the 1970s and 1980s, liberals understood a certain chunk of the Republican agenda as a coded appeal—a “dog ­whistle”—to white racism. The political power of cracking down on crack, or exposing welfare queens, lay in its explosive racial subtext. (Regarding Willie Horton, an unnamed Republican operative put it more bluntly: “It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”) This is what Paul Krugman was referring to in his recent Times op-ed titled “That Old-Time Whistle.” When the House Budget Committee releases a report on the failure of the War on Poverty and Paul Ryan speaks of a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working,” you can conclude that the policy report is mere pretext to smuggle in the hidden racial appeal.

Once you start looking for racial subtexts embedded within the Republican agenda, they turn up everywhere. And not always as subtexts. In response to their defeats in 2008 and 2012, Republican governors and state legislators in a host of swing states have enacted laws, ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud, whose actual impact will be to reduce the proportion of votes cast by minorities. A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.

It is likewise hard to imagine the mostly southern states that have refused free federal money to cover the uninsured in their states doing so outside of the racial context—nearly all-white Republican governments are willing and even eager to deny medical care to disproportionately black constituents. The most famous ad for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign depicted an elderly white man, with a narrator warning bluntly about Medicare cuts: “Now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”

Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space.

The racial debate of the Obama years emits some of the poisonous waft of the debates over communism during the ­McCarthy years. It defies rational resolution in part because it is about secret motives and concealed evil.

On September 9, 2009, the president delivered a State of the Union–style speech on health care before Congress. After a summer of angry tea-party town-hall meetings, Republicans had whipped themselves into a feisty mood. At one point, Obama assured the audience that his health-care law would not cover illegal immigrants. (This was true.) Joe Wilson, the Republican representing South Carolina’s Second District, screamed, “You lie!”

Over the next few days, several liberals stated what many more believed. “I think it’s based on racism,” offered Jimmy Carter at a public forum. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.” Maureen Dowd likewise concluded, “What I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! … Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Assailing Wilson’s motives on the basis of a word he did not say is, to say the least, a loose basis by which to indict his motives. It is certainly true that screaming a rebuke to a black president is the sort of thing a racist Republican would do. On the other hand, it’s also the sort of thing a rude or drunk or angry or unusually partisan Republican would do.

One way to isolate the independent variable, and thus to separate out the racism in the outburst, is to compare the treatment of Obama with that of the last Democratic president. Obama has never been called “boy” by a major Republican figure, but Bill Clinton was, by Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator and author of a presidential biography titled Boy Clinton. Here are some other things that happened during the Clinton years: North Carolina senator Jesse Helms said, “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page and other conservative organs speculated that Clinton may have had his aide Vince Foster murdered and had sanctioned a cocaine-smuggling operation out of an airport in Arkansas. Now, imagine if Obama had been called “boy” in the title of a biography, been subjected to threats of mob violence from a notorious former segregationist turned senator, or accused in a major newspaper of running coke. (And also impeached.) How easy would it be to argue that Republicans would never do such things to a white president?

Yet many, many liberals believe that only race can explain the ferocity of Republican opposition to Obama. It thus follows that anything Republicans say about Obama that could be explained by racism is probably racism. And since racists wouldn’t like anything Obama does, that renders just about any criticism of Obama—which is to say, nearly everything Republicans say about Obama—presumptively racist.

Does this sound like an exaggeration? Bill O’Reilly’s aggressive (and aggressively dumb) Super Bowl interview with the president included the question “Why do you feel it’s necessary to fundamentally transform the nation that has afforded you so much opportunity?” Salon’s Joan Walsh asserted, “O’Reilly and Ailes and their viewers see this president as unqualified and ungrateful, an affirmative-action baby who won’t thank us for all we’ve done for him and his cohort. The question was, of course, deeply condescending and borderline racist.” Yes, it’s possible that O’Reilly implied that the United States afforded Obama special opportunity owing to the color of his skin. But it’s at least as possible, and consistent with O’Reilly’s beliefs, that he merely believes the United States offers everybody opportunity.

Esquire columnist Charles Pierce has accused Times columnist David Brooks of criticizing Obama because he wants Obama to be an “anodyne black man” who would “lose, nobly, and then the country could go back to its rightful owners.” Timothy Noah, then at Slate, argued in 2008 that calling Obama “skinny” flirted with racism. (“When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama’s other physical attributes can’t help coming off as a coy walk around the barn.”) Though the term elitist has been attached to candidates of both parties for decades (and to John Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign), the writer David Shipler has called it racist when deployed against Obama. (“ ‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”)

MSNBC has spent the entire Obama presidency engaged in a nearly nonstop ideological stop-and-frisk operation. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell chided Obama for playing too much golf, Lawrence O’Donnell accused him of “trying to align … the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.” (McConnell had not mentioned Tiger Woods; it was O’Donnell who made the leap.) After Arizona governor Jan Brewer confronted Obama at an airport tarmac, Jonathan Capehart concluded, “A lot of people saw it as her wagging her finger at this president who’s also black, who should not be there.” Martin Bashir hung a monologue around his contention that Republicans were using the initialism IRS as a code that meant “nigger.” Chris Matthews calls Republicans racist so often it is hard to even keep track.

Few liberals acknowledge that the ability to label a person racist represents, in 21st-century America, real and frequently terrifying power. Conservatives feel that dread viscerally. Though the liberal analytic method begins with a sound grasp of the broad connection between conservatism and white racial resentment, it almost always devolves into an open-ended license to target opponents on the basis of their ideological profile. The power is rife with abuse.

By February, conservative rage against MSNBC had reached a boiling point. During the Super Bowl, General Mills ran a commercial depicting an adorable multiracial family bonding over a birth announcement and a bowl of Cheerios. The Cheerios ad was not especially groundbreaking or remarkable. A recent Chevy ad, to take just one other example, features a procession of families, some multiracial or gay, and declares, “While what it means to be a family hasn’t changed, what a family looks like has.” This schmaltzy, feel-good fare expresses the modern American creed, where patriotic tableaux meld old-generation standby images—American soldiers in World War II, small towns, American flags flapping in the breeze—with civil-rights protesters.

What made the Cheerios ad notable was that MSNBC, through its official Twitter account, announced, “Maybe the right wing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.” It was undeniably true that some elements of the right wing would object to the ad—similar previous ads have provoked angry racist reactions. Still, Republicans felt attacked, and not unreasonably. The enraged chairman of the Republican National Committee declared a boycott on any appearances on the network, and MSNBC quickly apologized and deleted the offending tweet.

Why did this particular tweet, of all things, make Republicans snap? It exposed a sense in which their entire party is being written out of the American civic religion. The inscription of the civil-rights story into the fabric of American history—the elevation of Rosa Parks to a new Paul Revere, Martin Luther King to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers­—has, by implication, cast Barack Obama as the contemporary protagonist and Republicans as the villains. The Obama campaign gave its supporters the thrill of historic accomplishment, the sense that they were undertaking something more grand than a campaign, something that would reverberate forever. But in Obama they had not just the material for future Americana stock footage but a live partisan figure. How did they think his presidency would work out?

Even the transformation of the civil-rights struggles of a half-century ago into our shared national heritage rests on more politically awkward underpinnings than we like to admit. As much as our museums and children’s history books and Black History Month celebrations and corporate advertisements sandblast away the rough ideological edges of the civil-rights story, its under­lying cast remains. John Lewis is not only a young hero who can be seen in grainy black-and-white footage enduring savage beatings at the hands of white supremacists. He is also a current Democratic member of Congress who, in 2010, reprised his iconic role by marching past screaming right-wing demonstrators while preparing to cast a vote for Obamacare. And, more to the point, the political forces behind segregation did not disappear into thin air. The lineal descendants of the segregationists, and in some cases the segregationists themselves, moved into the Republican Party and its unofficial media outlets, which specialize in stoking fears of black Americans among their audience. (Like when Rush Limbaugh seized on a minor fight between two schoolkids in Illinois to announce, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”)

The unresolved tension here concerns the very legitimacy of the contemporary Republican Party. It resembles, in milder form, the sorts of aftershocks that follow a democratic revolution, when the allies of the deposed junta—or ex-Communists in post–Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, or, closer to the bone, white conservatives in post-apartheid South Africa—attempt to reenter a newly democratized polity. South Africa famously created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that was easy—once democracy was in place, the basic shape of the polity was a foregone conclusion. In the United States, the partisan contest still runs very close; the character of our government is very much up for grabs.

And the truth is almost too brutal to be acknowledged. A few months ago, three University of Rochester political scientists—Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen—published an astonishing study. They discovered that a strong link exists between the proportion of slaves residing in a southern county in 1860 and the racial conservatism (and voting habits) of its white residents today. The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents. The authors tested their findings against every plausible control factor—for instance, whether the results could be explained simply by population density—but the correlation held. Higher levels of slave ownership in 1860 made white Southerners more opposed to affirmative action, score higher on the anti-black-affect scale, and more hostile to Democrats.

The authors suggest that the economic shock of emancipation, which suddenly raised wages among the black labor pool, caused whites in the most slave-intensive counties to “promote local anti-black sentiment by encouraging violence towards blacks, racist norms and cultural beliefs,” which “produced racially hostile attitudes that have been passed down from parents to children.” The scale of the effect they found is staggering. Whites from southern areas with very low rates of slave ownership exhibit attitudes similar to whites in the North—an enormous difference, given that Obama won only 27 percent of the white vote in the South in 2012, as opposed to 46 percent of the white vote outside the South.

The Rochester study should, among other things, settle a very old and deep argument about the roots of America’s unique hostility to the welfare state. Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States; in none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.

And yet—as vital as this revelation may be for understanding conservatism, it still should not be used to dismiss the beliefs of individual conservatives. Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses.

Liberals experience the limits of historically determined analysis in other realms, like when the conversation changes to anti-Semitism. Here is an equally charged argument in which conservatives dwell on the deep, pernicious power of anti-Semitism hiding its ugly face beneath the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel. When, during his confirmation hearings last year for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel came under attack for having once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” conservatives were outraged. (The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens: “The word ‘intimidates’ ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent.”) Liberals were outraged by the outrage: The blog Think Progress assembled a list of writers denouncing the accusations as a “neocon smear.” The liberal understanding of anti-­Semitism is an inversion of conservative thinking about race. Liberals recognize the existence of the malady and genuinely abhor it; they also understand it as mostly a distant, theoretical problem, and one defined primarily as a personal animosity rather than something that bleeds into politics. Their interest in the topic consists almost entirely of indignation against its use as slander to circumscribe the policy debate.

One of the central conceits of modern conservatism is a claim to have achieved an almost Zenlike state of color-blindness. (Stephen Colbert’s parodic conservative talking head boasts he cannot see race at all.) The truth is that conservatives are fixated on race, in a mystified, aggrieved, angry way that lends their claims of race neutrality a comic whiff of let-me-tell-you-again-how-I’m-over-my-ex. But while a certain portion of the party may indeed be forwarding and sending emails of racist jokes of the sort that got a federal judge in trouble, a much larger portion is consumed not with traditional racial victimization—the blacks are coming to get us—but a kind of ideological victimization. Conservatives are fervent believers in their own racial innocence.

This explains Paul Ryan’s almost laughable response to accusations of racial insensitivity over his recent comments. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” he insisted. “It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” Why would anybody understand a reference to “inner cities” as racially fraught?

And so just as liberals begin with a sound analysis of Republican racial animosity and overextend this into paranoia, conservatives take the very real circumstance of their occasional victimization and run with it. They are not merely wounded by the real drumbeat of spurious accusations they endure; this is the only context in which they appear able to understand racism. One can read conservative news sites devotedly for years without coming across a non-ironic reference to racism as an extant social phenomenon, as opposed to a smear against them. Facts like the persistence of hiring discrimination (experiments routinely show fake résumés with black-sounding names receive fewer callbacks than ones with white-sounding names) do not exist in this world.

Conservatives likewise believe that race has been Obama’s most devious political weapon. Race consciousness, the theory goes, benefits Democrats but not Republicans. “By huge margins,” argues Quin Hillyer in National Review, “blacks vote in racial blocs more often than whites do.” Obama’s race, conservatives believe, lent him an advantage even among white voters. (As 2012 candidate Michele Bachmann put it in real-talk mode, “There was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt.”)

As a corollary, conservatives believe that the true heir to the civil-rights movement and its ideals is the modern Republican Party (the one containing all the former segregationists). A whole subgenre of conservative “history” is devoted to rebutting the standard historical narrative that the civil-rights movement drove conservative whites out of the Democratic Party. The ritual of right-wing African-Americans’ appearing before tea-party activists to absolve them of racism has drawn liberal snickers, but the psychological distress on display here runs much deeper. Glenn Beck’s “I Have a Dream” rally, the Republican habit of likening Obama and his policies either to slavery or to segregation (at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference alone, both Ralph Reed and Bobby Jindal compared the Obama administration to George Wallace)—these are expressions not of a political tactic but a genuine obsession.

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life. On another level, it is itself a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense. The spread of racial resentment on the right in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality. It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives. Understanding the mutual racial-­ideological loathing of the Obama era requires understanding how all the foregoing can be true at once.

In February 2007, with the Obama cultural phenomenon already well under way, Joe Biden—being a rival candidate at the time, but also being Joe Biden—attempted a compliment. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-­American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

It was a cringe-worthy moment, but Obama brushed it off graciously. “He called me,” said Obama. “I told him [the call] wasn’t necessary. We have got more important things to worry about.”

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

This has not made an impression upon the critics. In fact, many conservatives believe he accuses them of racism all the time, even when he is doing the opposite. When asked recently if racism explained his sagging approval ratings, Obama replied, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” Conservatives exploded in indignation, quoting the first sentence without mentioning the second. Here was yet another case of Obama playing the race card, his most cruel and most unanswerable weapon.

I recently asked Jonah Goldberg, a longtime columnist for National Review, why conservatives believed that Obama himself (as opposed to his less reticent allies) implied that they were racially motivated. He told me something that made a certain amount of sense. A few days before Obama’s inaugural address, at a time when his every utterance commanded massive news coverage, the president-elect gave a speech in Philadelphia calling for “a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

What struck Goldberg was Obama’s juxtaposition of “ideology and small thinking”—terms he has always associated with his Republican opponents—with “prejudice and bigotry.” He was not explicitly calling them the same thing, but he was treating them as tantamount. “That feeds into the MSNBC style of argument about Obama’s opponents,” Goldberg told me, “that there must be a more interesting explanation for their motives.”

It’s unlikely that Obama is deliberately plotting to associate his opponents with white supremacy in a kind of reverse-Atwater maneuver. But Obama almost surely believes his race helped trigger the maniacal ferocity of his opponents. (If not, he would be one of the few Obama voters who don’t.) And it’s not hard to imagine that Obama’s constant, public frustration with the irrationality pervading the Republican Party subconsciously expresses his suspicions.

Obama is attempting to navigate the fraught, everywhere-and-yet-nowhere racial obsession that surrounds him. It’s a weird moment, but also a temporary one. The passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will likely ease the mutual suspicion. In the long run, generational changes grind inexorably away. The rising cohort of Americans holds far more liberal views than their parents and grandparents on race, and everything else (though of course what you think about “race” and what you think about “everything else” are now interchangeable). We are living through the angry pangs of a new nation not yet fully born.

The Color of His Presidency

Read More

[ecoorganic]

Mailbag: Future Changes to NFL's TV Packages, Impact of Canceled College Games

Plus, the impact a canceled college season has on the NFL, what to expect from Gardner Minshew in Year 2, whether this season will be seen as legitimate and more.

It’s a sad day in the football world. Blue-blood programs that are 41 (Michigan), 33 (Penn State), 32 (USC) and 30 (Ohio State and Nebraska) years older than the NFL itself won’t be playing this fall. And no matter who you blame, it’s a shame that

we’re here.

The slow death march college football seems to be on will absolute reverberate in the NFL world. We’re going to get to that, and a whole lot more, in this week’s mailbag. …

From Brock Ascher (@BrockAscher): What happens to NFL TV rights in the near future? Will I ever be able to get rid of DirecTV? Will I ever be able to buy a one-team out of market package?

Brock, my guess is the over-the-air packages will probably remain the same. I think Thursday night is the one variable in all this, with the potential Disney snaps it up so it can put either MNF or TNF on ABC, with the other staying on ESPN, ideal for them for cable-fee reasons. (My guess is Fox is finished with TNF.) The biggest difference you’d notice could come in structure. I was told by two execs that the NFL has discussed jettisoning the divvying up of Sunday afternoons by conference (the cross-flex would be a precursor to that).

It’d give the NFL more flexibility and, in this scenario, you could have Fox and CBS simply split up the games, via some sort of “draft.”

After that, we can dive into how streaming (where the younger audience lives) plays into all of this, and how the Sunday Ticket package you’re referencing factors into that. AT&T now owns DirecTV, which has the Ticket through 2022. The Ticket is vital to DirecTV's survival. How much does AT&T care about that? We’ll see, because the NFL has discussed the idea of moving the Ticket to a streaming service, where a younger audience lives.

You can imagine what the Ticket would be worth to ESPN-Plus, Peacock, HBO Max, DAZN or Amazon Prime. How many people would jump on those services if the Ticket was there? Based on DirecTV’s numbers, the answer is a lot. And part of the NFL’s concern about production quality in doing something like this may have been alleviated with how smoothly Amazon Prime’s venture into creating such a product for the Premier League over in the UK went.

As for the a la carte end of this, we’ll see. I think that’s coming, but it might be further down the line, and whoever were to win the Ticket rights would be involved in all of that. The bottom line here: Media’s changing fast, and the NFL is preparing for that.

From Jonathan Barakat (@jonathanbarakat): How do you think Gardner Minshew will play this year? Will he exceed expectations? Also what do you think of D.J. Chark coming into his third year?

Jonathan, I’ll give you what I like and what I don’t like about Gardner Minshew’s situation.

What I like: Minshew gets to play for Jay Gruden, who’s immediately made a big difference for young quarterbacks in both his previous NFL homes (Kirk Cousins in D.C. and Andy Dalton in Cincinnati), and in one of those cases actually did it with a rookie coming off the lockout, which is somewhat analogous to this situation. Also, D.J. Chark gives Minshew a strong No. 1 target, and Doug Marrone will use the run game to support him.

What I don’t like: It’s pretty clear where Jacksonville stands on Cam Robinson, and having an issue at left tackle isn’t great—particularly in a year when it’s going to be tough to work out offensive line issues on the fly. Also, the viability of the run game rides largely on Leonard Fournette, who hasn’t been the most reliable guy over his first three NFL seasons. And beyond Chark, there are question marks at receiver and tight end.

So all in all, it’s not a complete mess, but not really setup for Minshew to have a breakthrough sophomore campaign.

From Roberta Wears A Mask You Should Too (@AceandJasper): How will the teams take care of season ticket holders who won't get to sit in their front row seats even for a game or two?

Most teams are rolling payments over or refunding—and I can’t imagine any haven’t already given their season-ticket holders the choice to opt out and hold on to the rights to their seats in 2021. I think, at this point, we know that the season isn’t going to start with full stadiums anywhere. How will it end? That’s four months from now. And I think the last four months should be enough to keep anyone from making predictions that far ahead.

From Erik Ghirarduzzi (@eghirarduzzi): Given the circumstance around this season, currently known and ones yet to come, how legit would a SB winner be? There are teams at a competitive disadvantage, through no fault of their own, already and the season hasn't started.

Erik, this is a great question—I do believe this year will be remembered, if it’s completed, like the strike years of 1982 and ’87. In ’82, teams played nine games, the divisions were temporarily abolished, and a 16-team playoff was staged. In ’87, just six quarterbacks broke 3,000 yards passing, and just two backs reached 1,000 yards rushing. In both years, interestingly enough, Joe Gibbs led Washington to a championship.

Now, I don’t think the season necessarily will be cut to nine games (as ’82 was), nor will you have the oddity of replacement players en masse (like ’87 had). But I do think there’ll be aspects of the season that will go sideways, and the NFL, to its credit, knows it and is preparing for that.

So how are ’82 and ’87 remembered? I think most people who didn’t live it (I was way too young, 2, to remember the former, and have faint memories of the latter) probably wouldn’t look at championships or accolades from that year (John Elway was MVP and Reggie White DPOY in ’87) much differently. But it doesn’t take much Google acumen to discover how weird all the numbers from those seasons look.

To me, that feels like the likely result of this year.

From Dan Heiserman (@HeisermanDan): Has any player in history ever been on more teams than Josh McCown?

Speaking of Google, Dan, I didn’t know the answer to this and was legitimately interested, so I looked and found that legend-of-the-aughts J.T. O’Sullivan was on 11 (!) different NFL teams (Saints, Packers, Bears, Vikings, Patriots, Panthers, Lions, Niners, Bengals, Chargers, Raiders), which unbelievably matches McCown’s number (Cardinals, Lions, Raiders, Dolphins, Panthers, Niners, Bears, Bucs, Browns, Jets, Eagles).

A little more bumping around the internet showed that kicker Bill Cundiff was, at one point or another, with 13 different NFL teams (Cowboys, Bucs, Packers, Saints, Falcons, Chiefs, Lions, Browns, Ravens, Washington, Niners, Jets, Bills). And I’m sure there are other backup quarterbacks and kickers—playing positions where careers are longer, which facilitates this sort of movement—out there like these guys.

All of them must have pretty cool jersey displays in their basements.

From SUPER BOWL SUPER BROWNS HELL YEAH!!! (@WAH3rd): Should I still go back to the party barn and start drinking at 7 a.m. and yell at people on Saturdays this fall like I used to?

This is a very specific message just for me and a lot of other people who were in legit mourning on Tuesday night—and this will be absolutely be one of the Lane Avenue casualties (right there with the Varsity Club) of the depressing news we all got. It’s hard to describe the Party Barn if you don’t know what it is already, so I won’t try.

And the answer is yes.

From Skeeter6265 (@skeeter6265): Do you think Ohio will beat Michigan?

I was very excited for Michigan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its last win in Columbus—that was in the fall of my junior year—this November. Maybe that team can have a Zoom reunion to commemorate it now.

From FootballFan64 (@FFan64): With college coaches out of the running for NFL openings since their season is moving to the spring, which NFL coordinators do you expect to be coveted for any newly vacated HC positions? Who is this year’s Matt Rhule?

Well, Football Fan, I’m not sure that colleges playing in the spring (if that even happens) would prevent NFL teams from making runs at coaches at that level. If, and again it’s a big if, college football goes in the spring semester, my guess would be the season would start in February (you can’t just start the season the minute kids get back to campus). The NFL coaching carousel is spinning at the beginning of January. So there’d be time.

The NFL coordinator names you’ll hear most are some of the usual suspects from the last couple cycles—Patriots OC Josh McDaniels, Chiefs OC Eric Bieniemy, Ravens coordinators Greg Roman and Wink Martindale, 49ers DC Robert Saleh and Saints DC Dennis Allen would be on that list. I’d also just keep an eye on Falcons DC Raheem Morris, Chiefs pass-game coordinator Mike Kafka and Titans OC Arthur Smith as names that could pop up.

As for the next Matt Rhule, the NFL will continue to have interest in Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, and Ohio State’s Ryan Day is beginning to be held in that sort of regard among those in the pros. But both those guys have jobs that are very well-paying and, in reality, better than the majority of jobs they’d find in the NFL. Stanford’s David Shaw and Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald have long been on the radar of the league, but haven’t shown much appetite for leaving their alma maters. And Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck is a fun name to keep an eye on.

From Shawn Tangen (@SMTangen): How is Kevin Warren viewed within NFL circles?

Shawn, I’d say it’s pretty mixed. And I got some pretty strong reaction from certain corners of the NFL about the Big Ten commissioner (and former Vikings executive) after the conference canceled its season on Tuesday.

Warren was a polarizing figure inside the Minnesota locker room during the Adrian Peterson scandal of 2014—Peterson felt like Warren betrayed him to the point where Warren’s promotion to COO was a sticking point in the star’s contract negotiation. That was a situation that coach Mike Zimmer had to manage, and ultimately defuse, on the ground with the players, and it’s just one example in his NFL past where he’s rankled co-workers.

On top of that, many NFL people felt like Warren’s move to the Big 10 was with designs on eventually making a run at becoming NFL commissioner down the line. In that regard, the final result of his management of the last week (a result we won’t have for a while) will probably go a long way in determining whether those aspirations are realistic or not. I’d just hope his decisions here weren’t made with that in mind.

From Brycen Papp (@BrycenPapp): Do you think this season will be a massive shift in the way the draft process works? Will the NFL lower the requirements for college players to be draft eligible to two years instead of three?

Brycen, I think there will be a shift to the draft process to a degree, and we’re going to get into that in the GamePlan on Thursday. But I do want to get into your question on the NFL’s age requirement, because it’s a fascinating one—and something we covered extensively on the podcast this week.

I believe many of the best players in the Big 10 and Pac-12, from places like Ohio State, Oregon, USC, Penn State and Michigan, will sign with agents now, and go into draft prep. Because of that, and how the Big 10/Pac-12 shutdown devalues this college season, I think we’ll also see some attrition from the other conferences. That could lead to some players who only played two years of college football and skipped the required third year out of high school, going high in next April’s draft.

That, in turn, could open the door in the future for players with two good years on their resume skipping their junior year to protect themselves and prepare for the draft—in the same way Christian McCaffrey skipping his bowl game in 2016 gave others cover to do the same. At that point, the idea that players need three years of development to be NFL-ready gets broken down, and now you have guys taking a “gap year” instead.

Which isn’t good for the players, for college football or for the NFL.

It’s important to remember here too that it’s not college football keeping guys in school for three years. It’s pro football. The three-year rule is an NFL rule. And when Maurice Clarett and Mike Williams sued to become eligible for the draft in 2004, it wasn’t a school, a conference or the NCAA they sued. It was the NFL. So the ball would be in the NFL’s court on this one, if the situation comes to a head.

From Sam Perrone (@samjp33): Do you think the NFL would be willing to move the draft if the college football season bleeds into the spring?

I think, Sam, the NFL will do whatever it needs to in order to support the golden goose that is college football. Why? College football is very good for the NFL. And primarily for three reasons.

1) It’s a free minor league. The NFL, unlike the other sports, doesn’t have to fund a complex minor-league system to develop college-aged players. The expense of doing so in a sport like football would be astronomical and the opportunity to monetize it, as we’ve seen with other start-up leagues in the past, would be pretty limited.

2) It’s a marketing monster for star players coming in. Say what you will about Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel—they were legit sports-world celebrities before they lifted a single dumbbell in preparation for the draft. Everyone knows who Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovialoa and Chase Young are. Ezekiel Elliott and Saquon Barkley were household names as collegians. And all of that is great for the NFL on so many different levels.

3) College football is the foundation for the NFL’s tentpole offseason event. The draft is The Draft because of college football. We’ve been watching most of the top players for years. It marries two wildly popular entertainment entities. The draft itself wouldn’t be nearly the event it is without college football.

So, in order to protect the sanctity of a spring college football season (as much of a sham as it might be) would the NFL be willing to move the draft back a few weeks? Well, of course it would be.

• Question or comment? Email us.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/3fO2YCN

[newagesispage]

                                                            NOVEMBER            2019

PAGE RIB

 Look for the production of Boeing Boeing at the Hyde Park Opera House in Vermont. Director Gene Heinrich will bring the story on Nov. 8-10 and again the 15th -17th. Woo Hoo!

*****

Amber Guyser was found guilty and the strange part was the hugs she got from the judge and the victim’s brother.

*****

Robot Chicken is back for season 10.

*****

Days alert: Little Arianna is out.

*****

Word is that Mike Pence is behind the scenes working on health and human services. He has hired Alex Azar to revamp title 10 by putting $ into Obria which emphasizes abstinence. It’s sort of like a global gag rule. The conscious and religious freedom division helps medical workers who don’t want to help people if said patient lives against their faith.

*****

It’s been ruled that Northern Ireland’s abortion ban is a breach of the UK’s human rights commitments.

*****

The Native American Voting Rights Coalition has conducted hearings to get the lowdown on the trouble that exists in Native American voting rights. The barriers include poverty, closeness to polls and mailing addresses that include RR#’s and post office boxes. Let’s make the process easier for everybody.  We should all be able to vote!

*****

Congresswoman Katey Hill is getting divorced and losing her position after photos of her with another woman and a bong surfaced.

*****

Tim Ryan is out!

*****

John Kelly warned Trump of impeachment.

*****

Trump’s brother Robert was awarded a $33 million government contract.

*****

Why do all the older stars want to dance their way on to a talk show?? UR hip, we get it!!

*****

What DOJ?? A criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia probe?? Seriously??

Did ya see the Fallon interview with Joaquin Phoenix? It just sort of shows how wrong Jimmy can be. I think Phoenix was ready to take over the whole operation.** Joker got the biggest October opening ever.

*****

Inside the Actor’s Studio is back.

*****

Matt Lauer was accused of the rape of Brooke Nevils and NBC covered it up. Anne Curry and others have stood up for Nevils. It seems the management at NBC has themselves been charged with their own misconduct and tried hard to keep Ronan Farrow from telling us all about it. Comcast, NBC and Noah Oppenheim are in a bit of a spot.

*****

The NBA is distancing themselves from the coach who tweeted support for human rights but then they apologized. China has been pulling merch and cancelling games. Many companies including Mercedes and Tiffany are really trying to keep China happy.

*****

Drew Barrymore will debut a talk show for CBS.

*****

Thru all the crap that Kathy Griffin went through, at least she now owns all her shit. See the new movie she made:  A Hell of a Story

*****

ABC will bring us Craig Ferguson in the game show, The Hustler.

*****

If you haven’t heard Brittany Howard’s new Jaime album, do it now!! The song Stay High is so fab.

*****

Larry king is getting a divorce from Shawn Southwick King after 22 years.

*****

Zoe Kravitz is the new Catwoman.

*****

HBO is giving Sarah Silverman a late night pilot and a stand up special.

*****

Shep Smith is out at FOX. He shocked most everyone by leaving in the middle of his contract. He claims that it was his decision. Some say a WH rep visited with Fox management before the announcement.

*****

Pierre Delecto is the fake twitter account of Mitt Romney. ! ?

*****

The Nobel peace Prize was announced and will go to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali.

*****

The Dem debate was the best yet. I am all for keeping it civil, Mr. Booker, but it is a fucking debate. I am glad they shook it up a bit. Mayor Pete did a wonderful job of imagining the world after Trump. I think he soared above them all this time. Tulsi Gabbard really stood out in her white suit. Since then there have been some illusions to her favor in Russia but her performance that night was great. Tom Steyer talked to the camera like a robot. I am all for his enthusiasm about impeachment but Drop Out! He kept spouting statistics. Yang always jumps right into his financial speeches but he and Bernie were so right about how we need to stop talking about Trump. It would be nice if they asked him more about foreign policy and such. But Yang knows how to give real examples of automation that we can all relate to like, McDonald’s and CVS. He not only talks of the truckers affected but of those who serve them as well. Bernie also talked about the much needed infrastructure. Biden seemed angry and defensive but he was right about a number of things. When the talking heads were asked if Biden did good, one answered that, “he was coherent.” Yikes! Once again, Warren won’t give us a straight answer about taxes and it is the thing that hurts her the most.  Her “let’s be clear” is not clear enough for many. One of the things the average person has really come to hate is avoidance. She also blames more of the job loss on trade. I have to hand it to Klobachar, she was forceful and called people out. I loved her points on paper ballots, why isn’t everyone on board with this?? Castro had the best gun line of the night, “Police violence is also gun violence.” Harris and Beto held their own but did not stand out to me. If you put them altogether they would make a hell of a cabinet. What about Bernie and Buttigieg for Pres and VP. Warren to run the War dept., Yang the Treasury, Beto to run alcohol, tobacco and firearms, Harris for Sec. of State, Klobahcar for the FBI and Castro for homeland security. Just a suggestion.

*****

Former career diplomat Bill Taylor opened his inquiry questioning with a “beautifully written’ 15 page statement. Many later said the testimony was disturbing which elicited gasps. His words named names and connected the dots. Thank you Mr. Taylor for being a meticulous note taker and paper trail keeper.

*****

The State Department finally finished the internal investigation of Hil’s e -mails.  They found 38 unidentified people were “culpable” in 91 cases of sending classified info that wound up on her personal server.

*****

Republicans stormed into a secure hearing room with recording devices for a show they were filming. Some of these very republicans are included in these closed door meetings and given the same time to ask questions as anybody else. The participants do have clearance so it gives them the right to do this. This stunt happened the day after Taylor’s testimony and after Trump asked his fellow republicans to do something. They blocked testimony for over 5 hours. Thanks for wasting our money.  I guess their point was that they have no respect for our laws and traditions and they are very slimy.

*****

It was good to see Sam Donaldson back out there on the case.

*****

Hooray for the all- female spacewalk.  Thanks Christina Koch and Jessica Meir.

*****

Bernie had a huge NY rally where he was endorsed by Michael Moore and AOC.

*****

Harrison Ford made an impassioned speech about climate change.** Jane Fonda was arrested on the 11th at a climate change protest for unlawful demonstration at the U.S. Capital. She vows to keep coming back.

*****

Homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan is out.** Mike Pompeo’s senior advisor Mike Mckinley resigned and testified on the impeachment inquiry.** Rick Perry is out.

*****

Jennifer Lawrence has married Cooke Maroney.

*****

The Viola Davis produced, In A Man’s World looks interesting.

*****

This month in sexual harassment news:  43 new women have leveled allegations against Trump.** 3 new women have come forward about Cuba Gooding Jr. Word is that there are many stories of his grab ass tactics thru the years.

*****

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has released the names of this year’s noms which includes Pat Benatar, Dave Matthews Band, Doobie Brothers, Depeche Mode, Whitney Houston, Judas Priest, Kraftwerk, MC5, Motorhead, Nine Inch Nails, Todd Rundgren, Soundgarden, T Rex, Thin Lizzy and Notorious B.I.G.

*****

Stumptown on ABC is a great new show with that grit of the tough 70’s detective but with a chick. Nice! The cast is fab with Michael Ealy, Camryn Manheim and the sublime Tantoo Cardinal.

*****

The Prince estate was livid that the President used Purple Rain at a rally. “We will never give permission to President Trump to use Prince’s songs,  “ a spokesperson said.** Queen has told Trump not to use “We will rock you” in his new campaign video.

*****

Where do I begin with Scary Clown 45? By the time a month has gone by all his insanity is old news. When we see his family and piers act like everything he does is normal, it shows how dysfunctional they all are. I can’t tell you how many families I have seen that would have been pretty happy groups if it weren’t for the mad man running the show. How can people act so entitled and want to help no one?  Is it the water? Do they remember how much they gave grief to the Obama’s and Clintons? Are they scared of Trump or do they just love their money that much? How can so many be filled with so much hate and why do we always let them get by with everything? But it goes on… A DC court rules congress can see Trump’s taxes. The man is using our Justice Department to block a subpoena for his tax returns?  Merrick Garland is the presiding judge over the circuit court. **The Ukraine thing started with Scary Clown giving a little quid pro quo to Zelinsky. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward and their testimony has been confirmed. He then told us to look at Pence, Rudy, Perry or anybody else he could think of.  Pence plays stupid, Kurt Volker resigns, Rick Perry resigns** Now Trump has pulled troops out of Syria and betrayed the Kurds. We destroyed our own stuff so Turkey could not get at it. After Trump said there were no more troops there, actually there were about 1000. Now there is talk of sending some back after all the backlash. ISIS militants are now back on the loose. More troops are being sent to Saudi Arabia. ** Igor and Lev were arrested. ** Marie Yovanovitch testified against the wishes of the WH. Rudy claims that she was blocking him from his Ukraine shenanigans.  Trump said that the former ambassador was”bad news.”  Yovanovitch claims that she was forced out as a direct result of pressure from the boys.** A NY judge blocked the Trump rule to limit legal status for those who use public benefits. A Texas judge ruled that Trump’s use of emergency funds to build a wall was unlawful. ** John Bolton is starting to talk.

*****

Scary Clown called Nancy Pelosi a third rate politician n what they described as a meltdown.** Pelosi pushed thru a rules package for the impeachment as October came to a close.

*****

“If you support Donald Trump, don’t be afraid to get down on your knees.” Mrs. Pence

*****

720,000 acres of California public land will now be given over to oil and gas companies for fracking leases.** In better California news:  Hooray for bill AB32 which looks to stop private, for profit prisons and immigration detention facilities. It’s about time!!

*****

The National Enquirer is threatening a libel suit against Ronan Farrow.** Trump has threatened to sue CNN.

*****

Arizona’s Joe Arpaio lost his lawsuit against CNN, the Huffington Post and Rolling Stone. Reporters called him an ex-felon but the judge cited a case which states that, ‘in the interest of free expression, there is breathing room when it comes to public figures.

*****

Professor Allan Lichtman has properly predicted the last 9 elections. He says he can’t make a decision until the impeachment predicament is worked out.

*****

R.I.P. Kim Shattuck, Diahann Carroll, Marcello Giordani, Ginger Baker, Rip Taylor, Robert Forster, Elijah Cummings, Scotty Bowers, Bill Macy and John Witherspoon.

[njawaidofficial]

'Game of Thrones' Recap: Is Jaime Lannister Dead?

http://styleveryday.com/2017/08/07/game-of-thrones-recap-is-jaime-lannister-dead/

'Game of Thrones' Recap: Is Jaime Lannister Dead?

[Warning: this story contains spoilers for the fourth episode of Game of Thrones‘ seventh season, “The Spoils of War.”]

With the fourth hour of its seventh season, Game of Thrones delivered on yet another one of its longest held promises: dragons have returned to Westeros proper, with a vengeance — and it’s potentially very bad news for one character in particular.

The final act of the hour, called “The Spoils of War,” took a hard turn for “Battle of the Bastards” territory in the form of a massive battle between the Lannister and Targaryen forces. In one corner: Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), Bronn of the Blackwater (Jerome Flynn), the curiously named Dickon Tarly (Tom Hopper) and his cruel father Randyll (James Faulkner), and countless other soldiers. On the other side of the battlefield: Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) and Drogon, unleashing holy hellfire upon everyone they cross, with a huge Dothraki contingent as well. 

It’s the fulfillment of one of the show’s oldest oaths, stemming as early as the first episode of the series, when Viserys (Harry Lloyd) married Daenerys to Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) in an effort to recruit his army and win back Westeros. Both Viserys and Drogo are long gone, but the desired results of the marriage pact have finally played out, and very much in House Targaryen’s favor.

Of course, as has happened frequently this season, the battle wasn’t without at least one win for the Lannisters. In the second episode of season seven, Maester Qyburn (Anton Lesser) unveiled a new secret weapon in the campaign against Dany’s dragons: a huge crossbow, packing heat so powerful it could theoretically kill one of the fire-breathing beasts. The theory was put into practice at the end of this week’s dragon battle, as Bronn pierced Drogon’s shoulder with a well-placed arrow. The ferocious creature, up until then thoroughly ravaging the Lannister forces, howled in pain and virtually crash landed on a somewhat safe corner of the battlefield. It wasn’t enough to kill Drogon, but that’s more a matter of Bronn’s aim than the effectiveness of the weapon. As much as one hates to admit it, the giant crossbow looks likely to take out at least one of Dany’s dragons before the whole show is over.

Harming the dragon wasn’t enough of a victory for the Lannisters, however, as the battle culminated in one very foolish decision: Jaime grabbing a spear and charging straight for the wounded Drogon and the subsequently weakened Daenerys. From a distance, Jaime’s brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) watched on, shocked at his older sibling’s foolhardy decision to charge directly at a dragon, no matter how much pain it was in. But Jaime saw an opening to kill Daenerys and end the war in his sister and lover’s favor, and he seized it. Tyrion’s concerns were instantly validated, as Drogon reared his head up in the last few seconds before Jaime could reach Daenerys, and spewed forth a mouthful of fire.

Jaime would certainly be toast, if not for Bronn, who rode in at the eleventh hour and pushed the Lannister army’s leader into the nearby river. Both men narrowly avoided certain death by dragon fire, but for Jaime at least, the danger isn’t over. The episode ends as Jaime, weighed down by his heavy armor, slowly and helplessly sinks toward the bottom of the river. Viewers are left to wonder if the sole surviving son of Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) — or at least the only one who counts, as Cersei (Lena Headey) would tell you — is about to meet his father in the great beyond.

Of course, viewers haven’t really seen the last of Jaime Lannister. There’s no way Game of Thrones removes one of its longest-standing characters from the board without one final scene with Tyrion, especially with the estranged brothers in such close proximity on the battlefield. What’s more, would Thrones really kill off Jaime in an episode in which he lacks a single scene with Cersei? (And flipping the question, it doesn’t seem likely that Thrones would kill Cersei without one final scene with Jaime. In fact, many fans believe the two twins will ultimately die together, or one at the other’s hands.)

With that said, this is quite likely a preview of how Jaime will die eventually: foolishly rushing into a dangerous situation with no regard for anything other than his sister’s satisfaction. It’s a testament to the sad state of Jaime Lannister, as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau previously told The Hollywood Reporter before the season began: “He’s addicted to this relationship.” That addiction will very likely get him killed eventually, just not today.

Looking at the events of “The Spoils of War” from another perspective, this battle appears to be a major victory for Daenerys and her forces. Drogon and the Dothraki utterly decimated a huge swath of the Lannister army, even if they sustained some losses of their own, including the failed attempt on Drogon’s life. But in her own way, Daenerys suffered a moral defeat. The battle only came as a result of Dany feeling the heat of constantly losing against the Lannisters, a development that caused her to publicly blame Tyrion for the defeats. Hotheaded and furious, Dany wanted to charge right into Westeros, but first attempted to consult on the matter with Jon Snow (Kit Harington). 

“I never thought dragons would exist again,” says Lord Snow (or is it King Snow?) when Dany asks for his counsel. “No one did. The people who follow you know you made something impossible happen. Maybe that helps them believe you can make other impossible things happen, to build a world that’s different from the shit one they’ve always known. But if you use them to melt castles and burn cities, you’re not different. You’re just more of the same.”

Consider Jon’s advice roundly ignored, as Dany is next seen charging into battle on Drogon. The horrific carnage and haunting images of war make it clear that Dany’s actions, while effective, had terrible consequences. Pair those brutal images with the scene from earlier in the season in which Arya (Maisie Williams) befriends some kind-hearted Lannister loyalists (including Ed Sheeran), and you’re left to wonder just how far the apple has fallen from the tree where Daenerys and the Mad King are concerned. If there’s a silver lining, it’s Dany’s legitimate look of terror and concern for Drogon toward the end of the battle, perhaps a sign that she understands the scope of her devastating actions.

Returning to the subject of Jon and Daenerys, the King in the North and the Mother of Dragons inched closer together during their scenes in “The Spoils of War.” The chemistry between them is palpable when they stand together in a torchlit cave on Dragonstone, staring at the valuable dragonglass, along with ancient illustrations of the Children of the Forest fighting alongside humans against the White Walkers. (In an alternate universe in which Thrones is a comedy, Jon Snow totally mocked up those carvings on the quick and cheap to get Dany on his side.) 

Later in the episode, Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham) explicitly calls out Jon’s attraction to the Mother of Dragons. Jon quickly denies it like a school kid who has been rightfully called out on his secret crush, claiming his quest to kill the Night King is the only thing that matters now. The scene is quickly followed by one in which Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) sings Daenerys’ praises, with a sales pitch so effective that even Davos (whose friendly fondness for Missandei is quickly becoming one of the show’s quietest delights) jokes to Jon: “Would you forgive me if I switch sides?”

Clearly, Game of Thrones is building up toward some kind of romantic collision between Jon Snow and Daenerys. It’s not a shock, given the HBO series is based on a series of novels called A Song of Ice and Fire, a title that directly points toward some sort of union between Houses Stark and Targaryen. Then again, at the same time, the show is building up hype toward a reveal the audience already largely knows, even if the characters most directly involved are still in the dark: Jon Snow is secretly the son of Rhaegar Targaryen, Daenerys’ deceased brother who died at the height of Robert’s Rebellion. 

Is the show truly voyaging into territory where an aunt and her nephew are about to become the new “it” couple? There’s an awkwardly proud tradition of incest within the Targaryen family, so Jon and Dany coming together wouldn’t be out of line with their ancestors’ actions. Still, as the show positions these two as a potential romantic pair, it should come with some measure of squeamishness. 

Between Jon and Dany’s growing closeness and Tyrion’s proximity to Jaime on the battlefield, “The Spoils of War” was already rich with familial interactions. But the most explicit and satisfying family reunion occurred much further north, as Arya finally returned to Winterfell. After a scene that mirrors a moment from season one in which she tried to convince two King’s Landing guards of her identity, Arya finally infiltrates Winterfell and reunites with Sansa in the crypts of Winterfell. The two share a tender moment in which they reflect on how the statue of their late father Ned (Sean Bean) doesn’t look like him at all.

“Everybody who knew his face is dead,” Arya quietly mourns.

“We’re not,” Sansa reminds her younger sister.

The joyful reunion takes on a more somber tone as Sansa takes Arya to Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright), who remains emotionally detached due to his status as the Three-Eyed Raven. Indeed, the episode’s most non-violently devastating moment comes when Bran completely dismisses Meera (Ellie Kendrick) as she leaves Winterfell to return home to her family. In that scene, Bran tells Meera that he’s not even really Bran anymore: “I remember what it felt like to be Brandon Stark, but I remember so much else now.” The tearful Meera responds: “You died in that cave.” It’s yet another sign that the all-powerful Bran is becoming more tree than man by the day, and hopefully the start of Meera finally bringing her legendary father Howland Reed (one of the most widely anticipated, if never seen, characters from the books) into the story — though sadly, we’re not counting on it.

Speaking of trees, Bran finally meets up with Arya again beside the heart tree in the godswood of Winterfell. He proves his irrefutable power when he brings up Arya Stark’s list of enemies without her provocation. Bran offers another gift: the Valyrian dagger that was once used in an attempt on his life. Earlier in the episode, Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) presents the weapon to Bran as a sign of his loyalty to House Stark. But the mischievous manipulator is taken aback when Bran replies not with gratitude, but eerie insight into Lord Baelish’s past words: “Chaos is a ladder.” 

It’s the first meeting between two people who purportedly see everything all at once, albeit literally in the case of the young Three-Eyed Raven. Even with his extensive planning, it’s not likely Littlefinger ever imagined having to contend with someone who can actually see everything all at once, thanks to his ability to access the truth through magic. Indeed, as Littlefinger watches Arya use the Valyrian dagger in a wonderfully choreographed sparring match against Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), you get the sense that the Lord of the Vale has bitten off more than he can chew with Sansa’s siblings. Arya’s own suspicion of Littlefinger is noticeable as well, leading one to wonder if it’s just a matter of time before the Valyrian dagger finds its way back to Littlefinger, one bloody way or another.

Two final notes:

• Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) has returned to Dragonstone. The only reason he’s alive, according to Jon Snow, is that he saved Sansa from the Boltons. Otherwise, there’s no love lost between these two, who both grew up as black sheep within House Stark. Could that shared history, plus Theon redeeming himself further by saving Yara (Gemma Whelan) or serving the Starks in some other capacity, bring them closer together? In a happily ever after version of Game of Thrones, Theon and Jon would forge the same brotherly bond with one another they both had with the late Robb Stark (Richard Madden). Then again, Game of Thrones rarely if ever trades in happily ever after. Theon’s future remains one of the murkiest prospects on the board, then.

• In her scenes with Tycho Nestoris (Mark Gattis) of the Iron Bank, Cersei Lannister reveals her intention to hire an infamous group of sellswords known as the Golden Company. This should set off alarms for fans of the books: the Golden Company, founded long ago by a Targaryen bastard named Aegor “Bittersteel” Rivers, head to Westeros in George R.R. Martin’s “A Dance with Dragons,” serving a man who claims to be Aegon Targaryen, the murdered infant son of the late Rhaegar; according to his tale, the butchered baby was a double, while the real Aegon was raised in exile, as part of an eventual Targaryen resurgence. Almost nobody who reads the books actually believes this to be the real Aegon, and the show has shied away from the storyline altogether. Even if “FAegon” is unlikely to suddenly appear with only nine episodes remaining in the series, it’s starting to look likely that we’re going to see his vicious soldiers, the Golden Company, on the show, albeit working on Cersei’s behalf. It’s just the latest bit of bad news for anyone rooting against House Lannister.

Watch the video below for the Game of Thrones cast’s preview of season seven’s battles.

Follow THR.com/GameOfThrones all season long for news, interviews, theories and more.

Game of Thrones

[viralhottopics]

Think the Internet Is Polarized? Just Look at the FCC These Days

Earlier this month, in a classic late Friday afternoon news dump, the Federal Communications Commission announced a rollback of two key decisions made during theObama administration. In another era, few besidespolicy wonks and internet activists would have noticed such a thing. But these changes drew intense attention. These days, politics isn’t just what happens on the internetit’s what happens to the internet.

“Trumps FCC Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules,” the New York Times declared. “FCC blocks 9 companies from providing low-income internet access,” CNN reported. Mignon Clyburn, the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC, published sharp rebukes to themoves, complaining that her colleagues had acted “without a shred of explanation.”

The agency that regulates the internet is becoming as sharply divided as the internet itself.

Of particular concern were a series of FCC decisions made after the election last year allowingnine companies to participate in the government’s Lifeline program that subsidizes phone and internet service for low income families.At first, Ajit Pai, President Trump’s pick to lead the agency, offered no explanation forreversing those decisions. But by the following Tuesday, widespread criticism forced him topublish a lengthy explanation for a move that seemed to fly in the face of his stated objective of closing the digital divide.

The president’s tumultuous first month has brought intense scrutiny and publicity to agencies such as the National Park Service and Department of Education that until nowrarely made news. But the FCC’s rise from relative obscurity to big headlines corresponds not just with the Trump’s arrival in Washington, but with the ever-greater centrality of the internet to American life, political and otherwise.

From its start in 1934, the FCC has played a crucial role in determining how Americans communicate and gather information. But for most of its existence, it’s been a boring, technocratic agency tasked with granting broadcast licenses and divvying up the wireless spectrum. It occasionally waded into controversies like obscenity laws, media consolidation rules, or the Fairness Doctrine, but even when decisions followedparty lines, they rarely became political firestorms. But these days, the FCC has grownincreasingly polarized—and polarizing. The agency that regulates the internet isbecoming as sharply divided as the internet itself.

No Middle Ground

This polarization became undeniably apparent during the tenure of chairman Tom Wheeler, the head of the FCC under President Obama. The five-member panel frequently split along party lines on proposals such as cable box reform, privacy rules, and reclassifying internet providers as common carriers akin to utilities. You could blame partisan split on Wheeler for pushing an aggressive agenda opposed by the two Republicans on the panel, but that’s only part of the story.

Wheeler didn’t start out as a friend-of-the-consumer crusader when Obama appointed him in November 2013. The following April he proposed a new set of rules that critics argued would have allowed internet service providers to accelerate or throttle traffic from specific websites. This runs counter to an essential principle of the internet called net neutrality, which states that internet service providers must provide equal access to all websites, content, and applications.

The idea that the FCC might sacrifice net neutrality outraged activists. Encouraged by their success defeating the draconian intellectual property reform bills known as SOPA and PIPA, these activists launched a campaign to flood the FCC with comments opposing the proposal. Even comedian John Oliver joined the cause, dedicating an episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to the topic. (He said appointing Wheeler,a former cable industry lobbyist, to head the FCC wasakin to hiring a dingo to babysit your kids.)Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, and others throttled their platforms to protest the proposal. Even Obama weighed in. Ultimately, the FCC received a record 3.7 million comments in support of net neutrality, more than the previous record of 1.3 million comments complaining about Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004.

Maybe that popular uprising emboldened Wheeler to be the crusader he always wanted to be. Or maybe being called out on national television inspired him to take a more consumer-first approach to running the agency. Either way, Wheeler pursued an agenda more in line with that of consumer advocacy groups, regardless of what the telco industry wanted. First, Wheeler embraced reclassifying internet providers to increase the FCC’s ability to enforce net neutrality. Then, under his leadership, the FCC passed strict privacy rules for internet providers, expanded the Lifeline program to subsidize internet access in addition to phone service, and was set to vote on a proposal that could have ended pay TV’s providers’ cable box monopoly.

Republicans on the commission opposed each of these acts. Not every decision the agency made was so polarizing, of course. But when there were disagreements, critics argue that Wheeler relied on the Democratic majority on the commission to pass regulations rather than finding a middle ground with Republicans. “Wheeler stopped trying to reach compromise with his colleagues,” says Randolph May, founder of the Free State Foundation.

Wheeler has implied that the polarization stemmed from Republican stonewalling. “When I came in, I set up with each commissioner a date every other weekan hour for the two of us just to sit without staff and talk,” he said during an appearance at Harvard Law School last month. “For the last 18, 24 months he [Pai] canceled every meeting. Its hard to work for consensus when you wont sit down with each other.”

Pai, who Obama appointed to the FCC in 2012, started reversing those polarized decisions almost immediately after Trump promoted him to chairman. In just four weeks,he has reversed the Lifeline decision, dropped the cable box reform proposal, and looks set to block at least some of the new privacy rules. Yes, most issues the commission votes on remain uncontroversial. But certain decisions remain polarizing. For example, this week the Republican commissioners voted to exempt smaller internet providers from the agency’s transparency rules, over objections by Clyburn. Once again the agency is cleaving along party lines on contentious issues.

Internet Acrimony

At first, Americans of all political stripes supported net neutrality. That changed as Republican lawmakers pushed back. Republican senator Ted Cruz went so far as to call net neutrality a “Obamacare for the internet.” By the end of 2015, GOP voters were less likely than Democrats oppose allowing internet providers to charge some websites extra to for faster speeds. A majority still oppose the idea the idea of fast lanes for the internet, but Wheeler has come to look less like a populist hero in Republican eyes, and more like a Big Government meddler.

Still, you can’t blame petty politics alone for the mess the FCC finds itself in. Debates over net neutrality and cable boxes stem from an ideological shift in Washington. In earlier days, it was “good regulation versus bad regulation,” saysChris Lewis, vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Now it’s “more regulation versus less regulation.”

No one is well served by regulations that yo-yo back and forth as the political seasons change.

Fair enough. After all, “everyone across the spectrum agreed that Ma Bell should have been regulated,” says May. He’s referring to the original AT&T monopoly, which the government divided into “baby Bells,” including Verizon and the modern AT&T, in 1982. “It’s clearly a different communications landscape now.”

Free market advocates like May argue that the telecommunications sector enjoys robust competition and that the government should step aside tolet the market do its thing. Republicans tend to agree with him. But privacy and consumer advocates—and many Democratsfear increasing consolidation as telecoms buy each other and media companies. Fewer players, they argue, will lead to the erosion of competition and ultimately more restrictions on speech.

The Trump administration has signaled a hard shift in the direction of deregulation, though it may occasionally come down in favor of government intervention when politically desirablesuch as in the case of AT&T’s attempt to merge with Time Warner merger. Pai’s outlook is clearly in line with administration. But he, like the president and Congress, have an obligation to the public, not just to the Republican base or to free market ideology. No one, not even the telecommunication industry, is well served by regulations that yo-yo back and forth as the political seasons change. The internet, at least in this case, should really be above politics.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2lcZf5p

from Think the Internet Is Polarized? Just Look at the FCC These Days

[billyagogo]

The Color of His Presidency

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/01/26/the-color-of-his-presidency/

The Color of His Presidency

Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, the liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative strategist and pundit Bill Kristol had a brief spat on Maher’s HBO show, putatively over what instigated the tea party but ultimately over the psychic wound that has divided red America and blue America in the Obama years. The rise of the tea party, explained Maher in a let’s-get-real moment, closing his eyes for a second the way one does when saying something everybody knows but nobody wants to say, “was about a black president.” Both Maher and Kristol carry themselves with a weary cynicism that allows them to jovially spar with ideological rivals, but all of a sudden they both grew earnest and angry. Kristol interjected, shouting, “That’s bullshit! That is total bullshit!” After momentarily sputtering, Kristol recovered his calm, but his rare indignation remained, and there was no trace of the smirk he usually wears to distance himself slightly from his talking points. He almost pleaded to Maher, “Even you don’t believe that!”

“I totally believe that,” Maher responded, which is no doubt true, because every Obama supporter believes deep down, or sometimes right on the surface, that the furious opposition marshaled against the first black president is a reaction to his race. Likewise, every Obama opponent believes with equal fervor that this is not only false but a smear concocted willfully to silence them.

This bitter, irreconcilable enmity is not the racial harmony the optimists imagined the cultural breakthrough of an ­African- American president would usher in. On the other hand, it’s not exactly the sort of racial strife the pessimists, hardened by racial animosity, envisioned either, the splitting of white and black America into worlds of mutual incomprehension—as in the cases of the O. J. Simpson trial, the L.A. riots, or Bernhard Goetz.

The Simpson episode actually provides a useful comparison. The racial divide was what made the episode so depressing: Blacks saw one thing, whites something completely different. Indeed, when Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murder charges, whites across parties reacted in nearly equal measure: 56 percent of white Republicans objected to the verdict, as did 52 percent of white Democrats. Two decades later, the trial of George Zimmerman produced a very different reaction. This case also hinged on race—Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen from his neighborhood in Florida, and was acquitted of all charges. But here the gap in disapproval over the verdict between white Democrats and white Republicans was not 4 points but 43. Americans had split once again into mutually uncomprehending racial camps, but this time along political lines, not by race itself.

A different, unexpected racial argument has taken shape. Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history, has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world. Liberals dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable. Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right.

If you set out to write a classic history of the Obama era, once you had described the historically significant fact of Obama’s election, race would almost disappear from the narrative. The thumbnail sketch of every president’s tenure from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton prominently includes racial conflagrations—­desegregation fights over the military and schools, protests over civil-rights legislation, high-profile White House involvement in the expansion or rollback of busing and affirmative action. The policy landscape of the Obama era looks more like it did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, when Americans fought bitterly over regulation and the scope of government. The racial-policy agenda of the Obama administration has been nearly nonexistent.

But if you instead set out to write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the day-to-day experience of political life, you would find that race has saturated everything as perhaps never before. Hardly a day goes by without a volley and counter-volley of accusations of racial insensitivity and racial hypersensitivity. And even when the red and blue tribes are not waging their endless war of mutual victimization, the subject of race courses through everything else: debt, health care, unemployment. Whereas the great themes of the Bush years revolved around foreign policy and a cultural divide over what or who constituted “real” America, the Obama years have been defined by a bitter disagreement over the size of government, which quickly reduces to an argument over whether the recipients of big-government largesse deserve it. There is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.

It was immediately clear, from his triumphal introduction at the 2004 Democratic National Convention through the giddy early days of his audacious campaign, that Obama had reordered the political landscape. And though it is hard to remember now, his supporters initially saw this transformation as one that promised a “post-racial” politics. He attracted staggering crowds, boasted of his ability to win over Republicans, and made good on this boast by attracting independent voters in Iowa and other famously white locales.

Of course, this was always a fantasy. It was hardly a surprise when George Packer, reporting for The New Yorker, ventured to Kentucky and found white voters confessing that they would vote for a Democrat, but not Obama, simply because of his skin color. (As one said: “Race. I really don’t want an African-­American as president. Race.”) Packer’s report conveys the revelatory dismay with which his news struck. “Obama has a serious political problem,” he wrote. “Until now, he and his supporters have either denied it or blamed it on his opponents.” Reported anecdotes of similar flavor have since grown familiar enough to have receded into the political backdrop. One Louisiana man told NPR a few weeks ago that he would never support Senator Mary Landrieu after her vote for Obama­care. After ticking off the familiar talking points against the health-care law—it would kill jobs and so on—he arrived at the nub of the matter: “I don’t vote for black people.” (Never mind that Landrieu is white.)

We now know that the fact of Obama’s presidency—that a black man is our ­commander-in-chief, that a black family lives in the White House, that he was elected by a disproportionately high black vote—has affected not just the few Americans willing to share their racism with reporters but all Americans, across the political spectrum. Social scientists have long used a basic survey to measure what they call “racial resentment.” It doesn’t measure hatred of minorities or support for segregation, but rather a person’s level of broad sympathy for African-Americans (asking, for instance, if you believe that “blacks have gotten less than they deserve” or whether “it’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough”). Obviously, the racially conservative view—that blacks are owed no extra support from the government—has for decades corresponded more closely with conservatism writ large and thus with the Republican Party. The same is true with the racially liberal view and the Democratic Party: Many of the Americans who support government programs that disproportionately offer blacks a leg up are Democrats. But when the political scientists Michael Tesler and David Sears peered into the data in 2009, they noticed that the election of Obama has made views on race matter far more than ever.

By the outset of Obama’s presidency, they found, the gap in approval of the president between those with strongly liberal views on race and those with strongly conservative views on race was at least twice as large as it had been under any of the previous four administrations. As Tesler delved further into the numbers, he saw that race was bleeding into everything. People’s views on race predicted their views on health-care reform far more closely in 2009 than they did in 1993, when the president trying to reform health care was Bill Clinton. Tesler called what he saw unfurling before him a “hyperracialized era.”

In recent history, racial liberals have sometimes had conservative views on other matters, and racial conservatives have sometimes had liberal views. Consider another measure, called “anti-black affect,” a kind of thermometer that registers coldness toward African-Americans. Prior to 2009, anti-black affect did not predict an individual’s political identification (when factoring out that person’s economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism). Since Obama has taken office, the correlation between anti-black affect and Republican partisanship has shot up. Even people’s beliefs about whether the unemployment rate was rising or falling in 2012—which, in previous years, had stood independent of racial baggage—were now closely linked with their racial beliefs.

Racial conservatism and conservatism used to be similar things; now they are the same thing. This is also true with racial liberalism and liberalism. The mental chasm lying between red and blue America is, at bottom, an irreconcilable difference over the definition of racial justice. You can find this dispute erupting everywhere. A recent poll found a nearly 40-point partisan gap on the question of whether 12 Years a Slave deserved Best Picture.

In 1981, Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native working for the Reagan administration, gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. In it, Atwater described the process by which the conservative message evolved from explicitly racist appeals to implicitly racialized appeals to white economic self-interest:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ ”

Atwater went on to run George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, where he flamboyantly vowed to make Willie Horton, a murderer furloughed by Dukakis who subsequently raped a woman, “his running mate.” Atwater died three years later of a brain tumor, and his confessional quote to Lamis attracted scarcely any attention for years. In 2005, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert picked out the quote, which had appeared in two books by Lamis. In the ensuing years, liberal columnists and authors have recirculated Atwater’s words with increasing frequency, and they have attained the significance of a Rosetta stone.

A long line of social-science research bears out the general point that Atwater made. People have an elemental awareness of race, and we relentlessly process political appeals, even those that do not mention race, in racial terms.

In the 1970s and 1980s, liberals understood a certain chunk of the Republican agenda as a coded appeal—a “dog ­whistle”—to white racism. The political power of cracking down on crack, or exposing welfare queens, lay in its explosive racial subtext. (Regarding Willie Horton, an unnamed Republican operative put it more bluntly: “It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”) This is what Paul Krugman was referring to in his recent Times op-ed titled “That Old-Time Whistle.” When the House Budget Committee releases a report on the failure of the War on Poverty and Paul Ryan speaks of a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working,” you can conclude that the policy report is mere pretext to smuggle in the hidden racial appeal.

Once you start looking for racial subtexts embedded within the Republican agenda, they turn up everywhere. And not always as subtexts. In response to their defeats in 2008 and 2012, Republican governors and state legislators in a host of swing states have enacted laws, ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud, whose actual impact will be to reduce the proportion of votes cast by minorities. A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.

It is likewise hard to imagine the mostly southern states that have refused free federal money to cover the uninsured in their states doing so outside of the racial context—nearly all-white Republican governments are willing and even eager to deny medical care to disproportionately black constituents. The most famous ad for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign depicted an elderly white man, with a narrator warning bluntly about Medicare cuts: “Now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”

Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space.

The racial debate of the Obama years emits some of the poisonous waft of the debates over communism during the ­McCarthy years. It defies rational resolution in part because it is about secret motives and concealed evil.

On September 9, 2009, the president delivered a State of the Union–style speech on health care before Congress. After a summer of angry tea-party town-hall meetings, Republicans had whipped themselves into a feisty mood. At one point, Obama assured the audience that his health-care law would not cover illegal immigrants. (This was true.) Joe Wilson, the Republican representing South Carolina’s Second District, screamed, “You lie!”

Over the next few days, several liberals stated what many more believed. “I think it’s based on racism,” offered Jimmy Carter at a public forum. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.” Maureen Dowd likewise concluded, “What I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! … Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Assailing Wilson’s motives on the basis of a word he did not say is, to say the least, a loose basis by which to indict his motives. It is certainly true that screaming a rebuke to a black president is the sort of thing a racist Republican would do. On the other hand, it’s also the sort of thing a rude or drunk or angry or unusually partisan Republican would do.

One way to isolate the independent variable, and thus to separate out the racism in the outburst, is to compare the treatment of Obama with that of the last Democratic president. Obama has never been called “boy” by a major Republican figure, but Bill Clinton was, by Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator and author of a presidential biography titled Boy Clinton. Here are some other things that happened during the Clinton years: North Carolina senator Jesse Helms said, “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page and other conservative organs speculated that Clinton may have had his aide Vince Foster murdered and had sanctioned a cocaine-smuggling operation out of an airport in Arkansas. Now, imagine if Obama had been called “boy” in the title of a biography, been subjected to threats of mob violence from a notorious former segregationist turned senator, or accused in a major newspaper of running coke. (And also impeached.) How easy would it be to argue that Republicans would never do such things to a white president?

Yet many, many liberals believe that only race can explain the ferocity of Republican opposition to Obama. It thus follows that anything Republicans say about Obama that could be explained by racism is probably racism. And since racists wouldn’t like anything Obama does, that renders just about any criticism of Obama—which is to say, nearly everything Republicans say about Obama—presumptively racist.

Does this sound like an exaggeration? Bill O’Reilly’s aggressive (and aggressively dumb) Super Bowl interview with the president included the question “Why do you feel it’s necessary to fundamentally transform the nation that has afforded you so much opportunity?” Salon’s Joan Walsh asserted, “O’Reilly and Ailes and their viewers see this president as unqualified and ungrateful, an affirmative-action baby who won’t thank us for all we’ve done for him and his cohort. The question was, of course, deeply condescending and borderline racist.” Yes, it’s possible that O’Reilly implied that the United States afforded Obama special opportunity owing to the color of his skin. But it’s at least as possible, and consistent with O’Reilly’s beliefs, that he merely believes the United States offers everybody opportunity.

Esquire columnist Charles Pierce has accused Times columnist David Brooks of criticizing Obama because he wants Obama to be an “anodyne black man” who would “lose, nobly, and then the country could go back to its rightful owners.” Timothy Noah, then at Slate, argued in 2008 that calling Obama “skinny” flirted with racism. (“When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama’s other physical attributes can’t help coming off as a coy walk around the barn.”) Though the term elitist has been attached to candidates of both parties for decades (and to John Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign), the writer David Shipler has called it racist when deployed against Obama. (“ ‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”)

MSNBC has spent the entire Obama presidency engaged in a nearly nonstop ideological stop-and-frisk operation. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell chided Obama for playing too much golf, Lawrence O’Donnell accused him of “trying to align … the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.” (McConnell had not mentioned Tiger Woods; it was O’Donnell who made the leap.) After Arizona governor Jan Brewer confronted Obama at an airport tarmac, Jonathan Capehart concluded, “A lot of people saw it as her wagging her finger at this president who’s also black, who should not be there.” Martin Bashir hung a monologue around his contention that Republicans were using the initialism IRS as a code that meant “nigger.” Chris Matthews calls Republicans racist so often it is hard to even keep track.

Few liberals acknowledge that the ability to label a person racist represents, in 21st-century America, real and frequently terrifying power. Conservatives feel that dread viscerally. Though the liberal analytic method begins with a sound grasp of the broad connection between conservatism and white racial resentment, it almost always devolves into an open-ended license to target opponents on the basis of their ideological profile. The power is rife with abuse.

By February, conservative rage against MSNBC had reached a boiling point. During the Super Bowl, General Mills ran a commercial depicting an adorable multiracial family bonding over a birth announcement and a bowl of Cheerios. The Cheerios ad was not especially groundbreaking or remarkable. A recent Chevy ad, to take just one other example, features a procession of families, some multiracial or gay, and declares, “While what it means to be a family hasn’t changed, what a family looks like has.” This schmaltzy, feel-good fare expresses the modern American creed, where patriotic tableaux meld old-generation standby images—American soldiers in World War II, small towns, American flags flapping in the breeze—with civil-rights protesters.

What made the Cheerios ad notable was that MSNBC, through its official Twitter account, announced, “Maybe the right wing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.” It was undeniably true that some elements of the right wing would object to the ad—similar previous ads have provoked angry racist reactions. Still, Republicans felt attacked, and not unreasonably. The enraged chairman of the Republican National Committee declared a boycott on any appearances on the network, and MSNBC quickly apologized and deleted the offending tweet.

Why did this particular tweet, of all things, make Republicans snap? It exposed a sense in which their entire party is being written out of the American civic religion. The inscription of the civil-rights story into the fabric of American history—the elevation of Rosa Parks to a new Paul Revere, Martin Luther King to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers­—has, by implication, cast Barack Obama as the contemporary protagonist and Republicans as the villains. The Obama campaign gave its supporters the thrill of historic accomplishment, the sense that they were undertaking something more grand than a campaign, something that would reverberate forever. But in Obama they had not just the material for future Americana stock footage but a live partisan figure. How did they think his presidency would work out?

Even the transformation of the civil-rights struggles of a half-century ago into our shared national heritage rests on more politically awkward underpinnings than we like to admit. As much as our museums and children’s history books and Black History Month celebrations and corporate advertisements sandblast away the rough ideological edges of the civil-rights story, its under­lying cast remains. John Lewis is not only a young hero who can be seen in grainy black-and-white footage enduring savage beatings at the hands of white supremacists. He is also a current Democratic member of Congress who, in 2010, reprised his iconic role by marching past screaming right-wing demonstrators while preparing to cast a vote for Obamacare. And, more to the point, the political forces behind segregation did not disappear into thin air. The lineal descendants of the segregationists, and in some cases the segregationists themselves, moved into the Republican Party and its unofficial media outlets, which specialize in stoking fears of black Americans among their audience. (Like when Rush Limbaugh seized on a minor fight between two schoolkids in Illinois to announce, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”)

The unresolved tension here concerns the very legitimacy of the contemporary Republican Party. It resembles, in milder form, the sorts of aftershocks that follow a democratic revolution, when the allies of the deposed junta—or ex-Communists in post–Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, or, closer to the bone, white conservatives in post-apartheid South Africa—attempt to reenter a newly democratized polity. South Africa famously created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that was easy—once democracy was in place, the basic shape of the polity was a foregone conclusion. In the United States, the partisan contest still runs very close; the character of our government is very much up for grabs.

And the truth is almost too brutal to be acknowledged. A few months ago, three University of Rochester political scientists—Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen—published an astonishing study. They discovered that a strong link exists between the proportion of slaves residing in a southern county in 1860 and the racial conservatism (and voting habits) of its white residents today. The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents. The authors tested their findings against every plausible control factor—for instance, whether the results could be explained simply by population density—but the correlation held. Higher levels of slave ownership in 1860 made white Southerners more opposed to affirmative action, score higher on the anti-black-affect scale, and more hostile to Democrats.

The authors suggest that the economic shock of emancipation, which suddenly raised wages among the black labor pool, caused whites in the most slave-intensive counties to “promote local anti-black sentiment by encouraging violence towards blacks, racist norms and cultural beliefs,” which “produced racially hostile attitudes that have been passed down from parents to children.” The scale of the effect they found is staggering. Whites from southern areas with very low rates of slave ownership exhibit attitudes similar to whites in the North—an enormous difference, given that Obama won only 27 percent of the white vote in the South in 2012, as opposed to 46 percent of the white vote outside the South.

The Rochester study should, among other things, settle a very old and deep argument about the roots of America’s unique hostility to the welfare state. Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States; in none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.

And yet—as vital as this revelation may be for understanding conservatism, it still should not be used to dismiss the beliefs of individual conservatives. Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses.

Liberals experience the limits of historically determined analysis in other realms, like when the conversation changes to anti-Semitism. Here is an equally charged argument in which conservatives dwell on the deep, pernicious power of anti-Semitism hiding its ugly face beneath the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel. When, during his confirmation hearings last year for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel came under attack for having once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” conservatives were outraged. (The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens: “The word ‘intimidates’ ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent.”) Liberals were outraged by the outrage: The blog Think Progress assembled a list of writers denouncing the accusations as a “neocon smear.” The liberal understanding of anti-­Semitism is an inversion of conservative thinking about race. Liberals recognize the existence of the malady and genuinely abhor it; they also understand it as mostly a distant, theoretical problem, and one defined primarily as a personal animosity rather than something that bleeds into politics. Their interest in the topic consists almost entirely of indignation against its use as slander to circumscribe the policy debate.

One of the central conceits of modern conservatism is a claim to have achieved an almost Zenlike state of color-blindness. (Stephen Colbert’s parodic conservative talking head boasts he cannot see race at all.) The truth is that conservatives are fixated on race, in a mystified, aggrieved, angry way that lends their claims of race neutrality a comic whiff of let-me-tell-you-again-how-I’m-over-my-ex. But while a certain portion of the party may indeed be forwarding and sending emails of racist jokes of the sort that got a federal judge in trouble, a much larger portion is consumed not with traditional racial victimization—the blacks are coming to get us—but a kind of ideological victimization. Conservatives are fervent believers in their own racial innocence.

This explains Paul Ryan’s almost laughable response to accusations of racial insensitivity over his recent comments. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” he insisted. “It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” Why would anybody understand a reference to “inner cities” as racially fraught?

And so just as liberals begin with a sound analysis of Republican racial animosity and overextend this into paranoia, conservatives take the very real circumstance of their occasional victimization and run with it. They are not merely wounded by the real drumbeat of spurious accusations they endure; this is the only context in which they appear able to understand racism. One can read conservative news sites devotedly for years without coming across a non-ironic reference to racism as an extant social phenomenon, as opposed to a smear against them. Facts like the persistence of hiring discrimination (experiments routinely show fake résumés with black-sounding names receive fewer callbacks than ones with white-sounding names) do not exist in this world.

Conservatives likewise believe that race has been Obama’s most devious political weapon. Race consciousness, the theory goes, benefits Democrats but not Republicans. “By huge margins,” argues Quin Hillyer in National Review, “blacks vote in racial blocs more often than whites do.” Obama’s race, conservatives believe, lent him an advantage even among white voters. (As 2012 candidate Michele Bachmann put it in real-talk mode, “There was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt.”)

As a corollary, conservatives believe that the true heir to the civil-rights movement and its ideals is the modern Republican Party (the one containing all the former segregationists). A whole subgenre of conservative “history” is devoted to rebutting the standard historical narrative that the civil-rights movement drove conservative whites out of the Democratic Party. The ritual of right-wing African-Americans’ appearing before tea-party activists to absolve them of racism has drawn liberal snickers, but the psychological distress on display here runs much deeper. Glenn Beck’s “I Have a Dream” rally, the Republican habit of likening Obama and his policies either to slavery or to segregation (at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference alone, both Ralph Reed and Bobby Jindal compared the Obama administration to George Wallace)—these are expressions not of a political tactic but a genuine obsession.

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life. On another level, it is itself a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense. The spread of racial resentment on the right in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality. It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives. Understanding the mutual racial-­ideological loathing of the Obama era requires understanding how all the foregoing can be true at once.

In February 2007, with the Obama cultural phenomenon already well under way, Joe Biden—being a rival candidate at the time, but also being Joe Biden—attempted a compliment. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-­American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

It was a cringe-worthy moment, but Obama brushed it off graciously. “He called me,” said Obama. “I told him [the call] wasn’t necessary. We have got more important things to worry about.”

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

This has not made an impression upon the critics. In fact, many conservatives believe he accuses them of racism all the time, even when he is doing the opposite. When asked recently if racism explained his sagging approval ratings, Obama replied, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” Conservatives exploded in indignation, quoting the first sentence without mentioning the second. Here was yet another case of Obama playing the race card, his most cruel and most unanswerable weapon.

I recently asked Jonah Goldberg, a longtime columnist for National Review, why conservatives believed that Obama himself (as opposed to his less reticent allies) implied that they were racially motivated. He told me something that made a certain amount of sense. A few days before Obama’s inaugural address, at a time when his every utterance commanded massive news coverage, the president-elect gave a speech in Philadelphia calling for “a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

What struck Goldberg was Obama’s juxtaposition of “ideology and small thinking”—terms he has always associated with his Republican opponents—with “prejudice and bigotry.” He was not explicitly calling them the same thing, but he was treating them as tantamount. “That feeds into the MSNBC style of argument about Obama’s opponents,” Goldberg told me, “that there must be a more interesting explanation for their motives.”

It’s unlikely that Obama is deliberately plotting to associate his opponents with white supremacy in a kind of reverse-Atwater maneuver. But Obama almost surely believes his race helped trigger the maniacal ferocity of his opponents. (If not, he would be one of the few Obama voters who don’t.) And it’s not hard to imagine that Obama’s constant, public frustration with the irrationality pervading the Republican Party subconsciously expresses his suspicions.

Obama is attempting to navigate the fraught, everywhere-and-yet-nowhere racial obsession that surrounds him. It’s a weird moment, but also a temporary one. The passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will likely ease the mutual suspicion. In the long run, generational changes grind inexorably away. The rising cohort of Americans holds far more liberal views than their parents and grandparents on race, and everything else (though of course what you think about “race” and what you think about “everything else” are now interchangeable). We are living through the angry pangs of a new nation not yet fully born.

The Color of His Presidency

Read More

[ecoorganic]

Mailbag: Future Changes to NFL's TV Packages, Impact of Canceled College Games

Plus, the impact a canceled college season has on the NFL, what to expect from Gardner Minshew in Year 2, whether this season will be seen as legitimate and more.

It’s a sad day in the football world. Blue-blood programs that are 41 (Michigan), 33 (Penn State), 32 (USC) and 30 (Ohio State and Nebraska) years older than the NFL itself won’t be playing this fall. And no matter who you blame, it’s a shame that

we’re here.

The slow death march college football seems to be on will absolute reverberate in the NFL world. We’re going to get to that, and a whole lot more, in this week’s mailbag. …

From Brock Ascher (@BrockAscher): What happens to NFL TV rights in the near future? Will I ever be able to get rid of DirecTV? Will I ever be able to buy a one-team out of market package?

Brock, my guess is the over-the-air packages will probably remain the same. I think Thursday night is the one variable in all this, with the potential Disney snaps it up so it can put either MNF or TNF on ABC, with the other staying on ESPN, ideal for them for cable-fee reasons. (My guess is Fox is finished with TNF.) The biggest difference you’d notice could come in structure. I was told by two execs that the NFL has discussed jettisoning the divvying up of Sunday afternoons by conference (the cross-flex would be a precursor to that).

It’d give the NFL more flexibility and, in this scenario, you could have Fox and CBS simply split up the games, via some sort of “draft.”

After that, we can dive into how streaming (where the younger audience lives) plays into all of this, and how the Sunday Ticket package you’re referencing factors into that. AT&T now owns DirecTV, which has the Ticket through 2022. The Ticket is vital to DirecTV's survival. How much does AT&T care about that? We’ll see, because the NFL has discussed the idea of moving the Ticket to a streaming service, where a younger audience lives.

You can imagine what the Ticket would be worth to ESPN-Plus, Peacock, HBO Max, DAZN or Amazon Prime. How many people would jump on those services if the Ticket was there? Based on DirecTV’s numbers, the answer is a lot. And part of the NFL’s concern about production quality in doing something like this may have been alleviated with how smoothly Amazon Prime’s venture into creating such a product for the Premier League over in the UK went.

As for the a la carte end of this, we’ll see. I think that’s coming, but it might be further down the line, and whoever were to win the Ticket rights would be involved in all of that. The bottom line here: Media’s changing fast, and the NFL is preparing for that.

From Jonathan Barakat (@jonathanbarakat): How do you think Gardner Minshew will play this year? Will he exceed expectations? Also what do you think of D.J. Chark coming into his third year?

Jonathan, I’ll give you what I like and what I don’t like about Gardner Minshew’s situation.

What I like: Minshew gets to play for Jay Gruden, who’s immediately made a big difference for young quarterbacks in both his previous NFL homes (Kirk Cousins in D.C. and Andy Dalton in Cincinnati), and in one of those cases actually did it with a rookie coming off the lockout, which is somewhat analogous to this situation. Also, D.J. Chark gives Minshew a strong No. 1 target, and Doug Marrone will use the run game to support him.

What I don’t like: It’s pretty clear where Jacksonville stands on Cam Robinson, and having an issue at left tackle isn’t great—particularly in a year when it’s going to be tough to work out offensive line issues on the fly. Also, the viability of the run game rides largely on Leonard Fournette, who hasn’t been the most reliable guy over his first three NFL seasons. And beyond Chark, there are question marks at receiver and tight end.

So all in all, it’s not a complete mess, but not really setup for Minshew to have a breakthrough sophomore campaign.

From Roberta Wears A Mask You Should Too (@AceandJasper): How will the teams take care of season ticket holders who won't get to sit in their front row seats even for a game or two?

Most teams are rolling payments over or refunding—and I can’t imagine any haven’t already given their season-ticket holders the choice to opt out and hold on to the rights to their seats in 2021. I think, at this point, we know that the season isn’t going to start with full stadiums anywhere. How will it end? That’s four months from now. And I think the last four months should be enough to keep anyone from making predictions that far ahead.

From Erik Ghirarduzzi (@eghirarduzzi): Given the circumstance around this season, currently known and ones yet to come, how legit would a SB winner be? There are teams at a competitive disadvantage, through no fault of their own, already and the season hasn't started.

Erik, this is a great question—I do believe this year will be remembered, if it’s completed, like the strike years of 1982 and ’87. In ’82, teams played nine games, the divisions were temporarily abolished, and a 16-team playoff was staged. In ’87, just six quarterbacks broke 3,000 yards passing, and just two backs reached 1,000 yards rushing. In both years, interestingly enough, Joe Gibbs led Washington to a championship.

Now, I don’t think the season necessarily will be cut to nine games (as ’82 was), nor will you have the oddity of replacement players en masse (like ’87 had). But I do think there’ll be aspects of the season that will go sideways, and the NFL, to its credit, knows it and is preparing for that.

So how are ’82 and ’87 remembered? I think most people who didn’t live it (I was way too young, 2, to remember the former, and have faint memories of the latter) probably wouldn’t look at championships or accolades from that year (John Elway was MVP and Reggie White DPOY in ’87) much differently. But it doesn’t take much Google acumen to discover how weird all the numbers from those seasons look.

To me, that feels like the likely result of this year.

From Dan Heiserman (@HeisermanDan): Has any player in history ever been on more teams than Josh McCown?

Speaking of Google, Dan, I didn’t know the answer to this and was legitimately interested, so I looked and found that legend-of-the-aughts J.T. O’Sullivan was on 11 (!) different NFL teams (Saints, Packers, Bears, Vikings, Patriots, Panthers, Lions, Niners, Bengals, Chargers, Raiders), which unbelievably matches McCown’s number (Cardinals, Lions, Raiders, Dolphins, Panthers, Niners, Bears, Bucs, Browns, Jets, Eagles).

A little more bumping around the internet showed that kicker Bill Cundiff was, at one point or another, with 13 different NFL teams (Cowboys, Bucs, Packers, Saints, Falcons, Chiefs, Lions, Browns, Ravens, Washington, Niners, Jets, Bills). And I’m sure there are other backup quarterbacks and kickers—playing positions where careers are longer, which facilitates this sort of movement—out there like these guys.

All of them must have pretty cool jersey displays in their basements.

From SUPER BOWL SUPER BROWNS HELL YEAH!!! (@WAH3rd): Should I still go back to the party barn and start drinking at 7 a.m. and yell at people on Saturdays this fall like I used to?

This is a very specific message just for me and a lot of other people who were in legit mourning on Tuesday night—and this will be absolutely be one of the Lane Avenue casualties (right there with the Varsity Club) of the depressing news we all got. It’s hard to describe the Party Barn if you don’t know what it is already, so I won’t try.

And the answer is yes.

From Skeeter6265 (@skeeter6265): Do you think Ohio will beat Michigan?

I was very excited for Michigan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its last win in Columbus—that was in the fall of my junior year—this November. Maybe that team can have a Zoom reunion to commemorate it now.

From FootballFan64 (@FFan64): With college coaches out of the running for NFL openings since their season is moving to the spring, which NFL coordinators do you expect to be coveted for any newly vacated HC positions? Who is this year’s Matt Rhule?

Well, Football Fan, I’m not sure that colleges playing in the spring (if that even happens) would prevent NFL teams from making runs at coaches at that level. If, and again it’s a big if, college football goes in the spring semester, my guess would be the season would start in February (you can’t just start the season the minute kids get back to campus). The NFL coaching carousel is spinning at the beginning of January. So there’d be time.

The NFL coordinator names you’ll hear most are some of the usual suspects from the last couple cycles—Patriots OC Josh McDaniels, Chiefs OC Eric Bieniemy, Ravens coordinators Greg Roman and Wink Martindale, 49ers DC Robert Saleh and Saints DC Dennis Allen would be on that list. I’d also just keep an eye on Falcons DC Raheem Morris, Chiefs pass-game coordinator Mike Kafka and Titans OC Arthur Smith as names that could pop up.

As for the next Matt Rhule, the NFL will continue to have interest in Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, and Ohio State’s Ryan Day is beginning to be held in that sort of regard among those in the pros. But both those guys have jobs that are very well-paying and, in reality, better than the majority of jobs they’d find in the NFL. Stanford’s David Shaw and Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald have long been on the radar of the league, but haven’t shown much appetite for leaving their alma maters. And Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck is a fun name to keep an eye on.

From Shawn Tangen (@SMTangen): How is Kevin Warren viewed within NFL circles?

Shawn, I’d say it’s pretty mixed. And I got some pretty strong reaction from certain corners of the NFL about the Big Ten commissioner (and former Vikings executive) after the conference canceled its season on Tuesday.

Warren was a polarizing figure inside the Minnesota locker room during the Adrian Peterson scandal of 2014—Peterson felt like Warren betrayed him to the point where Warren’s promotion to COO was a sticking point in the star’s contract negotiation. That was a situation that coach Mike Zimmer had to manage, and ultimately defuse, on the ground with the players, and it’s just one example in his NFL past where he’s rankled co-workers.

On top of that, many NFL people felt like Warren’s move to the Big 10 was with designs on eventually making a run at becoming NFL commissioner down the line. In that regard, the final result of his management of the last week (a result we won’t have for a while) will probably go a long way in determining whether those aspirations are realistic or not. I’d just hope his decisions here weren’t made with that in mind.

From Brycen Papp (@BrycenPapp): Do you think this season will be a massive shift in the way the draft process works? Will the NFL lower the requirements for college players to be draft eligible to two years instead of three?

Brycen, I think there will be a shift to the draft process to a degree, and we’re going to get into that in the GamePlan on Thursday. But I do want to get into your question on the NFL’s age requirement, because it’s a fascinating one—and something we covered extensively on the podcast this week.

I believe many of the best players in the Big 10 and Pac-12, from places like Ohio State, Oregon, USC, Penn State and Michigan, will sign with agents now, and go into draft prep. Because of that, and how the Big 10/Pac-12 shutdown devalues this college season, I think we’ll also see some attrition from the other conferences. That could lead to some players who only played two years of college football and skipped the required third year out of high school, going high in next April’s draft.

That, in turn, could open the door in the future for players with two good years on their resume skipping their junior year to protect themselves and prepare for the draft—in the same way Christian McCaffrey skipping his bowl game in 2016 gave others cover to do the same. At that point, the idea that players need three years of development to be NFL-ready gets broken down, and now you have guys taking a “gap year” instead.

Which isn’t good for the players, for college football or for the NFL.

It’s important to remember here too that it’s not college football keeping guys in school for three years. It’s pro football. The three-year rule is an NFL rule. And when Maurice Clarett and Mike Williams sued to become eligible for the draft in 2004, it wasn’t a school, a conference or the NCAA they sued. It was the NFL. So the ball would be in the NFL’s court on this one, if the situation comes to a head.

From Sam Perrone (@samjp33): Do you think the NFL would be willing to move the draft if the college football season bleeds into the spring?

I think, Sam, the NFL will do whatever it needs to in order to support the golden goose that is college football. Why? College football is very good for the NFL. And primarily for three reasons.

1) It’s a free minor league. The NFL, unlike the other sports, doesn’t have to fund a complex minor-league system to develop college-aged players. The expense of doing so in a sport like football would be astronomical and the opportunity to monetize it, as we’ve seen with other start-up leagues in the past, would be pretty limited.

2) It’s a marketing monster for star players coming in. Say what you will about Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel—they were legit sports-world celebrities before they lifted a single dumbbell in preparation for the draft. Everyone knows who Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovialoa and Chase Young are. Ezekiel Elliott and Saquon Barkley were household names as collegians. And all of that is great for the NFL on so many different levels.

3) College football is the foundation for the NFL’s tentpole offseason event. The draft is The Draft because of college football. We’ve been watching most of the top players for years. It marries two wildly popular entertainment entities. The draft itself wouldn’t be nearly the event it is without college football.

So, in order to protect the sanctity of a spring college football season (as much of a sham as it might be) would the NFL be willing to move the draft back a few weeks? Well, of course it would be.

• Question or comment? Email us.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/3fO2YCN