On the Lesser of Two Evils

I just got finished writing an email to the Obama campaign.

The issue that matters most to me in this election is the restoration of our civil liberties. I was originally planning to vote for Dodd in the primary, but he dropped out before my state voted. I've never donated a dime to a politician, but came closer than I ever have in my life to donating to Dodd. My reason for even considering it had to do with his very principled stand over retroactive immunity for the telecoms that broke the law and wiretapped American citizens without warrants. Dodd's fight was weakly supported by Obama and Clinton, and outright opposed by Harry Reid, and so that is a good way to rank those three -- Obama and Clinton are ok, and Reid needs to be stripped of his leadership role, and even better, outright voted out of office.

Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald has been writing about this topic often, and has really done excellent work reporting on the issue and also motivating people to fight against the Congress whenever they take up this legislation. Unfortunately, it appears a lost cause now (as he predicted months ago), and part of the reason is that Obama has failed to lead and take a stand. Even worse, he appears to be simply covering his butt by issuing half-hearted statements to appease people like me, while knowing full well that he could take real action if he wanted to do so.

After realizing that Dodd wasn't going to be competitive, I reluctantly became an Obama supporter. I admit to being inspired by a lot of what he and his team have done, and I had gotten to the point where I thought that voting for Obama was actually going to be a vote for a candidate I genuinely supported, rather than the usual lesser of two evils vote.

With his failure on this issue, though, he squandered every ounce of my support and really has revealed himself to be yet another in a long line of lesser of two evils candidates. Maybe one of these days a real leader will actually run for office in this country, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

On begging for help

Please someone, anyone, offer me alternative internet service. There is yet another reason to despise Comcast, and this one elevates them to an entirely new level of sleaze. It pains me that I pretty much have no choice but to continue giving them my money.

Glenn Greenwald has been writing extensively about the fight against granting the telecoms retroactive immunity. It's an issue that is important to me, and I was impressed with Chris Dodd for putting everything on the line to fight against retroactive immunity. He won my support with that position.

Greenwald and some other folks have decided to actively work on this issue, and they have been going after blue dog democrats that have been enabling Bush. They took a poll about which blue dog to go after first, and after raising something like $75k in a short amount of time, put together an ad campaign to alert the constituents of a PA democrat that he's been voting for the Bush policies, including granting immunity to telecoms. Well, this guy lives in the heart of Comcast country, and Comcast has been very generous in donating to him.

Radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers have been playing the ad, but anyone want to guess which fine, upstanding cable company came up with a bunch of bogus reasons to refuse to run it? Yes, our comcastic friends refused to run a political ad critical of a congressman for taking money from telecoms (including them) to grant them immunity from prosecution.

Read Greenwald's column for more details. I'm going to go fire off a note to Verizon *begging* them to bring FiOS to my neighborhood.

On more outrage

I've been thinking about it, and although I never meant this blog to ever be about politics (which isn't cats, volleyball, or astronomy), it is getting that way because I keep getting more and more outraged. Every day when I think it can't get any worse, it gets worse.

There are plenty of much more serious things I can rail against, but this is the outrage of the day:

Rachael Ray.

She did an ad for Dunkin' Donuts wearing a scarf. Apparently, this means that she supports the terrorists and that she wants all Americans to die.

The same people who use racial slurs on TV or in their live speeches because that proves their bona fides as a "conservative" who does not bow to political correctness felt the need to force Dunkin' Donuts to pull a commercial because Rachael Ray was wearing a freaking scarf. This is the most important issue of our day, forget the war, the economy, or anything else -- we can't have our TV chefs wearing unapproved scarves on TV! Think about the anarchy that will result!

That's right. The "conservatives" have decided that this woman's attire so offended their delicate as a flower sensibilities as proud patriotic americans that no one should be allowed to see this heinous advertisement.

The 12 Republicans left in the US must be so proud -- they've finally won the all important battle to force companies to police the clothing choices of their paid endorsers.

Next time I'm going to wear a necktie, I'll be sure to call my Republican congressman to find out if it is on the approved list. I'm guessing I'll be in trouble, because I do have a lot of Jerry Garcia ties, after all.

On my favorite Dixie Chick

I was happy to see Bush get called out for what was just the latest in a long, long line of outrageous actions -- comparing Democrats to Nazi appeasers.

One thing that no one mentioned, though, was the first thought that occurred to me:

Natalie Maines said in Europe that she was embarrassed by our president. She was vilified and even received death threats. The howling outrage from the usual suspects could probably have been predicted, but I was amazed how many people and what a variety of people felt necessary to pile on Natalie. Does anyone think what she said was so wrong anymore? If anything, I think 99% of people would be willing to shout from the rooftops that Dubya is an embarrassment.

Anyway, someone explain to me how what Maines said was even remotely as awful as what Bush said. Like I said, I'm glad for the outrage (especially Olbermann's -- he's singlehandedly doing what Air America failed to do), but how come it's not as widespread and deeply felt as that a random Dixie Chick provoked? I'm hoping it's because we're all desensitized to what Worst.President.Ever has to say and not because people think calling Obama an appeaser in Israel isn't as bad as saying Bush embarrasses you while touring Europe.

Just another aside on Olbermann -- it takes some serious nerve to go on TV and tell the sitting president to "Shut the hell up". I wonder if his audit has started yet, or if they're looking deeper for skeletons in his closet. I'm guessing he's now on the TSA's "terrorist" list, has his phone tapped, and Rove is working on some "witnesses" to accuse him of bribery. I hope he's got some friends to help him out.

On the best line since "untracked"

I'm grading and watching the Pepperdine / Long Beach State NCAA men's vball semifinal.

Earlier tonight, PSU beat Ohio State to earn a spot in the championship.

This match is being called by the same team of Mowins & Kiraly that called the PSU / Stanford women's volleyball national championship match.

I've been known to make fun of this Mowins/Kiraly tandem. During the women's match, they must have said Foluke Akinradewo's name about a bazillion times, including telling us many, many, many times about her having to move out of her apartment to go train with the Olympic Team. It really seemed like it was the Foluke Akinradewo show, and oh, by the way, there is a match going on in the background.

Anyway... I found their commentary so annoying, I *have* to poke fun at Mowins for a slip she made during this match. I guess one of the Pepperdine guys attended commencement, and then went right to the gym to play in the conference championship match that got them into the tourney. While explaining this riveting human interest drama, Mowins said something along the lines of, "he took off the gown and the mortar & pestle and left for the gym."

I didn't know the regalia at Pepperdine was borrowed from the chemistry department.

On the Paterno Family Professor of English Literature

So the AAUP released their annual report on faculty salaries. I don't want to be too critical, but I do want to call out one of their arguments as bogus.

They say,

"The salaries paid to head football coaches at Division I-A universities are ten times as high as the salaries of senior professors. What does this say about the priorities of these universities?"

If anyone who has been here more than once doesn't know I'm a football fan, let me state for the record my bias -- I'm a season ticket holder at PSU, which is both my employer and the institution that awarded my bachelor's degree. That being said, though, I have to say that I think including this argument in what is otherwise a pretty standard paper on salary statistics hurts their credibility.

I know that it is easy to pick on football and fashionable to do so, but I just don't buy the argument that it is bad for colleges to pay football coaches more than $1M. Let's look at their argument:

(paraphrased) Major football schools pay their football coaches ~10 times the average full professor salary.

Well, what about supply and demand? How many PhDs are there that can fill your average full prof's slot? How many coaches have the CV to coach Penn State? Isn't it also simple economics that you pay a salary that is competitive with the other options a candidate might have? The full profs in my department are a talented lot, and could go to most other universities, could go to NSF, NASA, a national lab, or other federally funded research institution. So, PSU has to offer a competitive package to what those places have to offer in order to keep its faculty. Your average top D1 football coach gets approached annually by an NFL team, so D1 schools have to pay of order what an NFL coach might make to keep them. Last time I checked, even the worst NFL franchise (Detroit?, Arizona?) pays its coaches of order 10 times what NASA pays their senior scientists. If I'm wrong about NASA's salary scale, please tell me where to apply.

The authors of the AAUP report disagree. They say,

"If the purpose of the institutions were to produce football entertainment for profit and serve as farm teams for the National Football League, then arguments about letting market forces determine college coaches’ salaries would make sense. Otherwise, they don’t."

Huh? What is special about colleges that market forces can just be ignored when someone decides it is convenient? Why is it ok for market forces to determine that business profs should earn more than liberal arts profs, but not ok for football coaches? I just don't understand that statement at all. Personally, I wish that market forces were such that the best teachers commanded top salaries and movie stars and athletes made middle class salaries, but that's just not the case. Penn State can buy this argument, take a stand for the AAUP, and offer its next coach $100k, and we'll see if market forces can be ignored.

You can say that Penn State should do this, because it will mean the end of its football program (or at least the end of a D1 quality program). There is precedent for such a decision. Do the senior faculty at Chicago get larger annual salary increases than the schools that remained in the Big Ten? I'm going to guess that there is no correlation -- I bet Chicago profs have been getting annual raises similar to PSU faculty. I imagine that whatever the difference is in salary scale between PSU and Chicago, it has more to do with public vs. private than D1 vs. D3 athletics.

Lastly, how many head football coaches do schools like Penn State have? If you're not sure, the answer is 1.

Anyone know how many full profs there are? I would guess here it's in the neighborhood of 1,000. So if you integrate the salaries for football coaches and do the same for full profs, I get $1M for football coaches (tough math there -- 1 x $1M), and $100M for full profs. Seems to me that the ratio of football:full prof salaries does not show a lack of proper prioritization on the part of the administration.

We can argue about how self sufficient athletic departments truly are and how much football teams help to generate donations for academics (and here, I have to plug that at PSU Joe donated millions for things such as endowing faculty positions), but I just don't understand the demonizing of coaches and athletics.

Personally, I find football to be something that adds value to the quality of life here in State College. Isn't one of the Penn State PR lines "making life better"? So pay our head coach > 10 times what I make -- you're making my life better, even if you're not pleasing the AAUP. I'm not saying I want a raise less than inflation in 2008, but personally I don't think that there is any relationship to Joe's salary, football revenue, and my salary increase.

On the PA primary

It can't come soon enough.

I'm no fan of Hillary, but I have to say, any shred of hope she had of getting my vote has disappeared because of her incompetent PA staff.

We have been getting multiple calls a day from the Hillary campaign, and multiple sets of literature. In contrast, we've had one Obama call and one Obama pamphlet. That's all I need. Ten calls and ten pamphlets don't tell me anything different than the first one.

Still, though, today's bit of campaigning was the best of the bunch.

I got home at ~1pm, and found a Hillary pamphlet in my door jamb, *again*. However, I noticed this one had something on it, which I originally thought was ketchup. However, upon closer inspection, whoever dropped this pamphlet off must have been bleeding, and they got blood on the pamphlet and on my door.

So, here's the new slogan -- Hillary '08 - she's even willing to bleed for your vote.

I hope that she's planning to send a biohazard team to my neighborhood to clean up everyone's doors. Maybe I'll send her campaign a bill for disinfection services.