Speaking of Italian Gangsters . . .

If this review in today's Times is any indication, Sidney Lumet's new Vin Diesel vehicle, "Find Me Guilty," is fantastic. I saw Diesel on The Daily Show last night. It was hard to get a guage as to how good the movie would be, and I had no idea that Diesel is such a goofball, but certainly Lumet has done great work, and this review really makes me want to see this one. Entertainment Weekly was nowhere near as effusive (giving "Find me Guilty" a B-)so I now want to judge for myself.

Avoid South Boston Today

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I am one quarter Irish, and on this day, like an Italian-American who makes gangster films, I embrace the basest stereotype of my people. Slainte! (I am almost giddy that St. Patrick's day coincides with the second day of the tournament.)

Two Disparate Points

The two declarations that follow have nothing to dow ith one another. And I am ok with that:

With the premature ejection (see what I did there?) of Arrested Development because of the idiocy of both Fox and the American viewing public, My Name is Earl is officially the best comedy on television. Brilliantly funny, almost perfectly written and acted, MNiE is hilarious and has a soul. If you do not watch it, you are an idiot.

Second, on day one of the tournament I went 14 of 16 in most of my pools, with my only two losses minimal, because I have the other team winning the saturday game. Boston College almost ruined my month but spanked Pacific in the second overtime and get to face off against the Grizzlies of Montana. I call you out, (reader) Montana Urban Legend -- if that is your real name. And if you are really from Montana. And if you root for University of Montana sports.

My Final Four

Duke, UCLA, UConn, and the Boston College Golden Eagles. UCLA defeats Duke in one national semi, BC over the Huskies in the other. BC beats UCLA in the finals. More heart than head? Of course. But what fun is it to be right and pick UConn? Or, to use the phrase that seems to have emerged this year without me getting the memo, why "go chalk"?

Starting in twenty minutes, I will be playing hookie. These may be the two best sports days of the year.

TNR Invokes Hofstadter

It's always good to see Richard Hofstadter mentioned in the public dialogue.

DCAT Talks Porn, .xxx Style

I am pretty close to being a free speech absolutist. Campus speech codes make me queasy. When I hear the administration hint that speaking against the war somehow puts the trooops in danger I want to punch someone. I am opposed to David Irving's prison sentence (but would have no problem if someone kicked the snot out of him on their own).

So some might be surprised that I am not necessarily averse to something I saw this morning on CNN: The establishment of .xxx domain names for porn sites. A Democratic Congressman or Senator (sorry I am failing on the details -- I cannot find the story anywhere on CNN.com and I write these posts from my office, and so you can imagine why I might be averse to doing a google search involving the words "porn," "website," and "xxx." The University of Texas system is fairly straightforward on these matters. Then again, I suppose writing this means that surfing for such items would qualify as legitimate research . . .) has proposed that all porn sites be required to change from .com or .net to .xxx. Basically, the idea is that this way people, especially children, would be protected from inadvertantly ending up at an x-rated site when they browse the web for something rather more innocuous. The opposition, which I understand but just do not fully buy, argues that in so doing, we would ghettoize porn.

I am neither anti- nor am I pro- porn. I fully believe that adults have a right to do whatever they want behind closed doors as long as it is not illegal, and that such laws should be limited -- if someone is not getting hurt, the law ought to tread lightly if it treads at all. But my free speech near-absolutism comes with a caveat: While the state has little right to restrict speech, that does not mean that free speech does not have consequences. If you use the N-bomb on a college campus, you should not be punished by the university. But I'm going to have no problems if someone kicks the shit out of you, or if you find yourself stigmatized as a racist. If you say something offensive, there is no free speech protection from people being offended, and reacting accordingly. In sum, people have a right to be jerks; society has a right to response to that jerkiness. Free speech does not mean a free ride.

And so back to the porn domain names. I believe adults in their homes have every right to surf the internet for any damned thing they desire, to fulfill whatever sexual fetish they want. But I am not certain when the idea that someone might be embarassed equals as an encroachment on free speech gained traction. Now, if the government were to use this proposed domain names switch as a first step toward prohibiting pornography, I would have a problem with that. But I have no issue with protecting people with no interest of looking at porn, or protecting children from stumbling onto porn sites by providing a separate dominion for porn. As far as I know, prior to the internet, if people wanted access to porn, they had to go out and buy it or order it, and potentially risk embarassment. Tough patooties. Being a grownup, exercising rights, sometimes means one runs the risk of a little bit of blushing.

The Foe-on Nine

Andrew Sullivan has the 411 on some guy(s?) who decide to engage one of those African email spammers. There are some gutbustingly funny moments in this email exchange. I'll warn you now: This is not very pc.

DCAT Tournament Bracket

If you are interested in participating in dcat's first annual NCAA tournament challenge, go to the ESPN Home Page, click on "Tournament Challenge," and sign up. Our group name is "DCAT," and our group motto is "Thunderstick is a Nancy Boy." The league is public, so there is no password necessary.

Thunderstick thought we ought to have an entry fee so that someone can win money, but so many dcat readers are only moderately engaged in our little endeavor, many of them are poor, and a shocking number are foreigners from places such as Sussex, Oxford, Johannesburg, and Sydney, and frankly, I don't want to have to deal with their silly currencies.

UPDATE: In a world where new ideas are rare, the Thunderstick and I have just come up with a dandy: We believe that the teams tonight are getting screwed by the system, that there ought to be room for both of them to be in the Dance and that a team such as Air Force probably could yield to Monmouth or Hampton. But better yet, why not have a play-in game between bubble teams? After all, the brunt of the aftermath of Selection Sunday involves discussing who should have gotten in and who should not have. Why not have teams battle it out for those slots? Why not have all of the #13 seeds be up for grabs? Take four bubble teams from major conferences, four from mid-majors and let them face off. You could pit Missouri State v. South Carolina, Air Force v. Michigan, George Mason v. Cincinnati, and Texas A&M v. Hofstra. Who could possibly oppose this idea? It would effectively start things off on the Tuesday before the tournament, and the intensity of these games would be unreal. Such a system would also alleviate the age old Majors or Mid Majors? argument that we engage in every year, and the result would be more March Madness.

Someone call Dickie V and Miles Brand. This idea is too good not to happen.

Post Facto Arguments

Andrew Sullivan does a good job today of reminding anti-war advocates that for all of their smugness over the lack of WMD's, precious few made the arguments before we went to war that those weapons were not there. In other words, many who opposed the war and now take a "see -- we told you so!" approach in fact did no such thing -- they opposed war, to be sure, but not based on what we now know.

There is, however, a flip side to all of this that nails those who supported the war as well: In the wake of coming up empty on WMD's, many supporters of the war changed their own justifications for going in to Iraq. Where once Saddam's clear and present danger was reason enough -- and those who denied that such a danger existed were labelled appeasers or worse -- suddenly emerged a semi-cogent argument based on human rights that few made and even fewer emphasized in the build-up to the war three years ago. In other words, if the anti-war crowd never argued against the existence of WMD's that provides the foundation for their sanctimony, neither did the pro-war types stand on human rights to anywhere near the degree that they now claim.

My own stance was largely ambivalent, but I did make a liberal case for war. I was not gung-ho, I was skeptical of the "we have to go right now" crowd, but stood equally critical of those who were ardently opposed. I did emphasize human rights and also acknowledged that Saddam more than likely had WMD's. Despite this last belief, on the whole my stance seems reasonably prescient in the telling. Last year I posted the text of a speech I gave in Minnesota in the buildup to the war on Rebunk and I think it warrants consideration again now as we hit the three-year mark. As with most cases of disagreement in today's "I can shout loudest" approach to conflict, the loudest voices were wrong on both sides. As for the case today, the shrillest voices from right and left continue to misassess the situation in Iraq. It is not the disaster that the war's opponents claim, and it sure is not the success that proponents would like to argue that it is. I find myself still ambivalent, happy Saddam is gone, saddened by the incompetence of our leaders in waging war, pursuing peace, and rebuilding what we helped break.

BC Wuz Robbed!

In what looks to me to be one of the most wide open tournament brackets in years (I can see this being a year when a team like Arizona in 1997 comes through with a win from the mid-seeding pack) i can say with reasonable assuredness that Boston College got a little bit robbed in the seedings. Don't get me wrong -- I love their bracket, LOVE IT. They get a potential showdown with Villanove, which not only is, to my mind, a bit overrated, but which also has difficulties with teams with an inside presence who play physical basketball. In other words, with teams like BC.

That said, can someone tell me how the hell North Carolina enters the tournament as a higher seed than BC? BC had a better record. BC made it to the ACC finals. Oh, and UNC and BC played twice this year, and BC won both, including on Saturday in the ACC semis. What possible rationale is there, then, for UNC being given a higher ranking? It will all play out in the next three weeks, of course, and I do believe that BC has a pretty good path ahead. But still, a little justice.

There will be more, much more, on March Madness in this space in the days and weeks to come. I have not yet filled out my brackets yet, but I have a sense of which teams I like. A few keys to picking the brackets -- a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The reason why the department secretary and other casual fans oftentimes win pools is because they don't overthink these things. people who hew pretty close to the seedings tend to do well, especially in the early rounds. It may make you look like a genius to pick that 2-15 upset, but really it was luck (you missed your upset special the last four years if you had a 15 losing). The first round is just a matter of staying in the game. Missing an upset won't kill you -- everyone else missed it too (that's why it is an upset pick). What will kill you is when the team you picked to be upset makes it to the Elite Eight, destroying all of your hopes for that side of the bracket. At the same time, however, all four number ones are not going to be playing in Indianapolis three weekends from now. Maybe two will. So after those early games, you need to make some judgment calls. (Hint -- Memphis and Villanova look awfully lucky to be where they are).

I'd love to put some sort of pool together for dcat readers, but I'll have to figure out whether or not it is viable to do so.

UPDATE: The unsurpassable Bob Ryan has his take on BC in today's Globe.

Selverstone on Kennedy, Vietnam, and Iraq

Friend of dcat, Marc Selverstone, has this piece on JFK and Vietnam, but also on drawing conclusions for Iraq in today's Boston Globe.

Here is an excerpt:

Do the Kennedy tapes offer useful lessons for the current war in Iraq? Insofar as they provide analogues not only to America's entrance but also to its exit from both conflicts, we would do well to recall Kennedy's motives for his phased withdrawal from Vietnam: increased pressure on the client government to institute political, economic, and military reforms; a tangible response to dovish critics of his policy at home; and -- perhaps -- the rudiments of a full withdrawal he had every intention of completing.

Yet we cannot know conclusively how Kennedy would have responded to the altered conditions in the Vietnam of 1964 and 1965. Given his many conflicting statements on Vietnam, all we can say, by virtue of his own words on the subject, is that he would have crossed that bridge when -- and only when -- he came upon it.

Great job, Marc.

Live Free, And Well, Or Die

I'm on the road in Florida and will have much to report when I get back, but I thought I ought to weigh in with this bit of news: Once again New Hampshire has been ranked as the most livable state in the US. Wicked awesome. (Eat it, Maine!)

Manny Being Manny

Due to unforseen circumstances (both UTPB teams losing last night in Waxahachie, putting an end to sort-of-big-dance dreams) I am delaying my departure for Florida until tomorrow. And since this trip is so Red Sox focused, I thought I would weigh in on l'affaire Manny.

Let it be said up front that I have oposed trading Manny all along for a host of reasons, two looming largest. The first is that no matter what, we are not getting equal value for him. Manny puts up monstrous numbers. No one could give us equal value in return, and getting two nickels for a dime would have been dumb.The second is that the chief concern with trading him has been payroll-related, and frankly, those issues are both less salient as his contract comes into line as being more reasonable now that we are approaching the back end of it, and such concerns are largely insignificant anyway -- who takes the Sox seriously when they whine about payroll? They sell out every day even with the most expensive seats in basdeball, they sell scads of merchandise and concessions, and they have increased seating at Fenway. Hell, the Sox sell out every single spring training game in Fort Myers. Red Sox fans are insane and support the team at an ungodly level. The Sox are 'haves" in the Moneyball world. That they have resources AND have Moneyball management sense is a huge factor in their success, but they should not lose sight of the fact that they can afford superstars to supplement the sabrmetric, efficient approach that Theo and the braits trust generally supports. Keep in mind that for all of the hubbub about Moneyball, it still takes more than simple smart thrift to get deep in the playoffs. Ask Billy Beane.

So with Manny now in the fold and allegedly happy as can be, and with Sox fans relieved that we were able to trade off his late appearance in southwest Florida for his agreement not to play in the World Baseball Classic, it is worth considering some of the thoughts in this recent piece in the Globe.

Basically, Manny is healthy, he came back absolutely ripped, he is talking MVP, he took his penthouse at the Ritz off the market, his wife just had a second baby, he has more than replaced Johnny Damon's follicular follies with a new orange dreds combo that is all the rage, and he wants to put up monster numbers. That all sounds very good to me.

Manny is a manchild, and you never know when one of his Manny moments will take place. There will be anywhere from six to ten delicate situations when he says his hammys hurt and he takes time off. At some point he may well walk right from the shower out on to the field buck naked. No one would be surprised. The voracious New England media will be on the lookout for every foible, flaw, or screwup, never mind any moments that appear to indicate Manny putting himself above the team. But for all of that, here is what we are going to get: An OPS of .1100, 150 rbi, 40 home runs. If he stays healthy and hungry and the Sox are in it until the end, those numbers may rise. If not, they may settle at .1050, 145, 35 -- still MVP numbers. Knowing this, I am very happy for Manny to be Manny and for him to do so patrolling rightfield in his "Caution: Hardhat Zone" sort of way.

Meanwhile, Schilling says that he is feeling better than he has in two years. The sound I just made as I typed those words? Think of Homer Simpson near the forbidden jelly donut, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the drooling incoherence that escaped my lips. In a few days I'll be in Fort Myers. A report will follow. In the meantime, it'll be catch as catch can. Go Sox!!!

LBJ

C-SPAN radio is airing LBJ phone calls from June 1964 covering topics such as Medicare and Civil Rights. LBJ also chats with his first grade teacher. Good times.

Derek Gone Wild!

The close of business at UTPB today marks the beginning of spring break 2006. Sometime tomorrow, I'll begin my spring break road show.

If either UTPB basketball team, men or women, wins their Red River Athletic Conference semifinal games tonight (both teams won opening rounders last night) at Southwest Assemblies of God University in Waxahatchie, Texas, they will advance to the RRAC championships. I'll be there if they do, as reaching the finals of the tournament also earns them a berth in the NAIA Big Dance in Kansas City. I'm not sure if there will be room for the voice of UTPB radio in the KC, but I'll sure as hell try.

From there it will be off to New Orleans to see the aftermath of Katrina and contribute, if possible, to the local economy. One of my students today thought it ironic that I'd drink Hurricanes to help the city recover from the Hurricane. If I did such things, it might just be ironic . . .

Then it's on to Florida. Mom lives not far from Daytona (Bike Week begins tomorrow) and Dad in a little town outside of Lakeland. I am scheduled for a book signing at the Waldenbooks in the Edison Mall, southwest Florida's largest, next Friday, March 10, from 1:00 to 3:00. The Edison Mall is located in Fort Myers, Florida, which happens to be where the Red Sox hold spring training. It also may be the only place in the world where Bleeding Red is "doing brisk business," if a store manager who told me so today can be believed. If you are anywhere near Fort Myers, I encourage you to stop by.

As a consequence of all of these shenanigans, blogging will be light. I'll do my best, but something tells me that you'll live.

Nostalgia

I cannot even begin to convey how important baseball cards were to me for about eight years of my life when I was a kid. Somewhere back in New Hampshire I still have an awesome, and probably quite valuable, collection (baseball especially, but a pretty amazing football collection, with a random box or two of basketball and hockey cards) that I hope to pass on to my kids someday. (Note to self: Have kids someday.) I am reminded of all of this by Sportsguy's intern informing the world about the Baseballcardblog. Some of you should enjoy this trip down memory road (you know who you are).

Sportsguy and Gladwell

I have come to appreciate Sportsguy's "Curious Guy" columns/exchanges even if at first I thought it might be a bit hokey and the title is really bad. His latest is with Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point. Blink and New Yorker fame) and is fantastic, even if from how he explains it, Sportsguy is unclear on what a "contract year" is. (He implies that the contract year is the first year after a player signs a big, extended deal; in fact it is the last year of an exusting deal, when a player performs beyond all expectations and precedent, that is the contract year.) What I like about this one, and what I loved about his exchange with Chuck Klostermann, is that in these cases he is dealing with rabid sports fans who are, first and foremost, writers and whose work primarily is not sports related. I guess what i am saying is that if I ever make it big, I hope to be the subject of a "Curious Guy" interview. (This is part one of two parts -- the second segment will appear tomorrow.)

Serendipity, Discovery and a Civil Rights Treasure Trove

Historians are all well aware of the phenomenon: You are sifting through archival collections, on a lark decide to ask for a box that does not look likely to hold a lot of useful material, and as you quickly flip through the folders therein just to cover your bases, there it is -- a magical piece of evidence that becomes the telling anecdote, or that pulls together disparate strains. Or maybe you have been in the stacks, looking for a certain book, and when you get there you find six others that all prove to be even more significant. It's one of the best-known trade secrets, but we tend not to talk about these particular "Eureka" moments because we are trained professionals with PhDs and expertise both in our fields and in the craft of research, and so no one wants to admit what a huge role luck plays in this process of discovery that is more art than science.

I could not help but think about the barely acknowledged role that serendipity plays in historical scholarship when I first found out about the mother of all capricious discoveries. In 2004 Alexander Cohn, a photo intern at the Birmingham News, stumbled upon a cardboard box in an equipment closet labelled "Keep. Do Not Sell." Whoever wrote that command had an eye for value in a pre-E-Bay age, as within the box sat thousands of photo negatives of pictures from the civil rights era, a period in which Birmingham figured both prominently and ignominiously and during which the News did not exactly shine. This past Sunday, the paper produced a special eight-page section, "Unseen. Unforgotten." Cohn interviewed many of the people who appear in the pictures, and the section contains more than thirty of the photographs, with dozens more available online. The paper also addresses its own complicity and difficulties in covering the movement.

The Birmingham News has uncovered a treasure trove and done a service to hsitory. And it was all the function of luck. Fancy that.

More South Africa

As long as I am dealing with South Africa, I ran across this 2004 article yesterday when I was going through one of my many accumulated piles of stuff. "Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa" approaches the situation on the ground through two protagonists, one black, one white, each trying to deal with the New South Africa in as positive a way as possible. It seems to me that this is precisely how most South Africans are approaching their still new democracy. Even 22 months hence, the Times article sems to get at fundamental truths about the realities of life in a country trying to move forward but still hamstrung by the legacies of the past.

Here are the latest updates from the municipal elections, the results of which will not be fully clear for another day or so. At the bottom of the article is a series of links to other articles. I don't think I am serving as a shill for Mbeki when I say that he has a point when he entreats to his fellow South Africans (and to the country's journalists) "Don't focus on Khutsong only," referring to one of the communities that has been riven by strife and occasional violence as a result of being shifted from Gauteng's penumbra to that of the North West Province.

Africa Stuff

There is lots of news from Africa in the last few days. The Sudan nightmare continues, and might be expanding; South Africans are going to the polls today to vote in what should be telling municipal elections; Observers fear for the future. Consider this a roundup.:

At The New Republic online, James Forsyth, assistant editor at Foreign Policy makes a compelling realist's case for greater involvement in the Sudan crisis. The gist of his case is that our inaction in the Sudan appears to lend credence to the idea that countries that seek shelter under "the China umbrella" will have free rein to be as dastardly as they choose. Forsyth acknowledges the virtue of humanitarian arguments for intervention while at the same time introducing a fairly compelling argument for intervention based on geopolitical interests.

Meanwhile, in a tail-wags-dog story, the Times reported yesterday that the Sudan has withdrawn its support for UN peacekeepers to take the place of African Union troops doing their best to control the situation in Darfur. One can easily debate this move on the merits -- in the wake of previous peacekeeping fiascos in which the UN was ineffectual in the face of African tyranny, such news might give pause -- but that Sudan should have a say in the matter is, to say the least, not reassuring. On a somewhat related note, Smith English professor Eric Reeves has been one of the leading voices drawing attention to the Sudan, and in a recent Mail & Guardian piece he addresses some of the problems of the AU forces, South Africa's inaction, and the need for stronger leadership, whether from South Africa, the AU or elsewhere.

All the while, Darfur refugee spillover into Chad runs the risk of turning the Sudan situation into yet another international (in the most literal sense of the word) miasma in Africa. Just consider what happened in the wake of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 or how the Congo/Zaire became a tinderbox a few years later. Once this becomes a cross-border problem, the potential for explosive conflict expands exponentially. This Sudan spillover may pose the worst refugee crisis in Africa (and the world) since the aftermath of the one hundred days of mayhem in Rwanda a dozen years ago.

In more hopeful news, South Africans flock to the polls today in what may be the stiffest challenge the ANC has yet faced. Thus far things seem to be going smoothly. In yesterday's Times Padraig O'Malley sounds a note of caution in the context of discontent over how the ANC has handled relocating certain communities from Gauteng to less prosperous provinces. I do not quite buy the most dire interpretations from the article, and would point out that while there are aspects of the ANC that seem bent on grasping more power than most (myself included) find comforting, the very existence of what should be fairly well-turned out voters who may challenge the ANC ought to be reassuring. The sentiments of one member of a Northern Cape opposition party member may indicate the tone of discontentment but not vitriol many in South Africa feel about the current state of the ANC: "I pray that the ANC will lose. We feel that you failed us. I was part of the people who helped the ANC win in 1994." What this indicates may be that a short-term setback for the ANC might cause the party to take a long look at itself, and perhaps to win back, to earn back, those who are concerned with what they see. Then again, some of the dissatisfaction appears pretty deeply seeded, as a quotation from a Shangase headman, Phenyamadoda Mchunu, indicates: "Tell me one reason why I should vote. We always vote but our lives don't improve." If enough South Africans begin to feel this way, things could grow very difficult for Mbeki's ANC.

Finally, according to the Mail and Guardian and observers, "things don't look good for Uganda." President Yoweri Museveni of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) is facing its stiffest challenge yet, and the one-time darling of a west that only half-pays attention to Africa at the best of times (Presidents Clinton and Bush have both heaped praise on Museveni since he came to office in 1996), looks to be resorting to typical "Big Man" tactics that have become frustratingly commonplace across Africa.