There is something so right about college football this year. On Jan. 2, nearly a week before tonight’s so-called BC$ National Championship game, a legitimate national champion was already in place.

Also on Jan. 2, in some bowl game somewhere, Utah stomped all over Alabama. You will remember the Crimson Tide from earlier this season when they were ranked by several experts, computers and their fans as Number One in the nation. We know, however, that Utah is the national champion — not because they rolled all over the Tide, 31-17, but because they are the only undefeated team in Division One football at 13-0.

To repeat, there are no other undefeated teams. There are no undefeated BC$ teams. Only Utah was able to defeat all opponents, including the western division champions in the geographically challenged Southeastern Conference. The SEC is the best football conference in the country, as we all know because the SEC told us. Unless it is the Big 12 Conference, whose fans have also declared they are the best football conference in the country. We know that these claims are at best questionable and need to be modified. Perhaps they could claim they are the best BC$ conferences in the nation.

One can assume that if Florida wins the BC$ Championship game, then the SEC can claim to have the best BC$ conference, and if Oklahoma wins, the Big 12 can make that claim. Those living on the West Coast may object that they have the best football conference in the country. But we know it’s not true because the PAC 10 gets proportionally less press than the Big 12 and the SEC everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains, which you may note is the secret location of the University of Utah.

This is the second time in five years that Utah has finished the season undefeated. The last time it happened the coach was Urban Meyer, who in those days was an adequate football coach in an inferior league with an inferior team (”inferior” meaning non-BC$). Now that he is in the SEC, he is a genius — the greatest coach in the history of the football universe.

And, like many of the great coaches, he is noted for his small-minded behavior. Meyer has proven his greatness by refusing to ever refer to Florida State University by its name, instead calling it “that school out west.” You have to love this sort of infantilism. It is said that Meyer learned his display of “class” from his hero Woody Hayes.

Utah was inspired by another of the great coaches with an infantile vision, Alabama’s Nick Saban. Prior to the Sugar Bowl, Saban announced that Alabama was the only team from a real BC$ Conference to go undefeated in the regular season. Not only was this silly, it is not clear what it means, and it positioned Saban to eat his words. All of this has added to Saban’s total lack of credibility, which he firmly established with embarrassing ease over the past few years playing musical jobs.

After last week’s Siesta Bowl that drove people away from the television sets with a 6-3 first half, Texas struggled mightily to beat Ohio State from the 11-team feeble football conference, the Big 10. Only a classic display of dismal coaching by Ohio State’s genius, Jim Tressel, opened the way for Texas to rally in the last minute of play. This will lead some to claim that Texas is number one, although of course they are not. It may also lead those at Southern Cal to claim they are number one, because they hammered both Ohio State and Penn State. This claim of course is refuted with two words: “Big 10.”

So let the claims go on. Let those at Florida and Oklahoma operate under the delusion that they are playing for the national championship tonight. Meanwhile in Utah they can count up their wins and losses knowing that there is no team that can match them.

Allison Janney, Neil Patrick Harris, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Kathy Najimy and many more actors you know star in this send-up of religious objections to same-sex marriage. Did we mention Jack Black is Jesus?

“After being so angry and confused about this horrible and unconstitutional public shaming, it was amazing to go out there and do what we do best in protest: sing and dance,” said Adam Shankman, who staged and produced the video. The music and lyrics were written by Marc Shaiman, who won a Tony Award for “Hairspray” and who also wrote the score for “Southpark,” among other films.

The video ends with a message to visit Join the Impact for more information. Join the Impact coordinated the Nov. 15 National Day of Protest to repeal Proposition 8 and is now working toward becoming a clearinghouse for grassroots events related to gay rights.

Plus: From Pam’s House Blend, GLAAD/Harris post-election survey: Americans favor adoption and partner rights for same-sex couples

cross-posted at Our Bodies, Our Blog

Yes, stories of the future matter.  The best science fiction, as I’ve said before, is an allegory for our present-day world.

So I think it’s extremely cool that the folks over at i09 have asked a variety of well-known pundits what science fiction texts are must-reads when considering the imminent choice for president.

I would rather they asked science fiction authors or science fiction scholars, to be honest, but the responses they got actually resurrected — for a fleeting moment — my faith in punditry.

Kos, for example, goes classic with Asimov, but Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit chooses one of my new favorites, Vernor Vinge.

The list is more than just a set of recommendations, though.  The real treat is to hear why each pundit considers their text “good election-season material.”  Take Amanda Marcotte’s justification of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale:

It probably sounds a little trite since it gets referenced so much, but in light of the promotion of a true-believer fundamentalist to a national ticket, I have to recommend Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not just because it’s a dystopia that shows what America would be like under a Christian theocracy, but also because the book brilliantly skewers other aspects of the right-wing culture. You have the female misogynist Serena Joy that finds out the hard way that she isn’t exempt from the category ‘woman’ just because she was a stalwart soldier for the far right. You also are reminded that the conservative men who carry on about sexual morality in public all too often have their own closet full of secrets. The book is a reminder that right wing politics isn’t so much about ‘values’, but about power and control.

From the opposite side of the political spectrum, Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online actually wins big points for choosing an episode of Joss Whedon’s Angel, but unbelievably twists it into a warning that Obama’s calls for bi-partisanship are part of an evil totalitarian plot.  Really.

If I were asked, I would have a difficult time choosing — but I might go with Octavia Butler’s Dawn — which, more than any text I know, describes the difficulty of coalition-building and the special qualities a true leader must have to bring divergent factions together.

As a bonus, in its look at relations between humans and an intriguing but incredibly alien alien race, it reminds us of what a sensitive, peace-focused foreign policy might look like.

The success of the Tampa Bay Rays may seem to be quite remarkable to the baseball world, but it can only be fully appreciated if you have some idea of how truly dreadful this team and this franchise has been over the past decade. Everything associated with or touched by it was a disaster on an almost unbelievable scale.

For most of the country, the Devil Rays were barely a blip on the sports radar — some team from somewhere in Florida that your team could pound on. Or, if you had no horse in the American League, it was simply the perennial doormat of the American League East. It was the team that all National League teams wanted to draw for inter-league play, and, in fact, when the Marlins won the National League East, there were complaints that they got to play the Devil Rays each year (geographic rival) and pick up some easy and illegitimate wins. For most baseball fans it was easier to just ignore the entire tragic mess.

For those of us living in Florida, it was not quite so easy to ignore this abomination on the National Pastime. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, in their gaudy colored uniforms more appropriate for a softball beer league, were like a huge zit despoiling the face of baseball.

Let’s start with the home field. It does not qualify as a ballpark, doesn’t rise to the level of a stadium, and clearly is not an arena. What, then, is Tropicana Field? It once was the Suncoast Dome, became the ThunderDome when the Lightning skated there, and finally became “The Can,” or as the Orange Juice people would have it, Tropicana Field. From the outside it looks like a UFO that somehow arrived in a forsaken area of St. Petersburg, a city best known for its reputation as “God’s waiting room.”

(more…)

Oliver Stone’s “W” opened in theaters Friday, to mixed reviews.

“History is said to repeat itself as tragedy and farce, but here it registers as a full-blown burlesque,” writes Manohla Dargis. “It says nothing new or insightful about the president, his triumphs and calamities. (As if anyone goes to an Oliver Stone movie for a reality check.) But it does something most journalism and even documentaries can’t or won’t do: it reminds us what a long, strange trip it’s been to the Bush White House.”

If the idea of watching a fictional version of the Bush presidency gives you a headache, there is an alternative. Contributor Richard C. Crepeau was invited to a critics’ screening of a new film sure to delight young and old, as well as the “undecideds.” Here’s the trailer, as Dick remembers it:

From a time not long ago, and a place far away, comes the story of a hockey mom and Arctic Circle maverick, chosen to lead a nation …

“The Unbearable Being of Lightness: The Sarah Palin Story”

Starring …
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin as Tina Fey
John McCain as Tina Fey’s Running Mate

With …
Viggo Mortenson as “Todd the Snowshoe Secessionist”
Charles Bronson as “The State Trooper in Question”
Frances McDormand as Katie Couric

And introducing …
Karl Rove as “Earmark”
and
The Bridge to Nowhere as “The Bridge to Nowhere”

Plus …
Special guest appearance by George W. Bush as “The Man Who Thinks He’s Still President,” explaining the Bush Doctrine to a distracted crowd at a hockey rink

Don’t Miss …
- Watch a hockey mom shoot living things at the Arctic Circle from a B-52 while listening to “Jonah33″ on her iPod!

- Be amazed as the foreign policy maverick re-ignites the Cold War from her front porch, after she looks into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and sees his soul!

And, for the first time anywhere …
Sarah “The Barracuda” Palin challenges Barack Obama to go one-on-one in a half-court game!

Coming soon to a theater near you …

It has been a brutal week as Americans watched helplessly as the stock market went into free fall. Those with 401K’s tried to joke about not retiring until they’re in their 80s. Pensions dried up. Bailout and rescue plans passed without any impact. No one seemed to have any idea of how to stop the hemorrhaging. We became a nation of deers caught in the headlights.

If you are a Cubs fan, there is an upside to all this. You haven’t even noticed that we are all in free fall into the porcelain receptacle. You have been in such deep shock and depression that nothing happening in the known universe has any meaning to you at all.

When it will, is difficult to say, but when Cub fans discover economy they will simply regard it as a sign of an extension of the Cub curse.

The Cubs were swept by the Dodgers. I repeat: The Cubs were swept by the Dodgers. The first two games were in Wrigley Field, where the Cubs have been nearly unbeatable the entire season. The last game was in Dodger Stadium, where it looked as if the Cubs were still back in Wrigley Field. They didn’t show up.

No need to think about the 401K? The only K’s that Cub fans were thinking about were the strikeouts that suddenly infested Cub bats. Twenty-four strikeouts in three games, many in key situations, all symbolic of the futility of this display of baseball.

(more…)

9/18 Update: History has been made!

Bitch magazine has been providing readers a “feminist response to popular culture” for the past 13 years. In a sea of mediocre media, Bitch consistently and forcefully rises above the fray. Just take a look at the diversity of topics covered — and voices included — in the past 41 issues.

Now Bitch needs all the help it can get to continue publishing smart feminist analysis and media criticism.

This is not a good time for independent media, as Andi and Debbie make clear in their funny and poignant video. Take a look, and then click here to give what you can, or visit Bitch’s donate section for more info on the sustainer program, hosting a house party and other actions.

Sexism exists, and the only way to fight it is to vote for a woman you may or may not agree with on any of the issues.

That’s from the latest edition of “Target Women,” a segment on Current TV’s weekly show InfoMania that looks at the often-ridiculous ways in which the media reaches out to women.

Our hero Sarah Haskin introduces the new female-friendly PANTHER and shows how easy it is to switch out candidates. Supermarket scene: Priceless.

CNN just showed what is presumably a member of the Indiana delegation with a button, featuring a logo and picture of McCain and Palin along with the following: “Hoosiers for the Hot Chick.”

Since the Republicans have just discovered the concept of sexism, I guess we can understand if they are not yet up to speed on the whole “politically correct” thing.

(Wait, now that I think of it, political correctness was a Republican creation in the first place).

Update: Indiana’s WTHR television news has the story.

They’re moving delegates around on the floor to put more women in front of the stage before Gov. Sarah Palin speaks. The gender breakdown of Republican delegates explains the need for the seat shuffle: the number of male delegates overwhelms female delegates by 2 to 1.

Speaking of gender, NPR tonight noted that the speech originally written for the vice-presidential nominee was deemed too “masculine” and was thus rewritten when Sen. John McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

As for other demographics, in a historic shift, only 1.5 percent of the total number of delegates at the RNC are African Americans — amounting to only 36 delegates, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. It marks a sharp drop-off from 2004, when 6.7 percent, or 167 delegates, were African American. That was the all-time high.

In contrast, at the Democratic National Convention, nearly 25 percent of the delegates were African American, and slightly more than half were women (a first). The full demographic breakdown is available here.

Back at the convention, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former Republican presidential candidate, practically did air-quotes around community organizer to minimize Sen. Barack Obama’s experience.

Meanwhile, the current Republican mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, opted out of watching Palin’s speech. His pick tonight? Whoopi Goldberg — in “Xanadu.”

Update: The Washington Post has a front-page story on the mostly white convention.

The McCains, the Palins and the Johnston meet on the tarmac in Minneapolis. Via The New York Times.

CNN’s Campbell Brown on Monday interviewed a spokesman for John McCain about what experience Sarah Palin, McCain’s pick for VP, has to be commander in chief.

The interview began with a discussion of when McCain knew about the pregnancy of Palin’s 17-year-old daughter and whether Palin had thought about the ramifications of putting her daughter in the spotlight. Spokesman Tucker Bounds sidestepped the questions, and the conversation transitioned — as every conversation with Republicans in St. Paul does — to Palin’s qualifications and reform-mindedness.

But this time around, an interview with a campaign spokesman quickly moved into the realm of Must See TV.

(more…)

As a a Minnesotan in exile, I present the Top 16 Reasons the Republicans are meeting in Saint Paul rather than Minneapolis. If you have any other explanations, go ahead and add them in the comments.

16. St. Paul looks grittier than Minneapolis.

15. You can’t get cream and sugar in your coffee in Minneapolis.

14. Irish Catholic bars are more fun that Scandinavian Lutheran bars.

13. Most Republicans have never been to the St. Paul Winter Carnival.

12. General Disorder is always preferred over General Mills.

11. Minneapolis has a “Prince” and Republicans believe in Democracy.

(more…)

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! radio program, was arrested Monday afternoon in St. Paul. According to a press release, Goodman was attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who had been arrested on suspicion of rioting. Video of the arrest is available here.

Glenn Greenwald is keeping up with scenes of the protests. The excerpt below is from yesterday’s report on the federal government’s involvement in raids on protesters.

As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue — see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway — it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that “the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Today’s Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.” Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force — an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI — was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate “vegan groups” and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone.

Before I go join Drinking Liberally to watch tonight’s historic event, a few interesting items on race and the Democratic National Convention:

- Writing in The New York Times earlier this week, Alessandra Stanley notes that while one first was celebrated, another was almost swept under the rug: “Tuesday night was tailored to pay homage to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s barrier-breaking near-miss, yet there was no overt celebration of the bull’s-eye: Barack Obama is poised to be the first African-American presidential nominee.”

Of course, that’s all likely to change tonight — and to be clear, Stanley notes that it’s not so much that the sentiment is missing, but that the campaign has kept such references to a minimum: “While African-Americans on the convention floor — and in the commentators’ booth — express feelings of pride and exhilaration, convention organizers design the pageantry on the air to mute racial distinctions and veil novelty, focused it seems, on reassuring those white viewers who find the 2008 spectacle jarringly different from past ones.”

Surely being told of Michelle Obama’s appreciation for the “Brady Bunch” was part of the calculation. Yet the genuine excitement on the floor of the convention, as well as the diversity of this year’s delegates, is obvious to anyone glued to C-SPAN.

But this is the part in Stanley’s piece that was the real stunner:

Obviously, race is a tripwire topic for television, as Chris Matthews of MSNBC demonstrated all too irrepressibly on Tuesday.

Mr. Matthews said the Obamas are “like the Huxtables,” and praised Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama as exceptional role models: “They do everything right. They have great kids, they work their hearts off, they make it in their professions, they don’t live off welfare, they don’t commit crimes, they don’t live on affirmative action.”

His two African-American guests, the seasoned television personalities Ed Gordon and Jeff Johnson, gave him a skeptical look but did not comment.

Plus: Novelist Kim McLarin argues that Michelle Obama’s presence on stage at the convention may be even more transcendent than her husband’s.

- Dawn Turner Trice, a Chicago Tribune columnist who also leads the Exploring Race forum on the paper’s website, has been keeping the discussion going from Denver this week (she’s in row 20 right now at the stadium). Here she asks readers what it means to be an American in the context of race; more here.

- Over at Black Voices, Branden Cobb asks if the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been fulfilled. Rep. John Lewis fielded a similar question during a discussion with Michele Norris that aired on “All Things Considered” this evening.

- The DNC has put together this table (PDF) showing the gender and race breakdown of the delegates for all conventions between 1984 and 2008. This year, women came out slightly ahead of men for the first time ever. About 44 percent of the delegates are minorities. For the past three conventions, the DNC has also logged the percentage of delegates who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and delegates with disabilities — this year it’s 6 percent and 4 percent respectively.

-Here’s Spike Lee making perhaps the most apt assessment of the meaning of Obama’s nomination, defining it in terms of “BB” and “AB”: