Are my eyes really blue?

Senator Evan Bayh (Dumb Fuck-Indiana), already angling to take over leadership of the Senate Bottom Committee from Holy Joe Likud and Ben Nelson, is out there claiming that the loss in Massachusetts means that the Democrats have overreached and “just the furthest left elements of the Dem party [are] attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country.”

Right: listen up, you fucking coward: the Democrats MADE their common cause with ‘independents and moderates.’ The entire goddamn bill was held hostage to the will of Lieberman and Nelson (and to a lesser extent, Lincoln and Landrieu and Snowe), none of whom are going to be getting money from Daily Kos readers in the near future. In fact, the reason this health care bullshit is even still going on is because the whole thing was given to six Senators from one-cow-one-vote states somewhere in tumbleweed country for a whole goddamn month in August, when at least three of them (all sporting an R) knew full well they were going to agree to nothing. In fact, every single person who pays attention to politics in this country knew that there were no Republican votes to be had, because the GOP’s whole gameplan for the last year has been “No On Everything.”

So this health care package represents what it took to win all 60 Democrats, including your dumb ass. That’s right, you fucking chickenshit, you already voted for this bill. And now it looks like you’re going to be spared having to vote again, because the only hope is for the House to pass exactly what the Senate passed, so you’re spared the necessity of having to risk your neck again. But guess what: you’re already tarred and feathered. You’re going to get the full brunt of the Republican assault, no matter how much you quail and retreat and offer up your anus.

The problem isn’t that the Democrats are too conservative, or too liberal, it’s that the people who need to sack up and fight? Don’t. Or won’t. Hell with it. Hell with all of them. Let’s lose down to, say 54 Democrats in the Senate, including that worthless catamite Harry Reid, and then let’s have some people who fight instead of sitting around weeping that they might get called names.

The enemy isn’t conservatism, or liberalism. The enemy is bullshit. And it’s time to take the fight to the bullshit – and the bullshitters.

…remember where things were a year ago. The Democrats had 59 seats in the Senate, which meant a filibuster-based shutdown of everything. If Martha Chokely does what’s expected of her, then the Democrats will find themselves with…59 seats. Plus some actual accomplishments made in the face of complete opposition, which is kind of impressive given how everything went.

This is the part where I point out that I called it. To be precise, I called it on September 7, 2008, at precisely 8:17 PM Pacific Daylight Time. It’s not that I really am just that good – well, I am, or at least I used to be – but it should have been obvious to anybody who paid attention for the last twenty years how this stuff would go. Lockstep obstruction from the Republicans, sanctimonious dithering from conservative Democrats, a White House unwilling to grab people by the balls and twist, and a press too fucking stupid to handle any issue more complex than who’s going to be on NBC at 11:35.

And right now, nothing pisses me off more than the wailing weeping hysterical liberals who have decided that Obama is just like Bush, that the whole health care package should be trashed, and that scrapping everything and starting over now will force everything to the left. The correct response is: fuck you, hippie – this is how it works. You fight like hell to get what you can, and you be grateful that the stars aligned long enough to break the worst Senate minority obstruction in the history of the body, and you take your half a loaf and come back tomorrow and start fighting again. And if you’re too pious and good and principled to accept that, well, I think the term of art is know your role and shut your hole.

Too many people think that there’s an end point, that at some point the victory is won and the sky fills with rainbows and the lion lies down with the lamb and the music swells and the credits roll and you’re finished. Maybe that happens when you die, but it doesn’t happen in the real world of politics. It’s a race uphill, in a driving storm, through an ocean of tar, with no finish line.

I can’t say it enough: politics is the art of the POSSIBLE. If you want dreams, go major in theatre.

I didn’t think I was physically capable of pity for Vols, but the unfurling Armageddon at Tennessee is making for all kinds of amazements. Lane Kiffin is choosing to take French leave of a program that hired him off a 5-15 record in the NFL (where Al Davis called him “a flat-out liar”) after a single 7-6 season where his signature victory was managing to only lose to Alabama by 2 points.

The immortal Spencer Hall has the full rundown here; the most shocking and appalling thing in all this to me is this:

1) There are Tennessee recruits on campus who enrolled early to be in spring practice.

2) Classes start tomorrow.

3) Despite being registered for classes, these players are not considered “enrolled” until classes start.

4) Ed Orgeron, the Kiffy assistant who is also going to USC, was calling around to these recruits during Kiffy’s “press conference,” telling them not to go to class tomorrow – that if they didn’t, they would not be enrolled, and they would be welcome to leave UT and head for scholarships at USC in the fall.

This is absolutely the most bewildering thing I have seen in thirty-seven years of college football fandom. Lane Kiffin’s total record as a head coach is 12-21: 5-15 with the Raiders and a poor 7-6 with UT. He also racked up not one, not two, but SEVEN self-reported NCAA recruiting violations, not counting the shenanigans surrounding the “Orange Pride” girls going across state lines to cheer for possible recruits. Nor counting the felony arrests connected with the Great Prius Caper. Nor counting the buffoonery of bragging about NCAA scrutiny, or leveling accusations against other programs that drew the wrath of the SEC authorities, or generally running his mouth in a fashion inconsistent with a coach who could best be described at this point in his career as anything but a “possibly promising mediocrity.” Lane Kiffin is a loudmouth douchebag who hasn’t demonstrated any particular aptitude for improving a football team. So why, why, WHY would the USC Trojans – staring down the barrel of an NCAA investigation that can no longer be ignored, one where Kiffin himself is potentially culpable with regard to the recruiting of Reggie Bush and Joe McKnight – why in the HELL would Mike Garrett even consider hiring this human ball of bullshit to run the football program in its hour of greatest peril?

There is absolutely no logic of any kind behind this decision. It defies all rational analysis. All we can say with certainly is as follows:

1) Lane Kiffin leaving Tennessee for Southern California has the potential to be the ruination of both schools.

2) Between this fiasco, the basketball team’s Alcohol-Weed-Guns problem, and the imminent disaster in recruiting, Tennessee’s athletic director is on some thin motherfucking ice.

3) The police guard outside Lane Kiffin’s house tonight is probably a sound move, although personally, if I were a Knoxville cop, I’d be wandering across the street to see if I heard an echo. Buy the ticket, take the ride…even if it comes on a rail.

Well, here we go, predictable as the dawn, because these Texans have an excuse for everything. Let’s set this straight now, like a tin of Mister Dog, and maybe, they’ll shut the fuck up…

* “Alabama’s not really champions! There’s an asterisk because Colt McCoy barely played!”

Well, Texas would know all about asterisks, I suppose. But these things happen. Alabama suspended Andre Smith for the Sugar Bowl last year on account of NCAA allegations that turned out to be nothing, and without an NFL top-6 pick protecting the blind side, the QB got killed early and often in the first quarter. Nobody is saying Utah’s win deserves an asterisk – quite the contrary, it’s the one quality win the BCS busters can hang their hats on.**

More to the point, a sports show back in DC aptly pointed out this fact: Colt McCoy does not drop back into protection. He runs around like a donk in the backfield, and as a result got sacked eight times against Nebraska. Knowing that your offense and your QB’s style put him at risk, wouldn’t you make an effort to have something better than an 18-year-old freshman as the first backup option? And if that’s all you had, wouldn’t you take the opportunity to get him more than 30 live reps before, oh, THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME?

Meanwhile, Greg McElroy played in a flak jacket to protect his cracked ribs (thus only 11 passes) and Rolando McClain took two IVs for hydration before the game and a third at halftime. You play the game as it unfolds, with the players on hand, for better or worse.

* “Alabama ran up the score!”

Alabama was leading 24-21 with 5 minutes to play. Then a wicked sack and turnover resulted in a quick TD. Then Texas obligingly gave the ball back again, deep in their own territory. With just under two minutes left, and Texas with a time out to burn.

Did Alabama throw the ball downfield? Nope. Did they pull out the Boise State bag of gimmicks? Nope. Did they go for the quick 3 to make sure a touchdown and a field goal wouldn’t be enough to beat them? Nope. They ran the ball up the middle, the simplest and most basic thing you can do to burn clock, with the backup running back. If Texas and their #1-ranked rushing defense couldn’t stop a freshman’s dive up the middle from turning into a touchdown run, I respectfully submit that it’s not Trent Richardson’s job to fall on the ball just so the Steers can go home with only a 10-point loss on their resume. Given that the “number one rushing defense in the country” let not one but two backs go over 100 yards

* “Well…well…Alabama’s a bunch of rednecks!“

Really? The state of Texas wants to go down this path?

Here’s a hint for the burnt orange – quit your whining, go back home to UT-Asterisk with the rest of the hayseed hippies, slosh your Shiner, think long and hard about what you did, and maybe next time, before giving your coach a championship raise, make sure he’s won the fucking championship.

** Utah over Pitt in 2004 was a joke. Pitt didn’t deserve to be anywhere near a BCS bowl with an 8-3 record in the Big Least, as it certainly was at the time. Boise State over Chokelahoma was – do I need to remind everyone again? – a ONE POINT win, in DOUBLE OVERTIME, against the BCS’s own personal FAILboat team. And whenever BCS busters come up, nobody ever talks about how Hawai’i basically got vivisected by Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. When people say “non-BCS teams deserve a chance!” what they mean is “We want Boise State to get full credit for playing a JV schedule!” And you know my solution: no automatic bids for conference champions. Problem solved.

1) For maximum safety, you should assume that anyone behind the wheel of a car is a solipsistic, self-absorbed cocksucker with no regard for human life, and drive or walk accordingly.

2) If your phone drops a 911 call twice within two minutes, you should start to consider changing your provider and/or handset.

3) If your first instinct is to open fire on a vehicle that almost runs you down in the street, you should probably not attempt to obtain a concealed-carry permit or a firearm.

Just FYI.

No shit-talking here. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to present as some sort of born-again Alabama fan now, after all these years of dissociating myself from the state and the fandom. If I’m honest, the Crimson Tide have been my fourth football team at best since about 2000, behind the Redskins and Vandy and Cal. So as much as it does mean to me to beat Tennessee and Auburn, as much as this would have meant to me fifteen years ago – I can’t lie: I will be DVR’ing the game and attending a theology class on Thursday night.

It’s not my title to win. It’s theirs, if they will. There’s nothing I can do about it, so it’s best if I just leave it alone. I can’t decide whether that’s sad or sensible, but there it is.

After an hour of the much-hyped presentation of the Nexus One, here’s what we didn’t know two weeks ago that we know now:

* There’s going to be a Verizon version before long.

* It accepts voice input in text fields.

That’s it. That’s it and that’s all. Everything else – name, specs, pricing plans on T-Mobile – was known before we broke for Christmas.

For all their talk about the “revolutionary sales model,” I don’t see what’s so different about the selling system from what Apple did in 2007 with the iPhone, except for selling it unlocked – which means that you can pay $530 to use it on AT&T with no 3G service available. Which is kind of ridiculous – if Apple got skewered for having a phone with no 3G on AT&T in 2007, how useful is one going to be in 2010?

The practical upshot of today was ‘we have a GSM phone running Android 2.’ Which is great news, as it goes, but nothing that’s going to blow people away. It will be interesting to see if they get the same sort of backlash we’ve come to expect from Apple paste-eaters every time they fail to deliver the iGasm 4G with 1080p video, a 15-hour battery and instant on-demand transformation into Beyonce.

So back in the day, I thought it would be really cool to have a little white plastic communicator that would let me link up instantly with all my high-school pals. (It was a backhanded homage to this desire that led me to use my dinky Nokia 1112 at my high-school birthday party last year.) As in so many things back then, obviously, my vision was limited.

On the way to the bar yesterday for the final Redskins debacle of the year, I jotted down a list of everything I would have needed in 1989 to do what my iPhone does now…

Cordless telephone

WATS line (remember those?)

Videocassette player w/attached monitor

Walkman

One thousand cassette tapes

Newspaper

Atlas

Compass

Alarm clock

Stopwatch

2-way pager

Train schedule

Filofax/Dayrunner

Dictaphone recorder

Complete set of encyclopedias

Camera

Photo album

Videogame system

Barcode scanner

Entire shelf of additional books

A whole bookstore

A whole record store

So in other words, I would need to ride around in a station wagon towing a U-Haul to have everything I have in my front pocket.

Every now and then, it’s good to be reminded that I live in the !-ing future.

Properly first-footed this year. Hopefully it pays off. Get some sleep, people – the moveable feast starts early.

“Stagger Lee was born in February of 1996. After a little over a year at Vanderbilt University, he moved to Washington DC and signed on as tech support for a major non-profit. Seven years later, he moved with his fiancee to California, where he has lived and worked ever since.”

Seem like I’m leaving out a lot? Probably. But let’s be honest: for most people in my life, that’s my story. Anything before I joined a certain listserv during that winter of ’96 only exists in my own tales and imagination, because nobody was there to see it and there’s precious little physical proof any of it happened – apart from a ring or two and perhaps an old T-shirt or six. And if you’re in California, it goes more like:

“Stagger Lee was born in April 2001. His existence did not solidify until July 2004, when he moved to Silicon Valley. He has since bopped around several jobs, leaving a trail of incoherent ramblings about Vanderbilt athletics, tales from his first job, and something about an “EUS” that may or may not have to do with Scottish soccer.”

Four years ago, I went home and cleaned out the closet. The result was something of a temporal fugue, where for a span of about three hours, I was back in high school. A little over a year later, I was sent a link to a station of streaming Irish music, which catapulted me back in time seven years in a cloud of snow and pipe smoke. And last week, I opened boxes that carried me from 1985 to 1997 and back, providing me with the most unexpected gift of the year: a treasure-trove of real-time documentation of what I was thinking, what I was obsessing over, how I was living my life – in short, almost all the data points needed to really see what’s changed in the last twenty years…and what hasn’t.

There are things in my past that were too painful to contemplate, and to get them out of the way, I shut off the past. It didn’t keep the actual problems from leaking through, but it did succeed in cutting off large swathes of who I used to be – things that are, or should be, a very big part of who I am today. When they leaked through, it usually only served to trigger the wrong reaction. Memory and regret go together like Jack and Coke, and that’s not an idly chosen comparison.

The triumph of 2009 is that a lot of that past broke through in a big way this year, for a number of reasons, and for the most part not in a bad way. Call it the Lion King moment, if you like – “remember who you are.” I did. Those things that happened in 1989, or 1994, or 2000 are not things that happened to previous regenerations, played by different people in a different era – they happened to me, they made me what I am, and I still have a lot of those things going for me.

In 2010, I’m not going to be playing defense against my own past anymore. Which should free up a lot of time and energy for other things.