Spent the whole morning at various medical appointments, and I will be having arthroscopic surgery and then a procedure to pin/screw my glenoid back together next Tuesday. Until then- pain pills and limited movement. Rehab starts three days after surgery.

And according to my Doctor, I really messed my shoulder up- I basically used the ball joint on my humerus as a battering ram and shredded the glenoid.

In other news, Lily and Tunch still love me, although Tunch might be faking it for food.

A funny thing happened to me while I was in San Francisco. A friend of mine and I were having lunch and the waiter said to my friend “you look exactly like that political guy on tv, what’s his name?” My friend looked quizzically at him and I said “Tucker Carlson”. The waiter said “Yes!” and proceeded to call my friend Tucker for the rest of the meal. In fact, my friend looks exactly like Tucker Carlson (even wears a bow-tie), so I was shocked that no one has ever told him that before; another person pointed out to me that people might not say that to him since the resemblance is so uncanny, people probably think he is Tucker Carlson and just say “Great job with Paul Begala yesterday!”, which of course makes no sense to him.

So this got me thinking that I should check in on the Carlsonington Post. It’s awful, much worse than I thought. James Wolcott has a great summary of it here and here. “Papa Don’t Treach” must surely be the greatest Jim Treacher-related post title of all time.

Update. While Conor Friedersdorf’s review of the CP goes too easy on it, I give him credit for this:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this SE Cupp piece is the most inane, poseurish, wrongheaded bullshit published by a movement conservative writer so far in 2010 — scare quotes around environment? — but it’s well edited

I have to be honest, I find SE Cupp and Jim Treacher so annoying, I couldn’t read the rest of the site. It could be brilliant for all I know.

Steve Benen is completely right about this:

Be on the lookout for this one—as the economy improves and the Bush Recession ends, Republicans will try to convince people that Bush, not Obama, deserves credit for rescuing the economy. While the evidence is overwhelming that it was the stimulus that created economic growth and pulled the economy bank from the brink, Karen Hughes—and soon, her cohorts—would us believe that the economy had already been rescued before Obama took office.

Of course, reality is complicated here: Bush probably does deserve credit for TARP and Obama should have, in my opinion, pushed a bigger stimulus and done a better job with cramdown-lite. But, given that Bush preceded Obama, it takes a lot of chutzpah to blame Obama for the recession and give Bush credit for any subsequent recovery.

Once again, the rumors are getting louder about the New York Times going (back) behind a paywall. It probably says a lot about my personal biases that I found Foster Kamer’s Gawker article the most interesting—not least because of the comments engendered by it. You don’t get nearly such a range of… creativity… in the “Letters to Ye Editors”.

I would actually be willing to pay some kind of subscription to keep a high-quality “paper of record” online, because I’ve reduced a 30-year daily newspaper addiction down to a Sunday-only over-the-counter purchase for the ad inserts and leisurely browsing when screenreading isn’t convenient. And as a comparatively old person with an established pressed-pulpwood addiction, I should be a prime target. But I bitterly resent the idea of giving so much as a thin dime to the godsdamned New York Times, because they’re the Gordon-Gekko-besotted bandits who eviscerated my dependable Boston Globe and sabotaged its various delivery services in a (vain) attempt to “convince” Bostonians of a better-than-fourth-grade reading ability to switch to the NYTimes. As it turns out, Sulzberger’s People could wean me off buying the Globe, but they couldn’t force me to buy the Times, and I can only assume I’ve got plenty of company out here in the wilds beyond the Hudson. Suggestions as to alternative options gratefully accepted.

But it gladdened my shriveled heart to read that The Moustache of Understanding is no longer sanguine about the free exchange of ideas in the global marketplace…

Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

Friedman is now “pro some kind of pay model,” he says. “My own feeling is, we have to do anything we can to raise money,” he told me. “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”

I asked Friedman whether any of the technologists he meets during his globe-trotting had presented any groundbreaking ideas for how to save the Times and journalism. While he’s optimistic about the coming crop of tablets and e-readers, the answer is no. “We’re in a megatransition. It hasn’t ever felt like anyone has the answer,” he said. “My macro feeling is that I’m glad I had this job at this time. It was great working at the paper when it was on dead trees and could pay for itself.”

Such are the harsh judgements that must be made when a Very Serious Person’s family fortunes are cruelly reduced from a decently prosperous $3-billion-plus to a mere handful of millions. Perhaps the NYT’s last paywall-free front page can headline a five-page article chronicling the sad plight of its most illustrious pundits, reduced to scrabbling for speaking fees and book contracts with the unwashed hoi polloi from Fox News and the wingnuttier outposts of Heartland America™.

If you really like stuff like following stuff like Tuesday’s MA special election, I really recommend checking Ben Smith’s blog over the next couple days. I know it’s Politico and I know he consults Bill Cosby whenever race comes up, but for this stuff, his blog can’t be beat. I can’t take all the showy, overwrought stuff that Josh Marshall prints from readers before elections or Sully’s “who would Burke vote for in a special election” stuff, and I don’t even want to know what OBG Bob Somerby is writing about this race (I’d like it if someone would tell me briefly, though, provided it’s not too horrifying).

Any other recommendations for good places to read about Tuesday’s race? Boston being Boston, I’m sure there’s no shortage of bloviation. Anything that won’t make me want to punch myself in the neck?

Update: Speak of the devil, here’s footage of Brown smiling at the “shove a curling iron up her butt” comment:

I’d rather not go into the details, but this seems to be the origin of the bizarre “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” comments made by a Scott Brown supporter at a rally this weekend.

Unsavory sex abuse cases play a big role in Massachusetts politics. In 1998, the Democratic nominee for governor, Scott Harshbarger, lost in part because of his infamous prosecution of the Amirault family (which I agree was a terrible miscarriage of justice). Coakley has been criticized for her role in this case, but to me it seems fairly tangential. Weirdly and personally, I have heard about this case for my entire adult life: for reasons I can’t explain, when my uncle is drunk around the holidays, he starts joking about Tookie Amirault and the “magic room”. I can also remember my grandmother telling me she wouldn’t vote Harshbarger because he wouldn’t let priests wear their collars in their courtroom when they were being tried for sex crimes.

Massachusetts politics is strange. It’s very liberal by any measure and it’s completely dominated by Democrats (I would argue that the recent success of Republican gubernatorial candidates was caused by the fact that the Democrats ran a lunatic in 1990 while the Republicans ran a moderate candidate who went on to be a moderate and well-liked governor). But, Cambridge and a few other places notwithstanding, the liberalism is not always of the high-brow, nuanced variety. It’s more the liberalism of places like Italy or Spain, where there’s genuine concern for the poor and respect for the working class, but also a lot of superstitious, essentially conservative Catholicism and a lot of retelling of decades (if not centuries) old stories. If Coakley loses on Tuesday—and I think she’ll win by 6-10 points—it will be more because of the state’s idiosyncrasies than because voters reject health care reform.

I guess that is all that is on my agenda.

Are other people confused by the blue and yellow strip on the 20 yard line in San Diego? How can it be both the first-down marker AND the line of scrimmage? If the league is going to require that players pull their socks up and not take off their helmets, shouldn’t it also require that San Diego use different colors for their 20 yard line?

Update. The play-by-play guy just said “Hay-sha” for Haiti. Never heard that one before.

This will go over well with women voters:

The crowd responded enthusiastically as Brown made his case against AG Martha Coakley (D)—even interrupting frequently to make Brown’s case for him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Brown said, using a megaphone to address the crowd. “There’s negative campaigning, and then there’s malicious campaigning.”

“She’s malicious!” a man in the crowd cried out. “She’s a phony!” shouted another. “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” a third man interjected a few moments later.

Why is it always about putting things up people’s butts with Republicans these days? Seriously.

Update. Eddie Murphy said it best.

Your host will be pulling for the Chargers because my mother hates the Jetrs because she was a Colts fan and has never forgiven Joe Namath.

Cowboys v. Favre- helluva choice.

Gonna have to go with the Viking, I guess.

A friend of mine who lives in MA just got this anti-Coakley email:

Update. Regardless of how one feels about the issues, it is very strange to get an email like this from a wine store, no?

I’ve always been a defender of Tim Tebow—he has every right to express his religiosity in the stupidest way possible, IMHO. But this makes me hate him:

Focus on the Family will air a 30-second “life- and family-affirming” television spot, featuring University of Florida star quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, during the coverage.

The Colorado Springs-based media ministry shot the ad with the Tebows on Tuesday in Orlando, Focus spokesman Gary Schneeberger said Friday. It is set to air before and again during the CBS broadcast of the football championship from Dolphin Stadium near Miami.

Focus on the Family is a scam led by an adult with a sick fixation with beating children. I can’t respect anyone who would do ads for them.

I’ve been watching Bush the past two days working with Clinton on the Haiti disaster, and I think that even though his administration was such a disaster it made me switch parties, his conduct since he left office has been pretty admirable. Compare his behavior to Darth Cheney and Cheney’s idiot daughter. Bush deserves credit for that.

The Washington Monthly has a good, disturbing article about the Texas Board of Education:

“I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

[....]

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Perhaps I’m wrong wrong to make this comparison, but the right’s obsession with altering textbooks seems of a piece with its obsession with critiquing ostensibly non-political movies like “Avatar”. While today’s left thinks in terms of public options and stimulus details—however heatedly and irrationally—the right thinks in terms of changing the nation’s culture.

I used to think of this as just another pony plan: it’s much easier to say you’ll deal with a problem by changing the culture than by commissioning studies, enacting new legislation, etc., but now I think it’s something quite different, that they really believe that if kids watch “Avatar”, they’ll grow up to be pagans and we’ll all end up in Hell.