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In"The Faculty Bench," Inside Higher Ed, 8 November, the University Diary's Margaret Soltan surveys the major current scandals in American university athletics and argues that it's past time for faculty players to come off the bench.
Sorry, folks, I'm a closet political junky. It's 3:00 a.m. est and I'm still looking at late returns. You heard it here first: not only have the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, but I project that the final counts in Montana and Virginia will give them control of the Senate. Not many people really thought that a possibility. Unfortunately, the Democratic tide did not sweep Scott Kleeb, a Yale Ph. D. in history, over his Club for Growth Republican opponent. Personally, I regret the losses among Republican moderates – Lincoln Chafee, Nancy Johnson, and Jim Leach. Some of my friends on the other side of the aisle have yet to conjure with the increased strength of conservative Democrats in the next Congress.
Be honest, if you read down the list of top 25 NCAA football rankings, do you think of the schools as getting progresivly better? Do you think of the Final 4 teams as being terrible academic institutions (accross the board)? (FYI, OSU is no. 1, and USC is 7.)
Nathanael D. Robinson -
11/9/2006
The move to more disciplined political parties will inevitably lead to smaller parties and more of them, don't you think?
To draw out the point further, aren't liberal/moderate/conservative categories that are used to impose ideals of belief on the members and thus create political discipline? Isn't it enough that they are Republicans and Democrats?
Nathanael D. Robinson -
11/9/2006
USC: great football, bad academics. Then again, I went to UCLA!
Kurt Niehaus -
11/9/2006
"Already, if you’re at one of the big sports schools, you’re unlikely to be at an academic powerhouse; but you still think of yourself as a serious person, and you very much want to think of your university as a serious one."
Gee... I guess Penn State, Ohio State, University of Delaware, West Point, aren't what I thought they were. /sarcasm
Does anyone here actually associate a good or bad football program with a good or bad academic program?
Manan Ahmed -
11/8/2006
His response, I said what I said, to the question about why he was going around the campaign trail saying the Dems would be happy if the terrorists win.
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
I'll admit that I'm one of those "netroot" Dems who thinks the party should have considerably more ideological consistency than it does. Truth be told, I think the Republicans should, too....
On the other hand, why should the Democrats be any different than the Republicans: they had plenty of "moderates" who never voted against the party line, who never really moderated the party.
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
That's true. As always, it's not clear who was really driving this decision; I'd love to know who brought it up, who "pulled the trigger" and when the decision was actually made.
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
Bush said, in response to a question about whether he should have seen this coming, that he was an optimist who hoped that the American people would understand about national security and economic progress.
The implication, left unsaid, is that the American people clearly don't get it.
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
Other notable "jokes" at the conference, teasing a NYT reporter about "getting the facts" and asking "Do you think I'm nuts? That I lost my sensibilities working hard on the campaign trail?" [all quotations suspect, as I'm typing this during the conference and not trained as a stenographer]
He's also talking about "institutionalizing mechanisms" to allow future presidents to carry on the Global War On Terror, possibly without a lot of support from Congress or the Courts?
Nathanael D. Robinson -
11/8/2006
Hmmm ... I think that the reports that will come out in a few weeks--the one's witheld so that they "wouldn't become politicized"--would have been enough of the nightmare that he was eager to slink away.
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
Bush is claiming that he held off announcing the resignation because of the search for the replacement and to avoid giving the impression that military policy was being driven by politics.
My wife, who's smarter than I am most of the time, isn't convinced that Rumsfeld's resignation would have happened if the election hadn't been, as Bush just said, "a thumping."
Both Bush and his Fox allies are still trying to claim that Democrats are responsible for the poisoned atmosphere (and there's a phrase I really didn't want to have to explain to our 5-year old) and partisanship...
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
Every Republican who lost last night is now thinking "why didn't he do this a week ago?!?!?"
And I can't believe Bush made a "Republican interior decorator" joke....
Robert Gates, president of Texas A&M and former CIA director, is Bush's pick for Rumsfeld's replacement.
And it sounds like Bush is going to have a second press conference about Rumsfeld later, which suggests to me that it really was a last-minute decision.
Nathanael D. Robinson -
11/8/2006
I really hate this description of the new Democrats as being conservative ... as if Democrat and liberal were synonymous. The DNC's gains were made in the territory vacated by Republicans in their own quest for ideological purity and their unrelenting drive to turn out their base. If Lieberman is welcomed back into the fold, it will just rebalance the Democratic Party as a big tent of interests rather than a party with a dominant liberal leanings (which, it appears, the Netroots people wanted).
Oscar Chamberlain -
11/8/2006
The Democrats are now in a position to check the executive and introduce policy, but they cannot govern without negotiating with Bush (and that is true whichever way the Senate comes out).
Now the politics get interesting. To the extent that the next two years is perceived as an improvement, the Democrats will receive much of the credit. This is particularly true because Bush cannot cash in personally on any such improvement.
So, purely from a political standpoint, it may be in the Republican interest now to obstruct.
A lot of what follows still depends on what Bush wants to accomplish in the next two years. The more he needs Congressional action, the more the old "compassionate conservative" Bush will reemerge. To the extent that happens, both Congressional Republicans and liberal Democrats may be reaching for the Maalox as Bush works to patch together moderate to moderate-conservative coalitions.
Ralph E. Luker -
11/8/2006
Lieberman's a radical compared with some of the newbies. You've got a new anti-abortion Senator from Pennsylvania and lots of pro-gun Democrats in the House. I've seen claims that Jim Webb may become the most conservative member of the U. S. Senate. He was in Ronald Reagan's Defense Department, you recall.
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
p.s. I realized that I kind of repeated your last point, after I posted that. You're right: we're going to have to figure out how to manage the party as it currently stands, and like the Republican party, there's going to be a lot of people arguing for splits....
Jonathan Dresner -
11/8/2006
Time zones work in my favor; I'm normally up at this hour anyway. Odds are pretty good I'd have been up anyway; I'm as much of a junkie as you are.
It looks to me like most of the projections are including Lieberman as an "independent caucusing with Democrats" .... I know there's a lot of people in the party who, given the choice between control of the Senate and including Lieberman in the Dem Caucus, will stop and think.
I can't wait to hear the Bush news conference tomorrow.
