Blogging during the Navy-Utah Poinsettia Bowl

Workout notes 1 mile run/walk, 2 mile walk on the treadmill (just under 26 minutes; on inclines). Running was downright painful at first; the body just didn’t want to do it. The walk went ok.

Then yoga; nothing special.

Football:

(photos from yahoo NCAA football gallery)

Utah has thrown an interception, Navy fumbled inside the 5, Navy missed a long field goal, and right now Utah is in striking distance. 10 minutes to go in the first half and it is 0-0. Oh no, Utah just scored the first touchdown. 7-0, Utes. Well, Navy has not been a strong defensive team this year.

Update: Navy got the running game going and is up 10-7 after a couple of nice drives. There are 28 seconds left in the half; frankly I am surprised at how well the defense has played up to now.

Update Anchors Aweigh! Navy breaks a long run and is now up 17-7!

Oh-oh, now with 1:12, Utah has a couple of touchdown drives, and has held Navy to two 3 play possessions. That isn’t good; Navy needs to keep scoring; it is 21-17, Utes.

We’ll see if Navy can get things cranked up; Utah appears to have solved the option attack.

It isn’t looking good; the Utes have the ball on the Midshipmen 19 yard line; oops, make that yet another touchdown.

The Mids just don’t have the defense to stay in the game if the offense is shut down.

Good news: Navy just came back to score and made the 2 pointer; 28-25, Utes. But the Mids need a stop!

But Utah isn’t going to be stopped; they are at the Navy 5 and the Navy defense is tiring. If the Utes don’t fumble.

It appears that Utah lost the ball; the runner stretched the ball forward, lost the ball and it hit the pylon. That is a fumble! We’ll see what the replay says. No, they say it went out of bounds, 4′th down inside the 1.

But the defense holds on 4′th and 1! Now there is 3:40, and 99 yards to go!

But now there is 2:22, inside the their own 10, and 4′th and 2.

Navy has all three time outs, but hasn’t stopped Utah. Navy doesn’t make it, the game is over. Navy punts, there is still a slight chance, IF Navy holds Utah to 3 and out. That probably won’t happen; 4′th and 2 is probably a better risk at this stage of the game.

Oh well, Utah stopped Navy on 4′th and 2. It is over. The second down play is being reviewed; frankly it appears that Utah scored. But there is no doubt on the last one; it is 35-25.

It isn’t over yet! Navy hit a long touchdown pass; it is 35-32 with 57 seconds left, and the onside kick to come.

Navy has the onside kick!!!! We’ve got a game here!

Oh no. Utah intercepted a Navy pass; it is over. What a game though.

Politics

Republicans The Republicans have been trying to “out Reagan” each other.

Well, one of the things that Ronald Reagan was noted for was telling whoppers and getting away with it.

Elsewhere, Hayward tells us of “Reagan’s penchant for telling ‘whoppers’–wildly inaccurate statistics or supposedly true stories that were easily exposed as exaggerations or falsehoods–as evidence of the man’s unfitness to be taken seriously.” He writes, “The one that stuck most in the craw of liberals was Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ in Chicago public housing who supposedly collected public assistance under more than 100 separate names. The news media looked high and low, but no such person could ever be found.”
So much for the man who considered the truth as unto fresh water. But Hayward insists upon a greater truth:
Reagan’s whoppers were … always about the deeper meaning of America, both what was right with America and what was wrong with America. That’s why the accuracy of his whoppers was always secondary to their teaching, which resonated deeply with Americans who had grown disaffected with the leadership of the nation.
But accuracy matters, and the facts were that most welfare recipients were not stealing public funds, did not stay on welfare for more than two years, did not take up more than a minuscule percentage of the federal budget, were not black, and were not even adults (of some 11 million welfare recipients in 1980, 7 million were children). How much “teaching” was there in such distortions? How could it possibly have helped us to do what people must constantly do in a democracy, which is to make decisions after rationally, truthfully analyzing the world around us?

Reagan also told some personal story whoppers as well:

As a side note, one of Reagan’s most popular stories on the campaign trail, written by Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, involves Reagan’s days on the football field as a varsity receiver in high school. During one game, Reagan says he scored the winning touchdown for his team in the final seconds, but the honest Reagan told the ref that the touchdown shouldn’t count because he was offside. “I told the truth, the penalty was ruled, and Dixon [High School] lost the game.” Reagan says his teammates admired him for his honesty. Unfortunately, Dixon records show that Reagan only played in one varsity football game, and Dixon lost that game 24-0. (Bushwatch, Decades History Timeline, NLP Wessex, Boston Globe, Washington Post/Paul Waldman, Laura Flanders, Al Franken)

Evidently Mitt Romney is trying to be like Reagan. He came out with the story that “he watched his dad march with M. L. K” and got tears in his eyes. Touching, but, well, his dad never marched with M. L. K.:

Romney: …And I’m not going to distance myself in any way from my faith. But you can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at, at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King.

Mitt Romney has defended his position on civil rights, in multiple high-profile settings, by insisting that his father marched with Martin Luther King during his tenure as governor of Michigan in the 1960s. Pressed for specifics, the Romney campaign pointed to an event that occurred in Grosse Point, Mich.

The claim appears to be false — Romney’s father did not march with King. Unfortunately, the campaign has come up with an unpersuasive defense.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he watched his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, in a 1960s civil rights march in Michigan with Martin Luther King Jr.

On Wednesday, Romney’s campaign said his recollections of watching his father, an ardent civil rights supporter, march with King were meant to be figurative.

“He was speaking figuratively, not literally,” Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate.

Yeah, and I did math with John Nash, Bill Thurston and Grigory Perelman. (the former won a Nobel Prize in economics; the latter two were awarded Field’s Medals, though Perelman turned his down).

Oh, I was speaking figuratively.

Democrats

Barack Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. One of his students recounts the experience:

Spring quarter of my second year, I took Voting Rights and Election Law as a seminar with Professor Obama. Now, let’s be clear: in a school with a lot of Somebodies – Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, Cass Sunstein and David Currie – he was a relative nobody, and even compared with other younger faculty, it was Larry Lessig and Elena Kagan who had more of the hype. But Obama was teaching a course in a subject I wanted to study – at a point when I realized that law school was too short to be spent in classes that felt obligatory – and that made it an easy decision.

And he was … different. For one thing, better dressed. Sleek sweaters and blazers as opposed to ill-fitting, coffee-stained suits with mismatched ties. But he was also less formal, more relaxed – he never taught the class as though he knew the answers to all the questions he was posing and was just hiding the ball from us until we could find them. Confident, sure, but never cocky.

What’s more, he taught Voting Rights in a different way than others do. He didn’t use a textbook, for starters, but rather had us each purchase an eight-inch high multilith of cases, law review articles and statutes that he had personally compiled. And they weren’t all the “big” cases either – no, our class started by reviewing some early-19th century cases about the denial of the franchise, so that as the course moved forward we saw “voting rights” not as some static thing to be analyzed, but a constantly- and still-evolving process to be affected. Over the course of a few months, we studied changes in the franchise, changes in the rights of political parties, campaign finance law and redistricting, among other topics. We learned the law, but we also learned it on the level of real-world impact: based on a whites-only party primary, how many people would be denied a voice? What kind of policies would result from such a legislature?

[Mind you, he was running for the State Senate at the same time. Honestly, I had no idea. Law school is something of a cocoon, and he never brought his outside life into the classroom.]

Much in the Chicago tradition, he wanted all voices to be heard in the classroom, and when there a viewpoint that wasn’t being expressed or students were too complacent in their liberal views, he’d push the contrary view himself. These classes were conversations. [...]

And here is another nice summary of his activities while in Illinois:

Some kids carry the US Constitution in their pocket. Helluvan idea!

In this primary season, if you have two pockets, here’s another small copy of a document that you would do well to carry as a sidecar.

It’s a small graphic the New York Times put together last summer highlighting some of the more than 800 bills Barack Obama sponsored while in the Illinois Senate.

***

On a day when the Clinton campaign went deeply negative and launched two attack websites, coordinated with a Times article, based on 3% of 4000 votes Obama cast in the Illinois state legislature, I thought it would be useful to take a look at some of the very progressive things he not only voted for during the same tenure, but a few of the 823 bills he sponsored and fought for over those eight years.

Go to the diary to see the graphics.

Humor

Redstate on Huckabee

Fluff

(last one already posted)