Shots in the Dark

“If I cannot destroy a big high-rise anymore, because terrorists blew up two of the most famous ones, the twin towers, what does this say about our world?”

—Director Roland Emmerich, speaking of his new disaster movie, 2012.

Here’s the trailer:

The key word here—believe it at your own peril—is “inadvertent.”

The New York Post reports that Eliot Spitzer, the fallen-yet-unabashed former governor of New York, will be giving a lecture on ethics today at Harvard‘s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

Spitzer, 50, was forced to resign as governor in 2008 after it was revealed that he was the client of a prostitution ring at the center of a federal investigation. It was revealed that Spitzer — described in court papers as Client No. 9 — had paid to have sex with call-girl Ashley Dupree.

But the New York Daily News reports that the situation is a little more complicated.

[Conference host Laurence] Lessig said Spitzer is not giving “a lecture on ethics.”

“He has instead been invited to speak as part of a series on the topic of ‘institutional corruption’,” the professor said.

Even if Spitzer were speaking on ethics, I wouldn’t be much bothered by it: I don’t know any saints, and there’s plenty we can learn from sinners.

Not to mention that he’s from an extremely wealthy family. So while Spitzer uses Harvard to help rebuild his reputation, Harvard can use Spitzer to refill its coffers.

Fox News recently reported on the allegedly 20,000-45,000 people who attended the anti-health care rally initiated by kinda good-looking but completely insane congresswoman Michelle Bachman.

Only, as the Daily Show points out, they used footage from a much bigger rally two months earlier to illustrate it.

Those people really are shameless.

“You can’t call any season a success unless you’ve won the World Series.”

—Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, in the Globe

To newer Red Sox fans, this may seem an innocuous enough statement. But to longtime Sox fans, baseball fans, even Yankee fans, it’s a sort of remarkable assertion, a sign of how the Sox current management has raised the bar on expectations to, well, Yankee-like levels.

In this schema, there are no rebuilding years, no seasons where you don’t win the Series but that’s all right because you did better than expected, no seasons where you were successful but one or two other teams were just a little bit better.

For better or worse, that quote sounds like something George Steinbrenner would have said back in the mid-1970s.

I think it’s a mistake: You don’t have to win the Series to have a great season. (Look at the Sox in ’67, for example.) And to think that every season is a letdown if you don’t win the Series takes a lot of the joy out of the game….

The Crimson does a short piece on Drew Faust’s salary, pointing out that 23 university presidents are paid more than she is.

“Of all the lists we top, I’m glad Harvard is not number one on this list,” former Dean of Harvard College and Computer Science Professor Harry R. Lewis ’68 said….

Writing in the New York Times, former W. flack Ari Fleischer confirms what the sage amongst us have long suspected: That the Yankees could not win a World Series because they, and the country, were cursed while George W. Bush was in the White House.

(All right, he didn’t say the “and the country” part, but that’s only because he has his head so far up Bush’s rear he gives new meaning to the phrase “putting words in his mouth.”)

It’s not lost on me, as a lifelong Yankee fan, that the Bronx Bombers won the World Series four times during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the last time in 2000. On Wednesday, they won it again — in the first year of Barack Obama’s administration. Yankee success bookended the Bush presidency and that presents a problem for fans like me.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was standing in the Oval Office when the president secretly put his curse on my team….

What Fleischer seems to be saying is that if you love America, and you respect your parents, and you think ice cream is a good thing, then you love the Yankees.

If not…well, best not to think about it.

Saturday Night Live tees off on Goldman Sachs. They got swine flu vaccine before schools and hospitals. Really?

Saw a few minutes of this on HBO last night. I really love this guy; it’s terrific, the way he manipulates his voice, modulating the pace and tone—he reminds me of a Pixies song, like Debaser. (So great.) And I love the way his anger channels into weirdly-located obscenities which surprise you with their unexpectedness while suggesting that he is so pissed off, he can’t help the swear words from bursting out in awkward places. At the same time, Black clearly has a big heart. He’s angry because he’s outraged at the obscenities in the real world—like teaching a kid that if they dropped an atom bomb, he should hide under his desk.

Well—best not to dissect this sort of thing too much. Here’s Black reminiscing about his childhood fears of nuclear holocaust. Great stuff.

Frank Rich has long been a Larry Summers critic, and by extension, a critic of the Wall Street influence in and on the Obama White House: Summers, Geithner, Rubin, etc.

Today Rich makes an interesting case: The Election Day loss of a right-wing Republican in upstate New York is actually bad for the Democrats, because even the GOP will have to recognize that its moderates did well in New Jersey and Virginia while its looney right-wing got hammered in a district that should have been an easy win.

Which means that the GOP may start to show some semblance of sanity (not sure I’d bet on this, actually), exposing the Democrats’ real vulnerability: the fact that they have been coopted by Wall Street.

Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.

That’s a good line, that last one, not just clever but, I think, true. (I always thought it was a mistake for Corzine to make fun of Christie’s weight. Hell, 50% of America is fat. In New Jersey, 90%.)

Rich goes on to argue that the same principle applies to Michael Bloomberg’s underwhelming victory. Here I disagree. The Bloomberg race was close because of turnout, which was at about 25% of the electorate. Who voted? People who really liked Bill Thompson (apparently there were a few); people who really disliked Bloomberg or the term limits power grab (probably a larger group than the pro-Thompson voters); and people who felt strongly enough either against Thompson or pro-Bloomberg to go out and vote for the mayor.

But let’s face it, running for a third term on the promise that you’ll do more of the same doesn’t exactly drive voters to the polls.

Which means that it’s dangerous to attribute much larger meaning to the Bloomberg race, except that his support may be broader than it is deep, and there is a decent chunk of New York City which is ticked off at him.

But I think Rich is on very strong ground when he makes the following argument:

The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of thosepolled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.

If people aren’t getting jobs by next November, and the Republicans can keep their crazies in check, Election Night 2010 is going to be a lot uglier than this year’s.

There’s no question that there are a lot of smart people in the Obama administration. But sometimes they think so much, they forget to feel—and they forget that their boss was elected because of his passion, not his ideas. We don’t want a president who governs on heart alone, of course. But we certainly haven’t seen a lot of heart in recent days from the president and his Wall Street standard bearers.