For centuries, athletics have remained a core part of human culture and, especially in America, a base of cultural growth and development of national identity. Just this past month we experienced the highest form of this cultural adaptation—the Super Bowl, a sports event so important that the actual game takes a backseat to the spectacle of family, friends, freedom and country that accompanies it. Yet sports traditions as we know them are increasingly threatened by the evolution of entertainment technology. Events that were once necessarily group viewing will soon become available for mass individual consumption on wireless devices and personal computers.

The Consumer Electronics Association recently released a survey of sports fans with finding that seem to indicate the sports culture most Americans grow up with is, in large part, safe, and that of the international community, depending on the sport, is close to significant positive changes. The poll, conducted several weeks before the Super Bowl and spanning across the fan bases of most major sports in the United States, shows that there is a great willingness on the part of consumers to go online to find sports information and actually watch the events online as they occur. One in five sports fans polled said they were interested in watching live, televised games on a wireless or mobile device, though the willingness to go online varied from sport to sport. As the CEA’s Digital Answer Girl Megan Pollack tells us in her exclusive breakdown of the survey results for The NA710N, while the Super Bowl is still out of bounds for most sports viewers, those who plan on watching the Olympics are more open to wireless or mobile viewing.

For an event like the Super Bowl, that consists of a single game and is broadcast on a Sunday evening when very few Americans are working, the availability of alternative viewing methods might not have that much of an impact on the culture surrounding it. So much of the Super Bowl as we know it revolves around group eating, drinking, cheering, and partying that, by virtue of the game itself often being secondary to the near-holiday that surrounds it, few might opt to watch the event through a more personal medium. While the survey noted that 57% of respondents were planning to watch the Super Bowl this past weekend, only 13% said they would watch highlights online.

Sports events like the Super Bowl—a championship decided on one game broadcast at an extremely convenient time for most Americans—are few and far between, however. Most sports require a more crowded play schedule that spans a number of days. For example, the four tennis major tournaments span two weeks each, and since the male and female trophies are contested simultaneously, there is rarely a time when only one match is going on. The fact that three of the four tournaments (Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and the Australian Open) occur at least five hours off of the four American time zones makes following them during the weekdays even more difficult. In fact, the US Open has already implemented an online way to watch many matches not broadcast on TV while they occur simultaneously, and for free. Fans of international soccer tournaments—the World Cup, the Euro Cup, the America Cup, et al—find similar scheduling conflicts. In these cases, many fans turn to the internet to watch a live match that is not being broadcast on television but, due to their personal affiliations, are more invested in watching. Similarly, they can turn to the internet for highlights of matches they were unable to catch live. The CEA survey shows that, currently, nearly one in four (23%) sports fans follow statistics from other live games while watching a game, and this statistic spans baseball, basketball, tennis, soccer, and almost every other sport that requires more than one game to occur simultaneously. Nearly one in five are planning to use online coverage to keep track of the Olympic games, as well, which are an exaggerated form of a multi-game tournament in that dozens of sports are often occurring simultaneously.

With technology ever-expanding to include entertainment not formerly conceived in an individually-consumed medium, the fear of losing some of the mystique of the great sports events most of us grew up on is present. However, as of now it appears that the only way that our sports experiences are about to change thanks to the internet is that events requiring more than two eyes to keep track of are becoming increasingly attainable for spectators. It is already possible to watch multiple events simultaneously for some sports, but as access to the internet becomes more widespread and demand for further coverage continues, sports and sports culture will follow their lead.

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The Democrats now have their work cut out for them, and the message is clear: the euphoria of the 2008 elections has long been forgotten in the midst of broken promises and questionable legislative maneuvering. Coakley leaves the election no more of a loser than when she entered it, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its leader, Senator Robert Menendez, have some soul-searching to do. It is the responsibility of the DSCC to lead Democratic candidates to victory in Senate campaigns. It is their job to intervene when the campaigns are not going so well, especially in critical races to the collective health of the Democratic Senate. Menendez was nowhere to be found in Massachusetts. In fact, he was busy touting the health care bill on MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Show. The rage from former (and highly successful) DCCC Chairman, the House equivalent, Rahm Emanuel towards Menendez must be palpable from miles away today.

But today is not a day to talk about Democrats. The Republicans have regained a Senate seat in conservative no-man’s land, and they have in Brown a likeable, reasonable right-winger. Given the implosion of the Democratic Party, that’s really all they need to run in 2012, yet it has proven their Holy Grail. Candidates that people like, for better or worse, tend to be bonkers. Candidates that make sense are boring and out of touch. While Brown personally falls a little on the crazy side, his political behavior and beliefs are as close to rational as the Right is going to find, and his personal appeal, especially to independents and moderate Democrats, is unparalleled in the current Republican lineup. Given the current power scheme in the party, it shouldn’t be surprising that Matt Drudge, patron saint of the Internet, nominated Brown for President merely minutes after his victory speech.

Although the most prominent talking point on the matter currently floating in the political ether is that the Democrats are the ones facing a major identity crisis, reality seems to convey the opposite. It is the Right, as the more relevant and powerful faction, that needs to sharply hone their message until it is as close to pitch perfect as it can be. For now—for midterm elections—the right-wing conglomerate will be enough to reel in the Congressional seats, since the Democrats are hammering the nails into their own graves. 2012 is a much different story; an election spearheaded by one person needs one very coherent message to win. Fortunately for the Right, besides a few fringe elements in the wing, the message is crystal clear: anti-big government, anti-socialism, pro-Constitution, pro-individualism. The bad news is that the loudest voice among the divisive fringe elements is the famous beauty pageant participant and sportscaster Sarah Palin, who currently controls the Republican Party. It’s hard to imagine she was too happy to see Saint Drudge sound the presidential siren for someone who isn’t her. For all the reasonable (albeit comical) rhetoric coming from Chairman Michael Steele and the leaders that actually paid their dues for their high positions, Palin—who was plucked from obscurity in a desperate scramble to find anyone but Joe Lieberman to run on the John McCain ticket—has had the last word on everything in the Right for the past year. Never has a failure been so successful; she is much more powerful than any Vice President should be.

And she is at the center of a vicious fight for the heart of the Republican Party, where everyone is keeping their friends close, and their enemies closer. Palin asks major rival Glenn Beck to host Saturday Night Live with her. Beck emphatically highlights how “similar” they are. Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee playfully teases that “we all hate you” in congratulating Beck on his television program’s first anniversary. Even marginal characters like Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, and Charlie Crist have been uncharacteristically (well, maybe not for Pawlenty, who has not been known to speak since assuming the Minnesota governorship) chummy. Meanwhile, Michael Steele raps about the big tent he’s building for all of them (,“baby”). This is the face of ideological warfare. 2012 is still relatively far, but Brown jumping into the fray in a quest for populist supremacy—one in which he is directly defying Palin— will make things much more complex, and much more entertaining. The fact that Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly prefer him to her (his likeability ratings hover around 60%, while hers are somewhere around 25%) is already a sign that, unlike her comments on election night, this was not a vote in favor of conservatism as she sees it. For moderates, libertarians, and true conservatives, the rise of a new opposition to Palin’s vain advances at our presidency is good news no matter who is taking the reins. Since her beliefs are the most detrimental to the coherence of the right-wing platform (Republican or Tea Party alike), dethroning her is a first priority. And if there’s anything to celebrate about this week’s elections, it’s that Massachusetts voters, in asserting their right as constituents to be presented with a reasonable campaign effort, have implicitly cast their votes against her, too. Maybe they were voting liberal after all.

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For the past year, the case against Rod Blagojevich in the eyes of the American public has stood impervious to attack, since the only person attacking it was Rod Blagojevich. The federal complaint against the former Illinois governor, however, reads like a minefield of shady witnesses, out-of-context quotes, and a passion for getting this man and his Football indicted regardless of the truth. Blagojevich has been demanding that the FBI release the full, unedited conversations that the latter claim condemn him. He might just have a good reason for that. (Part 1 here)

In the first part of the federal complaint, as a way to corroborate the evidence that Blagojevich tried to use his influence to have the Chicago Tribune fire a reporter unfavorable to him, the complaint cites an occasion where Blagojevich spoke to a supposed campaign donor about giving him a high-level job. The donor, senior Blagojevich advisor Ali Ata, allegedly “discussed…a potential appointment to a high-level position in the State of Illinois while a $25,000 donation check to Friends of Blagojevich from Ata was sitting on a table.” Ata is the first of a stream of dubious witnesses to provide sideline information after pleading guilty to corruption charges. Among typical corruption charges like tax fraud, Ata proved he was not above perjury, pleading guilty of making false statements to the FBI to stay afloat. In exchange for damning testimony on Blagojevich, the federal complaint states “the government will make a motion pursuant to 5K1.1 for a reduction from his 12-18 month applicable guideline range.” If he had lied before to get out of jail, there is little reason to believe he would not do it again if offered a bargain. Ata is closely linked to another disgraced Blagojevich fundraiser, Antoin Rezko, most famous for his shady land dealings with Barack Obama, though also a known fundraiser for his State Senate and US Senate campaigns. Rezko was supposedly at the meeting where Ata and Blagojevich discussed a job offer, but “has a different recollection regarding the timing and chronology.” He is also being offered a reduced sentence in exchange for his services against Blagojevich, but this time the complaint admits “the government is not yet satisfied that Rezko’s accounts are full and complete… the government is not relying on Rezko’s account for probable cause.”

Then there is the first witness mentioned who actually testified to the FBI in the Blagojevich matter, and did not provide recycled material from the Rezko case that seemed to have the right pronouns. Stuart Levine, a former member of the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, stood accused of 28 counts of corruption (the usual: mail and wire fraud, extortion, bribery, and money laundering). Not surprisingly, he turned to Blagojevich, by now the most popular punching bag for indicted criminals in Illinois, in an attempt to claw himself out of trouble. His story—yet another not related to the Tribune incident or the selling of the Senate seat— is that Tony Rezko shook down Mercy Hospital in Rod Blagojevich’s name for campaign money. Most of Levine’s testimony involves conversations with Rezko, who would deal with the funds (Rezko, naturally, denies that any of the money went directly to him). Levine’s testimony is corroborated by Steven Loren, an attorney arrested for meddling in IRS affairs and bribed into talking with yet another shortened sentence.

Levine is one of the more interesting characters in the federal complaint because even the author seems ashamed of his presence there. For one, before testifying he was facing the greatest sentence of all the witnesses (life imprisonment). He admitted to using illegal drugs for about 30 years. The drugs listed are all stimulants (cocaine, ecstasy, crystal meth) except for ketamine, a veterinary drug first popularized by “club kid” Michael Alig, who was a fan of the drug when he butchered his dealer, Angel Melendez, with a hammer, syringe, and Drano in 1996. Perhaps Levine was taking ketamine as well when he committed his crimes: paying bribes, election fraud, tax fraud, and forcing a medical institution out of millions of dollars—the exact thing he accuses Blagojevich of doing against Mercy Hospital— among other things. The author of the complaint bashfully states Levine’s credibility was “vigorously challenged by the defense counsel” of the Rezko trial, hoping to link the failure of the defense to indict an obvious fiend like Rezko to the fact that Levine simply isn’t credible.

Whether because all these characters are now in jail or because the FBI had the foresight not to try and connect them to the bigger accusation, the evidence against Blagojevich for selling the Senate seat consists more of altered defendant quotes such as those discussed previously than witness testimony. Blagojevich himself has said that among the people recorded by the federal wiretap were White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, and maybe even President Obama. Among the bigger names in the indictment, however, is SEIU president and left-wing scandal magnet Andy Stern. No one made anything of it when the story first broke (Glenn Beck was muzzled at CNN back then), but Stern actually “served as an emissary” for an unnamed Senate candidate believed to be Valerie Jarrett to the governor to discuss the possibility of buying the seat. This is where the “three-way deal” was proposed: Andy Stern gives Rod Blagojevich a job after retiring from the governorship, Blagojevich appoints Jarrett to the Senate, and the White House would pay their dues to Stern. Jarrett was never appointed, but the White House certainly seems to be paying back something to Stern. He has been pegged a White House backroom puppetmaster, becoming the most frequent visitor during the first year of the Obama administration. He has also earned a reputation for ruthless authoritarianism. He is openly a fan of “the persuasion of power.” He makes naked threats like “we know where they live” to dissenting voices in his organization. Under his tenure, the SEIU has been responsible for savage beatings for which the criminals have not been held accountable.

Perhaps accusing Stern of having a hand in removing a problematic Democrat—one who refused to raise taxes during his tenure and professed an undying love for Richard Nixon—is a case of the boy who cried wolf. But if he follows a life philosophy that permits the types of comments and behavior his organization is guilty of, perjury does not seem beneath him. Stern does not come off as the kind of person who would be above baiting Blagojevich in conversation to talk about selling the senate seat, only to later have Blagojevich be quoted out of context and taken out of power. This especially if it would benefit an executive he has so much influence over, and if Blagojevich seemed ambivalent about Jarrett’s credentials. The federal complaint points out that the idea of making Blagojevich national director of an SEIU-run union organization, Change to Win, was never Blagojevich’s, but was directed at him through his chief of staff. Since the idea would benefit Jarrett the most, it is implied that the plan must have come from Jarrett or her emissary, Andy Stern. Blagojevich himself demonstrates hesitation at the idea of appointing Jarrett because he does not see her working to benefit the people, and proposes to his chief of staff the idea of an issue advocacy organization to promote “health care and other issues that I care about.”

The FBI does not customarily take a public official down from such a high pedestal without a significant amount of evidence. It is quite likely still that Blagojevich attempted to bend or break a few laws to his benefit. Most public officials, however, do not customarily react to accusations of this magnitude by demanding all the evidence be made public if they are certain of their guilt. Nearly every actor implicated in this affair has reacted atypically, but not least of all in these is the American public. Whether Blagojevich ends up in jail or, like colleague Eliot Spitzer, planning a second career is out of Americans’ hands (he states in his book that he has “not ruled out a career in public service”), but how that public treats him merits review. Analyzing the evidence publicly available in the federal complaint, the FBI doesn’t seem to have the “slam dunk” evidence that made for a better media story than reality. If America as a nation gave him a political pedestal (twice), the very least Blagojevich deserves is a fair look at the evidence. He might even be telling the truth.

As a nation, we didn’t throw Blagojevich under a bus; we threw him on an airplane tarmac during holiday season and, just to make sure he got it good, drove one of those luggage-filled golf carts over him a couple of times before the planes got there. Not since the Watergate scandal had the nation experienced such organized and devastating character assassination. It’s enough to make any suspicious mind curious, and it takes a bit of a conspiracy-oriented mindset to even contemplate that this man should be innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps it is the hair, or maybe the outlandish press conferences, or the fact that he unleashed the fury of Roland Burris onto the Senate, but Americans have a passion for disparaging this man. Yet the seventy or so pages accusing him in the federal complaint of attempting to sell the Senate seat generate many more questions than they answer. There is something thoroughly unsatisfying about the way it quotes the main characters and the integrity of the witnesses. It is simply filled with too many pseudonyms, too many brackets, too many ellipses to be telling the full story. The impression that someone is being protected in these pages is impossible to ignore.

Before getting to the extremely questionable evidence, it bears pointing out that the more obscure of two major claims, alleging that Blagojevich attempted to get a Chicago Tribune reporter fired for being critical of his administration, rings truer than the Senate seat accusation. The quotes from the governor (and his wife) clearly indicate his intentions and the sources seem to be, if not believable, at least consistent. He was leveraging the purchase of the Chicago Cubs to force the head of the Tribune to fire an enemy. Patti Blagojevich says it herself, in cruder words than that. The governor does not even attempt to defend himself from those accusations in his autobiography The Governor, a 200-page manifesto against racism and taxes that goes into his arrest in detail. It is the second accusation— that Blagojevich intended to sell Barack Obama’s former senate seat— which reads a bit like a retelling of Rashomon, with no one testimony aligning with another and no witness more credible than the next. In particular, there are two gaping holes in the federal argument against Blagojevich. The first is one that the governor made a hearty talking point out of; the quotes from taped conversations read suspiciously out of context. The second is the quality of the people willing to step forward and condemn him is subject to further inquiry.

Blagojevich’s foul language does little for his public image, but throwing around a few f-words shouldn’t put anyone in jail. And besides that, there is not all that much meat on the bones of this accusation. Yes, it is quite clear that he considered taking the Senate seat himself, with classic quotes like “I can parachute me there” and “I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying?” Contemplating this does not break any laws and, considering he was thinking about appointing Oprah Winfrey and eventually appointed Roland Burris, maybe he wasn’t his own worst choice after all.

Outside of being clear about considering himself a possible Senate candidate, one is hard-pressed to find direct quotes that sound like Blagojevich is trading personal monetary benefits for the seat. With the help of way too many editor-inserted words in quotes that are too short to hold so many, it may be possible to stretch them out into a smoking gun. In fact, many of the suspicious sentences—for example, the suggestion of a “three-way deal” between Blagojevich, the President, and the unions “so there is no obvious quid pro quo”—are not even attributed to the governor. Most of the time, though, the complaint accuses Blagojevich without evidence of things like stating “that he is willing to ‘trade’ the Senate seat to Senate Candidate 1 in exchange for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services.” The accusations are there, but the tapes aren’t quoted, and the witnesses questionable (more on that later).

Of the direct quotes, the most incriminating is also the most famous: “I’ve got this thing and it’s f****** golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f****** nothing.” Blagojevich has repeatedly stated that he meant nothing illegal by this claim, and that he merely wanted to put someone in office that would work to bring benefits back from Washington to the people of Illinois. He was, he claims, fighting for health care benefits for Illinois residents, for more money for the state government, to appoint someone who was first and foremost concerned with Illinois. This made him wary of candidates the White House handpicked, who would be more concerned with sponsoring legislation that would improve the Obama administration’s image. Moreover, he argues in his book that he had made what he describes as a “routine” political deal with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and his daughter Lisa. The elder Madigan would pass a bundle of laws benefitting Illinois residents and stop blocking Blagojevich’s initiatives in the legislature in exchange for Blagojevich appointing his daughter to the Senate seat. Lisa Madigan was serving as Illinois Attorney General at the time and was not a laughable suggestion for the seat, although bad blood between Blagojevich and the Madigans made the choice “personally repulsive” to him.

The more mundane part of the complaint seems to back up Blagojevich’s good intentions. He states openly that he would appoint a White House approved senator “in good faith . . . but it is not coming for free. . . .It’s got to be good stuff for the people of Illinois…” The complaint later explains that Blagojevich had a concrete plan for distributing this “good stuff,” further corroborating that he had bigger interests than himself. He is quoted as suggesting to the White House that he would appoint current White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett (“Senate Candidate 1”) if he could receive help in starting up an issue advocacy group, “so I can advocate health care and other issues I care about and help them.” In fact, Blagojevich emphasizes in the complaint that the nonprofit is the “one thing I’d be interested in.” The nonprofit sounds very much like a way to go around the Illinois legislature to enact the same reforms he would have wanted out of the Madigan deal. Looking for a senator who has an interest in allocating funds to an issue one has an interest in is not, to paraphrase the governor himself, an impeachable offense, and the consistency in the demands makes his claims more concrete. In fact, it would be a crime to appoint someone to office based on anything other than political interest in the same issues. It would only lead to stalemates. The press kept the idea of a 501(c)(4) organization under wraps, sticking to the shock-value quotes and laughing off the idea that The Hair, and the human under its control, would be interested in anything but itself. The direct quotes from the complaint seem to paint another story, and Blagojevich’s persistent claims to have all the tapes heard seem to indicate that there is more exonerating evidence under wraps.

Reading into the quotes from the governor alone, however, will lead nowhere. As the saying goes, the author is dead, and anyone can interpret anything from his words. Yet these possible out-of-context quotes are not the only suspicious items in the complaint. The list of people responsible for catching him in flagrante begins to cast some doubt on what was almost certain guilt this time last year, even those involved in the Tribune case. We already knew that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had had conversations with Blagojevich that incriminated the latter and not the former. As Blagojevich succeeded Emanuel in his Congressional seat prior to assuming the governorship, their relationship should come as no surprise. Nor should the presence of Obama himself make any jaws drop. It is way past them that big sharks swim.

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At first glance, it does appear that the Post got precisely what it wanted when it announced the official integration of their best escort friend into their semi-tabloid world. Pitching her some simple marriage questions, giving her a glossy interview and classing her up in a Sarah Palin outfit, Dupre has been welcomed with a sense of awe more than anything else. The New York Times political blog called the move “one of those milestones along the way that we’ll point to when our kids’ kids ask us innocently, ‘Grandpa, what was a newspaper?’” But it is their job to do that. The NY Daily News is similarly reeling. But among less biased media outlets, there is a common consensus that stealing a job from a hard-working writer and giving it to a former prostitute based on her status does not produce an emotion so much as a general physical feeling of nausea. Here is a woman who ended up in the right place at the right time by making a series of unconscionable mistakes, and as a society we reward her for it. It challenges the very fiber of our centuries-old meritocracy, and whether challenging the fiber of our society is your cup of tea or not, it is certainly monumental, one way or the other.

Despite the initial success of the publicity stunt, the entire idea generates more questions than it answers (which seem to be about five a week). Dupre certainly has one marketable skill, but it isn’t exactly writing advice columns, so how long will she be able to hide her lack of talent? Moreover, what kind of sod would be despondent enough to rely on advice from a woman famous for having sex with a sock-loving hypocrite like Eliot Spitzer? She seems to think the Tiger Woods harem want her around as a maternal figure, but it is as yet unclear how welcome she is to meddle in their affairs (pun intended). And if only, say, Ensign escorts or Sanford soulmates want her help, wouldn’t this column get repetitive? Many hope it will, putting Dupre on a one-way train to obscurity.

On the other hand, the rise and redemption of Ashley Alexandra Dupre is the one great moral victory of the Spitzer scandal. Time and again, Dupre has proven to be the most upstanding citizen of the bunch involved—Spitzer, the shady owners of Emperor’s Club VIP, even Silda Wall, whose forgiveness sets an unfortunate example for her daughters and all of New York’s young women. Dupre was merely doing her job, a consummate professional, and more than a year later she has yet to cash in with a tell-all book or a reality show. The only real rewards she has reaped from her scandal is ignominy, a couple of song downloads, and, now, a new job. Yes, a job that many have worked tirelessly to be qualified for, that many have spent years honing their journalistic skills, making connections, and improving themselves as human beings to get. That Dupre is being hired at the expense of any Columbia Journalism School graduate is an outrage. Yet it is hypocritical to focus on this one injustice and blame it on a woman that is just doing her best to reconstruct her life and, unlike many in similar positions and millions draining America’s social programs, actually trying to work for a living. She has never done anything but. The assent of Luke Russert and Peter Doocy is just as if not more morally objectionable than Dupre’s new job—at least she has an interesting life story to bring to the table— and there is no need to even go that far down the rabbit hole of nepotism. Fox News military hazard Geraldo Rivera confesses in chapter four of his 1991 autobiography Exposing Myself that the only reason WABC wanted him as a reporter, despite his complete lack of journalistic experience and preparation, was because he was Puerto Rican. Yes, affirmative action is single-handedly responsible for Geraldo’s reign of terror on late 20th century media. Perhaps we should be thankful that the worse the New York Post can do is to hurl Ashley Alexandra Dupre at us; it seems almost fair and comforting in comparison.

Whether this love/hate relationship with Dupre—love her, hate ourselves for it—pans out into a long-term career for her or not, this deep into the scandal Dupre has at least made her name prominent enough to merit her own segment on VH1’s “I Love the 00s.” She’s also emblematic of the evolution of fame from a hard-earned asset reserved for the rich and talented to a sort of “people’s fame” which desires only to love and be loved in return (see Levi Johnston, the entire cast of Jersey Shore). Almost two decades ago, it would have been impossible for Joey Buttafuoco to make a career out of his wife being shot by his jailbait lover. He only got as far as “Celebrity Boxing”, with a woman. Even the queen of political sex scandals, Monica Lewinsky, was temporarily exiled in England to avoid ignominy, and she didn’t even get paid for what she did. Had she waited a few years, she could have built a media empire. American pop culture is evolving faster than its moral code, and no one really has an answer as to whether we should be happy to see Dupre beat the system or disgusted at the state of our society, mostly because philosophers, once assigned to wasting time thinking about these things for us, have gone extinct. For now, all that is left is to stare mouth agape at the spectacle of someone, anyone, getting a job in this economy.

While no comment is less useful in times of turmoil than “it could be so much worse,” taking a look across the pond could provide some perspective for how strong, even through adversity, the American economy remains, and how even the most apparently powerful financial coalition could be hanging its stability by a thread. Even more importantly, taking a look at the flaws of fellow Western nations could help shape the policies of our future. Hidden among the avalanche of negative economic news last week came some unfortunate revelations for a currency the post-dollar world has taken to worship: the Euro. A Eurozone country stands dangerously close to a national bankruptcy, and the continent is in a panic about what that would mean for its currency. The country in question, Greece, was downgraded to the lowest credit level in the Eurozone, and how it arrived there could be a lesson for the Europeans as well as for our country and the value of the dollar.

A piece in the country’s largest newspaper Ta Nea reports that Finance Minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou took complete responsibility for Greece’s economic failings before the corps of the Foreign Press Association, but remained assertive in his belief that the nation would recover from its woes without help. “We don’t expect anyone to save us; we rely on our own forces,” he explained. He later told Bloomberg News that there was “absolutely” no chance of Greece defaulting. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde stood by the country, claiming that there was a “real, effective” plan in action to save Greece’s economy, but did not specify. Most of the other European officials on hand display much lower levels of confidence, however. Opposition to including Greece in the Eurozone at all has increased across the continent, although many supporters of aiding the small nation point out that this type of predicament is precisely why the Euro was adopted in the first place. Among the top of the EU chain of command, however, displeasure appears to be the most prominent emotion. EU Commissioner of Economic and Monetary Affairs Joaquín Almunia refused to mince words when he called Greece a “threat to the entire Eurozone.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel mentioned a “few time bombs” when asked about the state of the Euro, her statement confirmed to be about Greece by Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann. Considering the hole Greece has dug itself, with its public debt at 120% its GDP and predicted to rise to 135% by 2011, it is difficult to blame them. This economic behavior is common in the IMF welfare state of Latin America, but for a Eurozone country to be so close to bankruptcy when the Euro is doing so well triggers understandable frustration and confusion.

The relevance of this crisis to us may seem distant given the vast differences between the tiny, semi-agricultural Greek nation and our waning superpower, but every nation stands to learn from the mistakes of another. The story behind Greece’s demise, unsurprisingly, involves an outrageous amount of questionable spending at the hands of PASOK, the nation’s left-wing party (think slightly to the left of Nancy Pelosi). Between 1993 and 2009, PASOK only lost power for five years between 2004 and last October—the most recent term before the current Prime Minister, George Papandreou the younger (the elder being his grandfather; both have been president of the Socialist International), took office. Those years could not reverse the clock on some outrageously large projects for the small nation, the most prominent of these being the 2004 Olympic Games, which were clinched during PASOK years and cost the nation €7 billion. Add to that such PASOK-passed programs as a recently-launched €3 billion stimulus package and €550 million from a project called H.I.P.E.R.B., a sort of birthday present/bailout for all the other Balkan nations that has been extended to 2011, and the reality of bankruptcy begins to take shape. Greece spent themselves to ruin, and even during its more conservative period the government had to shell out €3 billion in damage costs for the 2007 forest fires. Even ignoring this massive drain on the national debt, it’s almost as if a socialist government deliberately spent the country to ruin in order to build it back up in an unrecognizable form.

Sound familiar? Many scholars and commentators concerned with the current spending spree the Obama Administration and Congress are treating themselves to have argued that this is precisely the plan they are trying to follow. That the inevitable ruin (should the spending continue) is deliberate may be conspiracy theory blather, but no one can deny the damage, deliberate or not, the continued spending by our nation’s leaders causes. Obamanomics— federal bailouts, the stimulus packages, the year-end $446.8 billion goody bag bill, the health care reform no one wants, the impending forced passing of cap and trade and the expansion of a war during a recession— has lead to a $12 trillion deficit, $11.5 trillion higher than Greece’s $450 billion debt.

Of course it would take a substantially larger amount to bankrupt our country, but Greece’s economic demise could be a mirror into America’s future if our government continues to spend egregiously with no plans to pay back the national debt. No country is too big to fail. We should know; we taught the Soviet Union that.

On the buyer level, Americans do seem to prefer consuming when they know part of what they are paying goes to helping someone less fortunate. A recent study on consumer preferences and charitable donations shows that while consumers prefer buying items when a percentage of the payment goes to charity, only in occasions where the national spotlight shines on a specific cause is it possible for a company to make more money by giving, assuming 10% of the item price goes to charity. While the study cites the enormous disaster of Hurricane Katrina, is it also possible for the argument to extend to a more widespread albeit less jarring problem? Now more than ever, private charities are playing a pivotal role in the survival of socioeconomically disenfranchised Americans. Unemployment is nationally in the double digits, banks are faltering, and more Americans find it difficult to make due with their salaries and promptly pay their bills. Unlike Katrina, however, this is a disaster that started at the top and has trickled down. As much as corporate donations are imperative for many charities to function, corporations were the first victims and continue to be jeopardized by the economic crisis. Since corporate donors tend to be essential to the finances of private charities, their failure breaks a circle of economic stability: corporations give to charities, who give back to communities, who then use their money to support corporations.

Many on the left express outrage on finding that the government they consider responsible for taking care of its most needy would spend outrageous sums of money to pay for bank bonuses for the outrageously wealthy. On the right, believers in the free market feel that forcing corporations to owe the government a favor will compromise the integrity of our economic regime. Both may be happy to learn that some of that bailout money will be cycling through the nation from some of the most charitable corporations, who needed a hand-up themselves this year.While many companies that were too big to fail may not have had the means with which to be magnanimous this year, many of the companies that were in the top ten of bailout money received were also near the top of most charitable lists even before they went into the red. General Motors received the fourth-largest government bailout package but made an appearance as Forbes’ eighth most charitable company in 2007 (a year when Americans were praised for being head-and-shoulders above the rest of the world in charitable donations.Fannie Mae, also on both lists, ranked first or second in the nation among all foundations in donations between 1998 and 2004, often surpassing the totals of independent foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment. Bank of America donated $211 million in 2007, landing them the number two spot on Forbes’ list, and made a commitment to keeping their similarly large 2008 donation numbers stable in 2009, and kept their word. Citigroup made both the 2007 and 2008 lists, as well. While four of the top ten is not exactly a home run in donations, the fact that there is a culture of generosity in corporate America strong enough to push corporate welfare recipients to donate millions of dollars is something we should be proud of as a nation, and every dollar helps.

Whether they can repeat their performances for 2009 is still up for speculation, but many of those companies’ histories indicate that at least part of their hearts have been in the right place for some time. And for those who doubt the efficiency of donating money—though many of the greatest corporate donations are also in volunteer time and in-kind product donations—the organizations receiving the donations efficiently serve a variety of purposes. Bank of America’s philanthropic funds go in large part to a program called Neighborhood Builders, in which the funds are funneled directly into local charities in underprivileged neighborhoods where those that live there know how the fix problems best. A few months ago, GM raised $160,000 for the United Way, which, among thousands of programs, helps many local organizations with holiday events. And, of course, the Salvation Army—a favorite of Target, Time Warner, and Citibank, among others—has a long history of helping those in need across the globe, whether through disaster relief, recreational programs, or simply feeding the hungry. The help is reaching those who need it, and the government was quick to help these corporations keep the cycle moving. In the worst of times, only through helping each other will we get back on our feet, and the pleasant surprise of corporate philanthropy indicates that the American spirit of giving is still aflame this holiday season.

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The written proof appeared in the form of a series of leaked emails from climatologists working around the world for the respected University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in the UK. The topic of most of the email threads is specifically what the researchers should do about the fact that the global warming trend has stagnated in recent years, and that the BBC has picked up on the temperature’s downward spiral. Others specifically take on the request through the Freedom of Information Act that some information be released to the public. Some emails suggest organizing the data through different software or in a different display such that light perusal will leave the reader believing the data indicates a warming trend, while some other participants in the thread suggest that their research, despite a few botched numbers, yields the correct result. The most damning of the statements in this thread, however, comes from Dr. Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Trenberth, researching in Boulder, Colorado, became increasingly concerned about the cold weather trend that began to dig holes into their hypothesis.

“The high the last 2 days was below 30ºF and the normal is 69ºF, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10ºF. The low was about 18ºF and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

[…]

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Other, later threads discussing the FOIA requests for data specifically include such quotable gems as “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and “Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!” Quite the inconvenient timing for these emails to leak now that President Obama, fresh from losing the support of pacifist Left, seeks to regain some of it by compromising the American economy with some more green initiatives at a climate summit in Copenhagen where other large nations are expected to join with the United States in a promise to cut carbon emissions. Given the proximity of what had been billed before the global warming scandal as a major event in the history of combating climate change and the outrageous fraud surrounding the theory as a whole, it was time for a major distraction.

The left-wing propaganda machine spun in overdrive last week to fabricate misleading and irrelevant scandal; President Obama has been publicly denounced as a liar enough during his tenure. The more subdued members of that wing have been extremely effective at doing so, with Chris Matthews calling the American troops “the enemy” and even the predictably noisy Michael Moore playing the George W. Bush card, calling Obama a “wartime President.” For those who find the musings of Chris Matthews a little too high brow, there’s always the White House party crashers, Tiger Woods’ harem of adult film stars, and naked pictures of Levi Johnston. There is no end to the dazzling array of mind-numbingly trivial information to throw out against hard news and see what sticks.

But although the pragmatists (and Tiger Woods) have been holding up the fort of distraction, the bleeding hearts have tackled “Climategate,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed, with zeal as the biggest breach in scientific privacy in the history of modern science. That’s the outlandish argument California Senator Barbara Boxer has raised against the legal release of these documents. “You call it Climategate,” she asserted, “but I call it Email-theft-gate,” perhaps because she refused to believe the few days after the scandal broke, when the emails were verified as legally released, actually happened. Even Pravda has declared the emails legally leaked, and, rather than questioning the legality of the release of the information (though they mistakenly cite the US FOIA rather than the UK one), suggests the scientists are the ones that may be facing criminal troubles. Then there is James Carville, for whom the past two decades or so never happened. Much like Adam Lambert lives in a grotesque 80s fantasy world, so too does Carville inhabit an alternate universe where Bill Clinton is the nation’s first Black President, Rahm Emanuel is some spunky, easily-ignored kid, and the Contract with America is still a fantasy that helps Newt Gingrich sleep at night. It is the only way to understand why he would take such an offensive stance when the Democrats have been cornered, caught red-handed involved in a massive global lie. Having a man on your side that doesn’t know when (or how) to retreat is only an asset when you haven’t been checkmated by your own deceit. Otherwise, it just makes you obnoxious as well as untrustworthy.

But never mind Carville, whose raison d’être is to publicly embarrass Democrats by revealing their true motives. Let’s look at their image. The squabbling Democrats proved they weren’t too big to fail on their mission to make Climategate a nonissue and forced the White House itself to intervene. Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency dropped a bombshell: carbon dioxide, the gas plants require to live, is dangerous to human health. It must be regulated. The EPA didn’t spend too much time specifying exactly how naturally existing greenhouse gases affect humans negatively when they themselves produce them, merely citing ominously that an “increase is deteriorating the natural balance in our atmosphere” and that “the threat is real.” The threat, that is, of carbon and oxygen hurting your health, not of the Left exploiting a climate (no pun intended) of fear to promote their absurd, now disproven, agenda. On the bright side, blacklisting CO2 will make us the belle of the ball in Copenhagen!  And we can’t let that wretched Pollution Lobby get soot all over our lovely dress.

Whether or not Climategate will affect a conference already predicted to end with no measurable progress requires at least for the conference to conclude, and hopefully someone there will be kind enough to measure the event’s carbon footprint, and perhaps delete the information if it is too incriminating. As Americans, what it means on a global scale should not concern us—it is the promotion of dangerous domestic policies like Cap and Trade that should catch our attention. The emails don’t give Americans a license to litter egregiously or needlessly kill polar bears, either; taking care of our habitat is still a measure of personal responsibility just as keeping a tidy house is. It should, however, make us think twice when accused of being murderers or destroying our childrens’ future simply because we refuse to drive a Prius or abandon plans to buy plane tickets.

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For a person who has been famous for less than a year, Lambert sure has to deal with a lot of whining. It took Barack Obama at least two years for his detractors to reach Orly Taitz-level hysteria.

Among the biggest whiners, of course, are the Parents Television Council, who deemed the performance “wholly unsuitable for children now and it’s pathetic, given the amount of economic support that children and teenagers bring to the industry today” and demanding that those who witnessed what they call, in their limited knowledge, “oral sex scenes” to hound the FCC into action. Matt Drudge was sufficiently outraged (?) to put him front and center on his web page, right under Joe Lieberman impersonating a Saint Bernard. They are joined by, ABC reports, about 1500 active complainers that forced the network to edit the West Coast broadcast of the performance for fear of FCC repercussions.

Lambert, of course, reverted to his now stale coyness when faced with the fact that he had rocked the nation enough to take Sarah Palin’s vapid bespectacled face off the cover of Drudge. You can almost hear him tee-heeing with glee when asked if they thought the fallout of his performance would be this overwhelming. “A lot of what I do is freestyle,” he initially told CNN. It took another day of nagging to get him to make a meaningful statement, but the 24 hours were worth the wait. “I’m a performer, not a babysitter,” he told old pal Ryan Seacrest. He also pointed out that he was the victim of a double standard, but the fact that he elaborated little other than comparing himself to Britney Spears makes one believe that the scope of his scandal escapes him.

Lambert may not be bright enough to fully comprehend the political repercussions of his actions, but the outrage against his performance unmasks the hypocrisy of conservative morality watchdogs in a way nothing has uncovered it since C. Delores Tucker began to buy stocks in Sony and Time Warner (incidentally, Tucker was a member of the PTC Advisory Board). Only liberals expressed concern that country legacy and Disney Channel nobility Miley Cyrus, only 17, danced on a stripper pole at this year’s Teen Choice Awards. Her red-blooded American dad surely didn’t seem to mind. Or how about The Hills nobody Heidi Montag, famous for, um, well, there’s this picture with upstanding citizen Rod Blagojevich, I guess? She appeared on every tween girl’s favorite competition, the Miss Universe Pageant, wearing a skin-colored, skin-tight jumpsuit (so 1999), prancing around seductively to a blasphemous remake of the 1982 Yazoo hit “Situation.” It was the stuff anorexic nightmares are made of, on a program that may be the single most harmful broadcast to the self-esteem and mental health of teenagers on television today. The beauty pageant cultural phenomenon gives a platform to dunces like Carrie Prejean to promote their life philosophy: it’s only the book’s cover that counts (to be fair, given her ability to construct sentences, Prejean may be one of the smarter ones).

And if it’s “the gay” we’re all up in arms about here, where was the Parents Television Council when Russian misfits t.A.T.u. owned MTV, running around kissing on middle school playgrounds everywhere? The rest of the world was up in arms, but since they weren’t really gay, apparently it wasn’t a problem in America. Even if they were, what harm could cheapening sexuality by employing it as a marketing ploy do to America’s children, anyway, especially if the people engaging in this behavior are attractive young women? Certainly not as much as genuinely expressing one’s sexuality through art, especially if the people doing this are questionably made-up young men.

To a certain extent, the puritans have won: ABC rescinded its invitation to have Lambert perform on Good Morning America, and last night Lambert announced over Twitter (please disregard the autosexual Twitter background) that he was being barred from performing on Jimmy Kimmel Live and ABC’s New Year’s Eve special (to his credit, he was sympathetic to the network). Of course, on the other hand, Lambert became the headline of a week where the Senate voted for Cloture on the Reid health care bill, Oprah Winfrey quit her daytime talk show, and Barack Obama announced he was considering making a decision on the Afghanistan war. All of this stemming from one of the worst vocal performances of his career, which somehow upstaged the queen of shock performance art, Lady Gaga, and got an invite to CBS’ Early Show. He is now a product networks are fighting over. And, ultimately, he made people think— is gender the line that dictates what is acceptable behavior in a musical performance? Is sexual orientation the line? Are the PTC so overwhelmingly bored that they will protest anything (short answer: no)?

Ultimately, forcing the nation to look itself in the mirror and reassess what private and public behavior society deems acceptable does no little benefit to a nation struggling with a delicate civil rights issue whose obvious solution continues to be hampered by people who cannot discern between political and religious liberties. Unlike other social issues like light drug use and abortion, there is no safe haven for those who struggle with bearing the cross of alternative sexualities. Even San Francisco and, most recently, New York City are powerless to push forward on the LGBT rights issue, and whether he had wanted this or not, Lambert’s behavior fits squarely into the center of this civil and religious rights narrative. He is now not only in a position to be demonized by the intolerant Right, but if he plays his cards right, he could become a martyr for the radical Left. Let us not forget that ABC, with whom Lambert has become persona non grata (although they have finally made tentative peace and compromised to let Lambert on the station in pre-taped format) was formerly the home of the right-wing John Stossel (the Left doesn’t listen enough to realize Stossel is actually radically libertarian) and still home to the questionably-striped Jake Tapper, one of the first broadcast organizations to come out in defense of Fox News when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn decided to declare war on the conservative network. Someone in the network has noticed that partisanship sells; ABC has been “asking for it” from the more liberal CBS and NBC for a while, the former adopting him onto their morning show when ABC turned him how and the latter scheduling an appearance on Jay Leno’s fledging comedy venture. Now that President Obama has become a neo-conservative about five years after that fad died and, with the health care bill passed in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out of the limelight, Lambert could be the next in line to spark a political firestorm that merely anticipates a catalyst to appear for it to begin burning. The scandal would be atypical—more atypical than the snoozefest that is the Tiger Woods affair, anyway—and, unlike most pseudo-sex scandals, constructive in the dialogue it would initiate nationally. Not to mention it would be a ratings bonanza for all involved, and every little bit of corporate success helps in this economy. He may not have intended to position himself this way, but as much as Lambert’s motives were limited to entertaining his audience and basking in his own fabulous glory, the outrage surrounding his identity may make him the most qualified contestant to carry the American Idol title since the program’s inception.

One can argue that “Palin 2012” is one of the funniest and most original political statements of this SNL season. To liberals, the momentum for a Palin-Beck ticket from the Right appeared to be snowballing out of control. Together, the two greatest conservative icons of the nation would be all but unstoppable. After all, even if the Right were not intentionally monolithic, those on the Left still believe that they have enough of a stranglehold on power to force them into working together, and their biggest fear—that the Right would succeed in organizing—seemed perilously close to fruition. The success of their frustrated parody should have been bad news for the former Alaska governor. It was a universal hit based on one simple premise: absolutely no one wants to see Sarah Palin be president. Not liberals, not conservatives, and certainly not Glenn Beck. The problem is that Sarah Palin didn’t seem to get the joke. SNL probably used a November 17 interview with Newsmax.com as inspiration for their parody, during which Palin offhandedly commented that she considered Beck a “hoot” and that she is considering him as a potential vice presidential running mate.

The silence from the Beck camp was deafening, especially after the parody. Beck had been hyping up his grandiose new plan for 2010, during which he threatened he would become more politically active. “I’m going to teach you how to be a community organizer next year, oh, because two can play at that game,” he told his audience on his WOR radio program last week. It seemed the carving of Glenn Beck’s political career had begun, with or without Sarah Palin. Palin’s response to his autonomous political threat was a little more coy flirting on his home television network:

Palin was asked during an interview with Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” about the chances that she “would run on a ticket with Fox’s own Glenn Beck,” as the conservative outlet Newsmax reported might be a possibility in 2012.

[…]

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

She then proceeded to call him and her and the whole idea of them running on a ticket together, once again, a “hoot,” probably hoping her folksy demeanor would disarm Beck enough to goad him into an answer. That much she did get from him.

“I don’t think things are hoots,” Beck commented on his WOR Radio program last Wednesday. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s a hoot. I would never use the word hoot, and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she would stop using the word ‘hoot.’” As for the prospect of a Palin/Beck administration, he envisions a nightmare scenario for him just as much as the rest of us: “She’d be yapping or something, and I’d say, “I’m sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I’m not in the kitchen.” He went on to add that he had spoken to Palin about it and he “didn’t even know what she was saying.”

On first listen, this one appeared to be a political freebie for the liberals, who went into emergency victim mode—on Palin’s behalf, of all people— about Beck’s “sexist” comments. Had he been discussing an interaction with any other woman this side of Phyllis Schlafly, I would have agreed. But Beck, a master of disguise, is not showing off his misogynistic stripes—he’s playing Palin’s own game, and beating her at it. After touting the importance of the “American mom” and leading by example, making painfully obvious how subservient he is to his own wife, he has built up a significant amount of street cred among female conservatives. He knows all hope of ingratiating himself with female liberals evaporated long ago—he’s not trying to court them, anyway—but keeping the traditional housewives happy is a top priority. In fact, in some circles Beck is considered somewhat of an honorary mom. This is the only possible position from which it would be acceptable to criticize Palin for showing off her impressive body in what would become the cover of the November 23 edition of Newsweek. “What was she thinking?!” he wailed on his radio program. “How could she not realize they would attack her for this?”

Many will argue that this is the kind of unfair “she was asking for it” point of view misogynists often employ when a woman wearing a miniskirt late at night gets raped. Others more prone to assigning personal responsibility will argue that, well, she was asking for it. Guess which side the average conservative will tend to fall on.

This is the atmosphere in which Beck prepared his attack. This is the mood he put his listeners—many of them Palin fans—before enlightening them on how ridiculous he actually considered the idea of being under Palin’s authority. A regular Beck listener would have already been both staunchly convinced of Beck’s reverence towards the hardworking American housewife and slightly jaded about Palin’s promise to be the GOP’s savior. Couple her willingness to sell her body for political gain with what many conservatives would consider massive parenting failures and, really, does a woman like Palin deserve to be anywhere but the kitchen? And more importantly: is there anywhere liberals would rather put her?

Beck has not launched an attack against women in politics, but on his adversaries sharing space in the American Right wing. Having hammered the Obama administration to the ground all year, Republicans/conservatives/whatever they are calling themselves today have bought themselves the breathing room necessary to address their identity crisis. They know that they are capitalists, and they know they love America, but whether they are autocratic about their preferences is a more nuanced issue. Social freedoms fall under this category, as do respect for free media and foreign military activity. Palin’s wing of the party prefer to micromanage American lives, silence the “gotcha” media, and pray their way out of wars. Beck distrusts the government too much, no matter who runs it, to give it the power necessary to go about such activity, and he knows the first message to be manipulated under a Palin administration is his own.

The ideology of the conservatives makes it imperative for them to control the other half of their political wing, and libertarians don’t often warm up to being told what to do. Beck’s incendiary comments serve to highlight to the libertarians in his office what him selling out to a conservative administration would mean: conservatives yapping away at him while he irreverently fights the power, and eventually destroys himself. The alternative—a libertarian administration with conservative underlings—would function more smoothly by definition, because libertarians don’t nag. Turning the George Lakoff model on its head, Beck is making right-wingers choose between Palin’s Strict Mother—no drugs, no sex, and certainly no gay tomfoolery in her Christian vision of America—and his Nurturing Father, a concerned authority figure who guides his followers away from evil without ever stopping to judge them (who was the guy that said “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”? Probably not anyone Sarah Palin has read). Picking a fight with Palin will kick the latter’s victimization instincts into overdrive, but when the person she is trying to demonize has already run circles around her folksiness, incompetence, and hypocrisy, perhaps the only thing to do is put her tail between her legs and get back in the kitchen.