The Weekly Tendown July 3-9 2011

Dear Internet:

A week and a half ago turtles lined up on the tarmac of JFK delaying flights.

I had to wait to get my curly fries at the Checkers drive thru for this family of ducks to pass.  The mother is right behind, just out of the shot.

It's Tendown 84.  I've got more work to do today, so it's links.

1. Do You Remember Barry Halper?



Halper was the big baseball artifact collector; if you ever read a story in SI  in the 1980s or 90s about sports memorabilia, you saw at least a reference to Barry Halper; when I went back to grad school about a decade ago I interned at a south Florida sports museum, and Halper's legacy was true north for the entire enterprise.  Beyond sports memorabilia as commerce, when you think about the preservation of baseball's material culture as having a real historical importance, Barry Halper was probably deserving of greater consideration than he was given for the Hall of Fame.

Except, it looks like he was a fraud.

2. The 45th President of the United States



Gun to my head, preferably not the one held by the Texas Governor, Obama is re-elected in 2012, even with the jobs report this week.

But that might require people like me to vote for him again, and I'm unlikely to do that.  Whatever budget deal he's going to cut will be some variation of astonishingly bad, and at some point, if you're on the left, and you criticize Obama for accommodating the right - then you probably need to stop accommodating the Democrats.  The best avenue for a sports team to win a title is to lose big for awhile (it's harder to see with baseball, but the Giants won because of high draft picks that we got from losing; if it were the NFL, Sabean would have been fired for the bad decisions that led to the losing, and someone else would have swept in, made the draft picks, and gotten credit for the WS) you hoped that might be the case with Obama, that after the complete discrediting of right wing economic ideology if ever there was a time for real progressive reform, it would have been now.  Instead - we're talking about Social Security cuts.

If people like me stay home in 2012, that opens the door for a Republican.  Right now, on Intrade, the second most likely Republican to become the next President of the United States is a guy currently not running, Rick Perry.

I've written before about that day of fasting and Christian prayer Perry is involved in next month - here, is a really interesting piece about how its Perry, among all of the possible Republican nominees, who is consolidating support among the big hitters on the religious right.  Maybe its 2016 after a second Obama term...but if you ask me right now who the 45h President will be, gun to my head, I'll say Rick Perry.

3. Ban Porn!
Perry hasn't yet signed the pledge that Bachmann and Santorum took this week, to ban all forms of pornography, to make it more difficult to divorce, and to declare that homosexuality is a choice.  If you didn't know better, you'd think it was a left leaning group, and not the Family Leader (I'm sorry, FAMiLY LEADER, all the letters are in caps except for the i to show the submission of the individual) who was pinning the Republicans to extreme social conservative positions.  If it turns out the Family Leader (I don't have the energy to do the caps thing again) is actually the Yes Men, don't be shocked.

4. Frank Rich
Here's Rich, now at New York Magazine, talking about Obama's failure to confront our real economic problems.

5. Privatized Jail
Here are two things that are true.

1. The United States locks people in jail at a historically significant rate.  A rate that has exponentially increased over the past couple of decades.

2. Over that same couple of decades, we've dramatically increased the shift to privatizing prisons.

Has the profit motive contributed to our willingness to lock people up?  Consider here. And here.


Judith Greene, a policy analyst with Justice Strategies, a nonprofit sentencing-reform advocacy group in New York, says, "Profits by no means created the machinery of mass incarceration, no more than defense contracts invented war, but the huge profits to be made by incarcerating an ever-growing segment of our population serves the system very well."


"Profits oil the machinery, keep it humming and speed its growth.


6. Look at This Chart!
Technology is bananas.

7. Turley, Writing about Casey Anthony
I don't have any idea whether Casey Anthony's guilty or not, but if you just followed the trial through news reports, you don't either, Here's Jonathan Turley's take.


While many Americans learned about the case through ciphers like Grace and an army of bloggers who focused on Anthony’s love life and pictures of the adorable Caylee, the jurors were focusing on the evidence:
•There was no clear evidence of how the child died.
•There were no witnesses to the act.
•There was no clear evidence of a motive.
For every major circumstantial fact offered by the prosecution, the jurors had doubt as to whether it was true or whether it tied Anthony to the death. In the end, the only clear crime was lying to the police, the count on which Anthony was found guilty.


8. The All Time 49er/Raider 45 Man Roster
I put up three pieces this week, the continuation of my look at the all time rosters for every NFL franchise.  The all time NFL North roster is here, and you can get to the Packers and Vikings through that post.

As an early preview to you, the loyal Tendown readers - here's an amalgamation, the best of the Bay Area - it's the All Time Raiders/49ers 45 man roster.

QB Joe Montana

      QB Steve Young

      QB John Brodie

RB Marcus Allen

RB Roger Craig

      RB Joe Perry

      RB Hugh McElhenny

WR Jerry Rice

WR Tim Brown

       WR Fred Biletnikoff

       WR Cliff Branch

TE Brent Jones

     TE Todd Christensen

C Jim Otto

G Gene Upshaw

G Steve Wisniewski

T Art Shell

T Bob St. Clair

    OL Randy Cross

    OL Keith Fahnhorst

    OL Harris Barton

DE Howie Long

DT Leo Nomellini

DT Bryant Young

DE Tommy Hart

     DL Charlie Krueger

     DL Michael Carter

     DL Ben Davidson

OLB Dave Wilcox

ILB Matt Millen

OLB Ted Hendricks

     LB Matt Hazeltine

     LB Dan Conners

     LB Phil Villapiano

     LB Patrick Willis

CB Jimmy Johnson

S Ronnie Lott

S Jack Tatum

CB Willie Brown

    DB Lester Hayes

    DB Terry McDaniel

    DB George Atkinson

    DB Nnamdi Asomugha

PK Sebastian Janikowski

P Ray Guy

QB - Joe/Young are unquestionably 1-2, there's a better argument that Steve should start than that anyone else should be second string.  Brodie was not as good, on a per game basis, as Stabler; for me, his cumulative advantage makes him a solid pick, but I wouldn't think a Stabler selection would be wrong necessarily.  Tittle is 5th, real close to Stabler, and could be called third string.  

RB - One could move the ordering around, but not the composition of the quartet; per game you might say McElhenny was the best of the four, and his total Niner career wasn't so far below the other three that you couldn't start him if you wanted to.  I'm comfortable with this ordering.  Van Eeghen and Willard are dead heat for fifth.

WR - Starters are easily the starters.  If you wanted to say TO needs to crack the quartet, I don't inherently disagree, as he was better per game than anyone but Jerry, and the other two Raiders don't have the amount of career that Brown had.  I'll say they had enough though to keep Owens 5th.

TE - Jones by a tick over Christensen, Casper was a better player than both, but I'll say didn't have enough career to get by either.

OL - No question about the starters.   No question about the backups.  This is pretty easy.

DL - Hall of Famers and then a drop to Hart and the backups.  Hardman, Stubblefield, Haley, Sistrunk, Townsend could all take that last spot.

LB - The outside starters are easy, Millen's combined work with both teams slips him into the MLB slot.  You could consider Haley for that last spot or Norton or you could get out ahead maybe a year early and plug in Willis, as he's headed for this roster.  In fact, that's the switch I just made.  I swapped Willis in for Keena Turner.  

DB - No question at all about almost every member of the secondary, starters/backups.  That 8th spot is in play, and that's sort of important as this team has 23 Raiders/22 Niners (assigning Jerry, Roger, Ronnie to SF and Millen to the Raiders) so if this spot were flipped to a Niner, that would change the balance.  Per game, its Nnamdi and Charles Woodson - for total value, you'd take Merton Hanks.  I'm going to leave it as it is for now.

9. This Week's Quiz

Prepared for someone who isn't me.  It's about inequality, it's here.  It's good.  

10. And In Case You Missed a Few of the Questions

It's probably a left wing plot to keep you stupid.

That's all for this time.  I'll be back next time...if there is a next time...

Your pal,

Jim