Galley Friend K.K. has a couple more posts up, which are long, thoughtful, and interesting. Including this instant classic during the course of a reluctant defense of Sarah Palin:

Now, only ambitious people go into politics, and most successful politicians have tended to start early.  Both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich plotted their careers while staring at the ceiling at night as teenagers.  Both were able to jump nimbly to new perches when things didn’t work out and still end up where they wanted to be, or close.

With Mrs. Palin, one finds a different phenomenon: the most freighted moment in recent American politics may have been when she looked Frank Murkowski in the eyes and thought, “I’m smarter than you are.” She made short work of then Gov. Murkowski and began the career that has left us all scratching our heads.

When the Atlantic go prude? Time was, they were happy to endorse the hook-up one-night stand getting balled in the alley behind a bar “sex out of love” as an “amazing, wonderful, transformative” act. Now they’re running long pieces about the problems with pornography and immutable gender differences and this crazy hard-core piece about Karen Owen, Tucker Max, and the Duke social culture by Caitlin Flanagan.

It looks like the theocons and Christianists have taken over. Sigh.

Over at the Wall Street Journal I’ve reviewed Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything. I won’t pile on here.

So President Obama seems to have honed in on how the executive branch is supposed to respond to local crises–which is great! His answer: Dispatch FBI Director Robert Mueller to Arizona and force him to stand around as a prop and then . . . wait for it . . . have the FBI set up a dedicated task force on the case involving “hundreds of FBI agents.”

That’s right–we need to tie down “hundreds of FBI agents” in an investigation where the bad guy is already caught, he almost certainly worked alone, was part of no network or larger conspiracy, and is, if not legally guilty, then certainly responsible for having committed the crimes.

For a little perspective, the FBI–which is charged with being America’s main counter-terrorism force–has just 13,000 agents. So if only 200 agents are fanned out across Arizona trying to figure out what in the world happened, then 1.5 percent of our counter-terrorism capability is being tied down by a single spree crime.

Guess we don’t have to worry about jihadis anymore!

Look, the killing spree in Arizona is really, really terrible. At least as terrible as the Omar Thornton spree murders last August and the Nidal Hassan spree killing in 2009. Each case was terrible in its own way. (Though only Hassan’s had actual ideological causes.) But the world is often a cruel and dangerous place. Prince George’s County–a suburb of DC–has had 11 murders so far in 2011. We’re not sending the feds to canvas PG County to determine exactly what’s going on.

Galley Friend A.W. sent along this clip of Terry Taylor in his sad WWF gimmick as the Red Rooster. I never thought much of the Red Rooster, but in his heel days in the WCW, Taylor was a great mid-card guy.

I’ve been thinking a little bit about the great heels of my time but I can’t put together any coherent group. Any list would have to include Roddy Piper, Macho Man, Triple H, Bobby Heenan, and be topped by Ric Flair. But a whole bunch of slots would be open for discussion.

Suggestions welcome.

Here’s Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, diagnosing the hole in America’s soul:

“And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Umm, isn’t Mecca kind of the mecca for prejudice and bigotry? I mean, Mecca won’t even allow non-Muslims inside the Mecca city limits. They have road blocks and religious police on the lookout for intruders and everything. Just saying.

Perhaps Sheriff Dupnik will help relieve some conservatives of their knee-jerk belief in the innate wisdom and goodness of all law enforcement officers.

Update: Jacob Weisberg is even sillier than Ezra Klein. He blames Arizona on . . . GOP opposition to Obamacare:

First you rile up psychotics with inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country.

Weisberg is confused–he’s mistakenly inserting his own crazy critique of Bush for the crazy conservative critique of Obama.”Tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country” were the explicit complaints of the left about the Bush administration. Remember the people on the left who frequently claimed that they thought Bush would cancel elections? Remember “Bush lied, thousands died”? Remember Howard Dean’s rally cry of “take our country back”?

Even the craziest people on the right don’t think that Obama is fixing to be president for life or that he somehow lied Obamacare into existence. The right’s complaints about Obama are more along the lines of “statism, socialism, and bringing back the constitution.”

The future editor of the Washington Post writes:

[T]he reality is that a violent act that could be clearly traced to the rhetoric of certain leaders or groups would lead to much more damaging and coercive restrictions on political speech than anything people are considering now. Having this conversation when no one has blood on their hands is far preferable to having it when someone does.

Or, to put it another way, Fake, but true!

So people criticizing Obama better start watching what they say now, before they really do get someone killed.

I’ve stepped away from the sports buffet for the last year or so, but I made time yesterday to hunker down and watch the entire second half of the Eagles-Packers game. It was, by a long measure, the most sports-entertainment product I’ve watched in one sitting since last year’s Super Bowl.

Despite the Eagles’ loss, I was pretty stoked and part of my excitement came from realizing that it didn’t really matter that I’d been gone for so long. Everything was still the same. The Eagles were vaguely competent, over-achieving team good enough to get close.

The INT at the end of the game felt like a dagger at the time, but Galley Brother B.J. explains, calmly and dispassionately, that the pick was really the least of the problems:

The Eagles played very badly (and so did the Packers or it wouldn’t have been close). Does Reid have something against Winston Justice or does he just not know how to adjust? This is the 2nd game where Reid has let an elite pash rusher dominate Justice without using a back or TE to help Justice out (the first game was the Giants game where Justice gave up 6 sacks to Osi Umenyora).

That said, I liked the final offensive play call. 40 seconds left, no timeouts, need a touchdown, and the Packers are in 1-on-1 coverage. I doubt the Eagles would have seen so few defenders in the endzone for the rest of the game. I fully support going for the touchdown on that throw. The ball was under thrown which might have been intentional figuring that the DB’s would be making sure no one got behind them. Or the ball could have been under thrown because being out of football for about 2 years (including 1 year in prison) and then playing 30 snaps for a year and only throwing 5 passes doesn’t turn you into an unstoppable QB.

Oh well, the Wild Card round is the new NFC Championship game.

That sounds about right. Andy Reid is a mystifying figure. On the one hand, what he’s accomplished in Philadelphia in terms of regular season records and play-off appearances is nothing short of awesome. There aren’t five coaches during the last ten years who are in his class. From an organizational view, he’s a fantastic big-picture manager.

But on the other hand, he often has teams show poorly in big spots. He’s not very good at in-game adjustments or on-the-fly coaching. And he’s possibly the worst boss in America. (Not that this matters to us fans.)

Back during the ’90s baseball people often asked if you’d rather be the Braves or the Marlins: Would you rather have a consistent winner for a sustained period of time, or an up-and-down franchise that occasionally won a championship.

I’ve always thought that I’d prefer the Braves. And that’s kind of what Reid’s Eagles are. And, on balance, I think they do make for a more enjoyable fan experience than, say, the Bucs.

But as I’ve said before, while I’m sure I’ll miss Reid when he’s gone, I won’t miss him when he leaves.