Fantastic stuff from Galley Friend A.W.:

André was billed as being undefeated, which was presumably untrue but functionally valid; he certainly never lost a straight singles match to pinfall or submission during this period. He didn’t need to, though — he would elevate his opponents in the audience’s eyes just by letting them get in a few good minutes against the giant. As Jerry “the King” Lawler, one of the many local heroes to get the rub from André, put it to Krugman: “He’d let you do anything you wanted in a match. Other than beat him… But if he didn’t like you, he’d make you look like crap, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.” This became a pattern in André’s career, the willingness to make his opponent look good, unless he personally disliked the guy. The explanations for this are assorted — that André was protective of his place on top of the food chain, that André respected the tradition of wrestling and detested anyone who didn’t — but the result was a legend of André’s temperament that was less a story of personality dispute and more like the old tales of the angry and unpredictable Greek gods. And if you were one of the unlucky few whom André decided to smite, well, god help you.

By this time, André was undeniably a megastar. In 1974, the Guinness Book of World Records named him the highest paid professional wrestler, with a one-year take of $400,000. The Washington Redskins offered him a tryout — and even viewed as a publicity stunt, it shows the degree of André’s celebrity. He appeared (in costume) onThe Six Million Dollar Man, playing a dastardly Sasquatch. In 1976, on the night that Muhammad Ali fought Japanese pro wrestler Antonio Inoki in a terribly ill-conceived inter-disciplinary match, André fought ham-and-egger Chuck Wepner (the inspiration for the Rocky movies) in Shea Stadium.

I get the sense that very few people are non-plussed by the passage of President Obama’s healthcare reform bill last night–you are either enthusiastically happy with the new bill or vociferously unhappy with it. Some mildly-interelated thoughts for both camps:

* As a political matter this was a destabilizing act. Passing a gargantuan piece of legislation with permanent  consequences for the country using only the support of one party (and against bipartisan opposition) against significant popular unhappiness with the legislation will have large political consequences, both immediate and long-term.

Seats that were safe will not be. Candidates who are not ready for prime-time will find themselves winning the political lottery. ObamaCare will destabilize the political environment in the same way the Iraq war did, upsetting coalitions, elevating new figures, and dooming once solid-seeming politicians on all sides.

* No Democratic politician can any longer credibly claim to be anti-abortion. This is particularly worrisome because once abortion becomes a purely party-driven issue (as opposed to a mostly party-driven issue) it will become even harder to find common ground of the “safe, legal, and rare” variety. By necessity Democrats will cease to be pro-choice and become objectively pro-abortion.

* For people who like to think of themselves in ideological, rather than party-based, political terms, ObamaCare is a hard lesson. When push comes to shove, political parties matter, quite a bit. Any Republican who, say, voted for Jim Webb as a sensible, hard-nosed Democrat over George Allen, a bumbling, embarrassment of a Republican, is now confronted with the stern truth about the power of parties. To paraphrase the great Midge Decter, at the end of the day you have to join the side you’re on.

* At the same time, George W. Bush deserves at least some small sliver of credit for ObamaCare. He was so careless with the final term of his presidency, so completely uninterested in the fate of the Republican party aprés moi, that he helped Democrats to the Congressional majorities which made this possible.

I have no deep thoughts about the substance of President Obama’s health-care scheme, but I do find the game-theory of the last few weeks (and next 60 hours) very interesting.

One of the principle failings of economic theory is that it always assumes rational actors. I don’t think you can assume that many of the wavering Democrats are behaving rationally:

* By their own lights, very few people–and by definition none of the waverers–like this bill in and of itself. If the bill was self-evidently great, they wouldn’t be wavering.

* There’s no credible way to claim that for a wavering congressman, voting for the bill will help with their re-election. A “yes” vote might help some Democrats, but it’s not going to help the swing-district Dems who have to face the music in seven months.

* There are certainly Democrats for whom even the highly-imperfect bill–with all its attendant political ramifications–would be deemed an ideological bargain at twice the price. Let’s pretend for a minute that we had a Republican president and a Republican Congress poised to pass a deeply unpopular bill that would outlaw abortion. All Republicans understood that such passage would cause the GOP to lose the next three election cycles. Would many Republican office-holders make that deal? My guess is: Yes.

The problem is, the kind of Republicans who would take that bargain would be the ones who already have the best chances of re-election. For the anti-abortion bill to pass, it would need the support of more marginal Republicans (“marginal” here applying to their ideological status, not their moral worth, obvs). Mike Pence might be willing to lose his seat to outlaw abortion. But would Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe give up their jobs to pass an anti-abortion bill? I very much doubt it.

So what the president and the Congressional leadership is trying to do is persuade the marginal members of their party to act irrationally–that is, against their electoral self-interest and against their ideological bias. (I’m sure some of the wavering Dems are “for” health-care reform in the abstract, but probably not much more than moderate Republicans are abstractly “for” choosing life. And I doubt that very many of the waverers are “for” this particular health-care reform in any meaningful, ideological way.)

At the end of the day, I suppose that’s what real power is: The ability to convince people to behave contrary to their best interests.

Which leads us to the end-game game theory. There are two countervailing imperatives on any remaining “undecided” congressmen.

1) Hold out as long as you can in the hope that the issue will become settled before you have to render your decision.

2) Make your decision as soon as you can so that you don’t become the deciding vote, thereby putting a giant target on your back.

I’m sure John Nash could work the numbers and give us a graph showing the equilibrium point of these two equations and predicting the hour and minute at which the final congressman will make up his mind.

There is, however, one other pressure, which I assume exists, but which is not being talked about.

3) Assuming your re-election is out of reach, hold out for long as possible in the hope of extracting some iron-clad post-Congress income from the Democratic establishment or friends thereof.

It was hilarious hearing Obama threaten not to campaign for “no” Democrats earlier this week. Any Democrat who has to even consider voting “no” is going to run as far away from Obama as possible come November. This president is going to be electoral poison in vulnerable districts. What I assumed Obama’s threat implicitly meant was this: The president is not going to take care of any “no” Democrat who loses in November.


When people euphemistically talk about the leadership trying to “change minds” I assume they’re not just referring to government pork for the district.

Speaking of, Marjorie Margolies-Mazvinsky–who did okay for herself after doing a kamikaze for her party–had a charming op-ed the other day telling Democrats that she was glad, in retrospect, that she voted for the Clinton ’93 budget, lost her seat, “saved” the presidency, etc. I wonder if she really means that.

By which I mean this: By their own lights, would Democrats really trade the first 2 years of the Clinton presidency for the 12 years that followed it? You can’t make a straight-line projection from the 1993 tax increase to the 1994 Republican re-alignment, but they’re closely related. If you’re a Democrat who believes that the Republican Congress which existed more or less from 1994 to 2006 and did all sorts of dreadful things to the country–welfare “reform”, tax cuts, war authorization, rolling back women’s reproductive rights, et al–might have been avoided by tanking the 1993 tax increase, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to go back in time and re-do that vote?

For vote counts, Fire Dog Lake seems pretty good (which is to say, both well-researched and modest) as does The Hill.

If I was in a pool and I had gone heavy on the Big East and I was a Georgetown alum, I’d hope that my friends and family welded the windows shut and hid sharp objects from me.

NB: I’ve already removed the stapler and letter opener from Matus’s office.

There, it’s my gift to you. Go put it on your DVR schedule and catch up with this week’s premier on On Demand or the Hulu machine or whatever. Just get in now on the ground floor, because this series is going to be crazy awesome.

The first episode was some of the best TV I’ve seen in years. Justified is an Elmore Leonard rough adaptation. On the surface it plays like Hillbilly Heat, but only the chassis is crime story. Underneath the hood, Justified is pure Western. The premise is a U.S. Marshal who gets himself banished from the Miami field office and back to a small branch in rural Kentucky, which happens to be where he’s from. There he immediately gets involved in tracking down a fellow he was buddies with in high school, who now happens to be an Aryan brotherhood, white-supremacist type. It is, by turns, tense, engaging, and even funny. And it changes speeds effortlessly.

Also, I suspect it’s going to (finally) make a big star out of Timothy Olyphant. A tease below of the awesomeness:

Skins Superfans were jazzed enough about the Larry Johnson signing but hold the phone! The new era of responsible management in Washington has continued with the Redskins signing 2 tons of twisted steel and sex appeal–Sexy Rexy Grossman!

Galley Friend M.C. points us to this 60 Minutes piece on the new Michael Lewis book. It looks pretty great.

But has anyone else noticed how very, very much Steve Kroft looks like Ryan O’Neill?

Cracked has a truly fantastic post on five dangers to the internet as we now know it. Great tech writing in breezy, layman’s terms. I can’t recommend it enough.