“But of course, most of those assumptions are ridiculous. Kolb is not a starting NFL quarterback. He’s a young Doug Pederson. And the Eagles have no chance–zero–of making the playoffs this season.”
–Doing your oppo research for you

But seriously, here’s what I want to know: What is a team that’s 2-4 in division (4-8 over the last two seasons) doing in the playoffs? It’s not quite the travesty of San Diego getting in at 8-8, but it’s not that far off.

All of that said, the Giants’ Superbowl victory last year is proof that in today’s NFL, any reasonably-decent team has a chance to win a championship, in a way that reasonably-decent teams in the NBA and MLB do not.

Alexandra DuPont, who very probably is not Jane Espenson, has the most devastating movie review of 2008, about The Spirit:

There’s this cute rookie cop (Stana Tatic) who goes on and on about Sand Serif’s “Elektra complex.” It’s the sort of weirdly self-congratulatory joke — a nod to Miller’s past “Daredevil” glory that only comics insiders will get — that turns up all over this movie.

In another scene, someone sees The Spirit hanging from a skyscraper and says, “You’ll believe a man CAN’T fly!” Seriously? A pun based on the advertising tagline from a 1978 superhero movie? Who is that gag for, exactly? It’s like you’re watching a very expensive series of inside jokes, or reading a really bad webcomic with a vast continuity and its own tiny and deeply insular LiveJournal community.

This leads me to my larger rant: Watching the movie, I really started to wonder if Miller suffers from that artist’s malady where he’s been called a “genius” and a “maverick” so many times, he’s settled into a nice comfy couch inside his own head and is now perfectly happy cycling through a tiny set of visual obsessions that only he finds funny or profound.

This isn’t the Frank Miller who wrote and/or drew dense, scary, funny, moody, multilayered sci-fi satires — classics like “Ronin” or “Give Me Liberty” or “The Dark Knight Returns” or his staggering takes on Elektra and Daredevil. That Frank Miller was like the James Cameron of comics, young and hungry and drunk on telling bad-ass popular stories full of strong women.

Maybe Hollywood thought it was hiring that Frank Miller to adapt “The Spirit.” What Hollywood is about to learn — in a very public and embarrassing way — is that the “Frank Miller” comics fans once spoke of in hushed tones stopped making good stories about 10 years ago, if you count “300” as his last ambitious book. It’s worth pointing out here that Rodriguez was skillfully remixing Miller’s 10- and 15-year-old material for “Sin City” — material that gets weaker and weaker as that series (and that movie) goes on.

That will leave a mark.

Just in time for the New Year, the former NAR hack shows up to admit that he was “spinning” with his economic pronouncements in the run-up to the housing bubble.

No news there, of course, but what does seem newsworthy is Lereah’s claim that, “I worked for an association promoting housing, and it was my job to represent their interests. . . . I would not have done anything different. But I was a public spokesman writing about housing having a good future. I was wrong.”

Here’s the important distinction: Lereah was never a “public spokesman”–at least that’s not how I ever saw him ID’d. He was always and everywhere presented as the NAR’s chief “economist”.

If David Lereah had been just a “spokesman,” there would have been nothing wrong with his misleading, stupifying, claims. But he wasn’t being asked for comment all those years–he was being asked for actual economic analysis. He wasn’t Baghdad Bob–he was the Big Tobacco “scientist” presenting data about how smoking isn’t harmful for your health.

There’s nothing wrong with prostituting yourself, however distasteful it may be. But when you prostitute your profession, there are supposed to be consequences.

Today officially marks the end of VHS.

It will not be missed.

Labash’s opus on Detroit is the best magazine piece I’ve read this year, and maybe the best thing he’s written.

Print it and read it now, before Christmas. You’ll see what I mean.

Hugh Hewitt isn’t happy with the Obama bailout program. Instead, Hewitt wants to see a giant housing bailout that includes:

Fund 4%, 40 year mortgages for people making less than $100k.

Buy up foreclosed properties and turn them into quasi-public housing via transfer to not-for-profits like Habitat for Humanity that qualify tenants/owners on the basis of long experience with the working poor.

Aggressively purchase at fair market value property deemed crucial to species protection to both conserve the property and release the value of it into productive enterprise while honoring the 5th Amendment.

Oh yes, by all means. Let’s punish good credit-risk buyers by pushing a ton of people into the marketplace who can bid on property they can’t really afford because the government is giving them a 4 percent sweetheart mortgage.

You will perhaps remember that the recently-popped bubble was caused in part by lending which pushed lots of people who couldn’t really afford mortgages into the market, thus driving up prices for everyone else. In 2000, if you could reasonably afford, say, a 2,000 square foot home, by 2005 you could only reasonably afford a much smaller home because bad-credit risks (along with speculators and other factors, of course) had entered the market and bid prices up to (obviously) unsustainable levels. So your choice was to buy a crappier house and live within your means, sit out of the market betting that there would be a readjustment, or say, “What the hell” and get in over your head like everyone else.

The only saving grace to responsible people was the prospect that the bubble’s unsustainability would eventually punish the risky and create lower prices you could, someday, take advantage of. Hewitt’s “plan” would simply push more underqualified buyers into the market by giving them an advantage that responsible, qualified buyers won’t get because they’re responsible and qualified. In other words, after being punished for being responsible once, they’d be punished for being responsible again.

To top it all off, Hewitt wants to buy up foreclosed properties and turn them into public housing. That’s right. Keep punishing the responsible people who have been able to hold onto their properties by creating public housing in the middle of their neighborhoods where none existed before. And just what do you think turning the mass of foreclosures into public housing would do to the long-term property values of suburban and exurban neighborhoods? My guess: Cripple them for a generation. Or more.

Maybe Hewitt was just being ironic and I’m just missing the joke. If not, then with conservatism like this why worry about Obamanomics?

Aside from bringing about the destruction of the godless Soviet empire, the Cold War also gave us the amazing constellation of technology mastered by NORAD. Today that technology is put to good use every year tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

Don’t forget to check your NORAD Santa Tracker frequently on Wednesday night.

And if you want to be really fancy, you can track Santa in 3-D using NORAD’s specially adapted overlay for Google Earth.

“But don’t worry, that Tiger Woods guy will be taking over.”