Author: John Debay

The carriers, after giving up ground initially, are fighting back. They are using Android’s openness against the company. The carriers refuse to carry the Nexus. Verizon cuts exclusive deals with Skype. Slowness in “approving” new Android OS releases. AT&T locked devices from side-loading and the removal of the Google Marketplace. Secret (and ridiculous) deals on net neutrality. And now, insult to injury to Google who expected to make most of their money from selling ads like they do on the web, removing Google Search in favor of Microsoft Bing as the only and default search option on certain Android-based smartphones.

The Dallas Cowboys could be the single most overrated team in football … maybe the single most overrated team in all of professional sports in America. The franchise has won one playoff game since 1996. Every acquisition they make, every game they win is overstated. Their players are overly praised. They haven’t mattered in a decade nearly as much as the New England Patriots or Pittsburgh Steelers or Indianapolis Colts or even the New York Giants or Philadelphia Eagles in their own division.

Every single thing about the Cowboys, in recent years anyway, has been overdone. They come into every season being picked to win something between a division and the Super Bowl but limp out to great disappointment annually.

Writing fast about serious subjects because they are in the news, without doing a lot of reporting first, can produce crap.

The wretched two-term record compiled by the younger Bush on income, poverty and access to health care should compel Republicans to answer a straightforward question: if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?

Let’s end on a Cowboys rant. The Cowboys remind me of the Kardashians in that their strongest talent is a relentless ability to remain relevant. Much like the Kardashians successfully created the illusion that they should be famous, the Cowboys successfully created the illusion that they should be a Super Bowl contender. And they didn’t even have to leak a sex tape to do it. You know what Dallas’ record has been since 2000? 82-78. You know how many playoff games it has won over that stretch? One. That’s right … one more playoff win than Buffalo and Detroit.

As with the Kardashians, it’s all about the packaging. We consider Tony Romo an elite QB because he dates celebrities and puts up big fantasy numbers; so what if he freezes in big games? We consider Jerry Jones an elite owner because he splurged on a magnificent stadium and matched wits with Ari Gold; so what if he never built a Super Bowl team without Jimmy Johnson? Dez Bryant has been reinvented as the steal of the 2010 draft based on a bunch of preseason practices that nobody saw; so what if half the league passed on him because teams thought he was a head case? Most fans consider the Dallas offense as “elite” because it has a few high fantasy picks; so what if they don’t have a single elite offensive lineman? Every Cowboys Super Bowl pick includes the caveat, “They’re returning 20 of 22 starters from last year”; so what if it means they’re returning 20 of the 22 starters the Vikings trounced in January by 31 points?

Even the Kardashians thing makes more sense to me. They learned all their tricks from Paris Hilton; there are three of them; they have a catchy name; they don’t say anything controversial or incriminating; they only date celebrities, athletes and reality-TV-ready degenerates; and Kim (their fearless leader) is the perfect goddess for her time: a multi-new-media icon (Internet, reality TV and Us Weekly) with a definite hook (her butt), a tawdry past (her sex tape) that wasn’t really all that tawdry (the camerawork was bad, and you could barely see anything) and no discernible talent whatsoever (which doesn’t matter, because you don’t need talent to be famous in 2010). That smoke-and-mirrors routine should work in pop culture. In football? No. And yet, somehow, the Dallas Cowboys have the fourth-best odds to win this year’s Super Bowl (8-1). I give up.

It’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.

The problem, rather, is that Ms Fiorina had to hesitate on the specific question of whether humans are causing global warming. Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard has been severely criticised, but she is clearly an intelligent woman and in all likelihood recognises that man-made global warming is real. It is troubling that the contemporary state of American political discourse obliges people who know better to stifle themselves on this issue. So long as segments of the American political elite feed voters cynical lines on global warming, and large numbers of voters believe them, America will continue to get the political leadership it deserves, and face the serious consequences of inaction.