Planet Utah

Tiger Woods...ick

So, Tiger Woods apparently had sex with six women (and counting), most of them repeatedly, most of them over a protracted period.

And what does that mean? For one thing, it means that he did not have "an affair," at least not in the sense of an emotionally intimate extra-marital relationship. While that would be immoral, it would at least be understandable (because monogamy is difficult).

For another, it means that he did not engage in a one-night stand in a moment of weakness, or even a few one-night stands with a few different women in a few moments of weakness. While that would be immoral, it would again be understandable (and again, because monogamy is difficult).

No, what he appears to have done is to conduct himself like a rutting pig, arranging sexual encounters with multiple women on multiple occasions in multiple locations, for no other reasons than that: (1) he wanted to; and (2) he could.

Assuming that he and Elin don't have a "deal" of the sort that Charles and Maureen Barkley appear to, Tiger's behavior is despicable. He deserves every bit of the anguish and regret he's feeling today, and all the rest that will come with each additional revelation.

Texas, Nebraska, and Florida (Florida 2000, that is)

The Texas/Nebraska game ended with quite a bit of controversy last night. Texas quarterback Colt McCoy threw the ball out of bounds near the end of regulation, trying to stop the clock with just a second or two left, giving his team a chance to kick a game-winning field goal. The ball hit the ground with a second left, and the ref whistled the play dead a second later. When the whistle blew, the clock was at :00. Game over, Texas loses, Nebraska storms the field.

But wait a minute--the rulebook says that the play is actually dead when the ball hits the ground, not when the ref's whistle blows. So, the refs review the play, they see that the ball hit the ground with :01 on the clock, and they give Texas one more play. Texas kicks a field goal to win.

The most interesting argument I've heard about this controversial outcome goes something like this: "Based on the refs' decision at the end, then the correct way to call a play dead is to determine exactly when the ball is dead--not when the ref blows the whistle to indicate that it's dead, but the split second before, when it's actually dead--and stop the game clock at that precise point. If the whole game had been called that way, rather than just the play before the last one, who knows how things might have turned out?"

What does this have to do with the 2000 election in Florida? Basically, you have Al Gore supporters saying, "If you count all of the undervotes and overvotes from all of the counties in Florida--the ones that Gore contested and the ones that he did not--and you do your best to make sense of every last scribble and chad and assign it a vote one way or the other, then Al Gore wins Florida. Winning Florida, of course, means that he wins the election."

The appropriate response to that is this: "If counting all of the undervotes and overvotes from all of a state's counties, and doing one's best to make sense of every last scribble and chad and assign it a vote one way or the other--if all of that is the right way to count votes, then wouldn't we need to do that in every state, and not just Florida? And if the entire country's votes had been counted that way, who knows how things might have turned out? Maybe George W. Bush would have won all over again."

In praise of confession

Back when I was a serious Catholic, I used to go to confession regularly. Watching Tiger Woods' world unravel reminded me of a virtue of confession that I had forgotten: If you have to tell someone about your transgressions, they become much harder to defend.

All of us have sinned in secret at one time or other. Maybe we've committed the same sin repeatedly. It's easy enough to rationalize this behavior when you only have to defend it to yourself. In some cases, you might even persuade yourself that what other people define as "sin" is not, in fact, sinful when you do it.

You get a wake-up call, though, when you tell someone else (or they find out on their own). Think about it: Tiger Woods' behavior is no more or less immoral than it was before his car crash. But now there's a world full of people--people who don't know Tiger, but who probably are predisposed to like him--saying, "What a dirtbag." If it hadn't been for the accident, one wonders how much longer he would have carried on without admitting to himself that he was acting like a dirtbag.

So, you know, maybe the Catholics are on to something after all...

The biological imperative

So, now that women are coming out of the woodwork to say that they've had sex with Tiger Woods, I know some of you are thinking something along these lines: "What the hell was Tiger thinking? His wife is GORGEOUS."

Indeed she is. Here's a picture of her in all her bikini-clad majesty. 

So, what...does Tiger think he can do better?

No. But it isn't about better. It's about different.

That's where 200,000 years of evolutionary psychology come in. Like a dominant elephant seal or the alpha male in a pack of hyenas, we men learned during our hunter-gatherer days that the best way of passing along our DNA was to impregnate as many young, healthy, reproductively fit females as possible.

That didn't work out so well for the females, though, who had to fend for themselves and their children without any help from the guy(s) who got them pregnant. So, they worked out a deal with any guy that wanted to have sex with them: "Sure, we can have sex, and yes, I'll have your children. But then you have to stick around and help raise the kids. You can't just move on to the next girl. If that's what you have in mind, you're not going to have sex with me, and I'm not going to bear your children. Now come look at this wall painting I did..."

So, that was the compromise that men and women worked out in order to produce offspring.  But we men, way down deep, at the microscopic level of our male DNA, still haven't unlearned the animal lessons of evolution. We still want to spread our seed wide and far, and unconscious primal stirrings tell us that the best way to do that is to have sex with a lot of different women. And that's true no matter how gorgeous our current partner might be.

Oliver Miller sighting

Anybody remember Oliver Miller? He was a big, fat dude who played center for the Suns during a couple of different contract stints. He was a very talented guy who, unfortunately, couldn't stop eating donuts.  He also allegedly enjoyed the company of women in a more forceful manner than the law and the Colangelos allow. So, he left the Suns, bounced around the league for a while, played overseas, ate more donuts, and is now out of basketball altogether.

I happened to be in a Dallas bar on Saturday night when who should walk in but...Ed "Too Tall" Jones. Actually, it was Oliver Miller, but one of the drunken patrons at the bar said, "I think that's 'Too Tall' Jones. I'm going to go ask him."

I watched as the guy approached Miller, and though I couldn't hear the conversation, Oliver allowed as how as he was not Mr. Jones, and then immediately began looking around the room for someone more interesting, attractive, or important to talk to. (This is exactly what happened when I met Dan Quayle back in the late-1990s. And no, I didn't have to look very far. Kidding! I was the one who got the bum's rush. The former VP made eye contact with me long enough to shake my hand and say, 'Nice to meet you,' but then immediately began to scan the room for someone wearing something nicer than a Timex Indiglo.)

After denying that he was "Too Tall" (though he is indeed too tall...about 6'9"), Miller came walking in my direction. So, having had 18 or 19 beers, I looked up and said, "Oliver Miller?" He looked down and said, "Yeah, how are you," but never broke stride. I said, "I'm from Phoenix." (How's that for quick thinking, huh?) That got him to stop. He said, "Oh yeah?", and stuck out his hand to shake, his fingertips reaching down to about my elbow. I said, "Yeah, I enjoyed watching you play," which was lame but true. He said, "Thanks, man," and kept on walking.

Footnote: He left the bar soon thereafter, and did not invite me to come with him, even though I told him I was Tom Tolbert, to whom I bear an unfortunate resemblance.

Bait and switch?

A lot of people think it will be impossible for President Obama to keep his promise not to raise taxes on families making more than $250k/year. I'm not one of those people. I just don't think the promise is very meaningful.

To see what I mean, take a look at the Senate version of the health care bill. It includes a tax on insurance companies that offer high-cost, high-value insurance plans.

In response to that tax, insurers will have three options: (1) stop offering such plans altogether;   (2) continue to offer them (as long as they make money), but pass the costs on to their customers; and (3) continue to offer them (as long as they make money), and just eat the added costs.

Of course, no one knows for sure what choice insurance companies will make. Undoubtedly, different companies will respond differently. But if you had to guess, a smart guess would be that ALL companies would seek to jointly maximize: (a) their profits; and (b) the amount of the tax costs they can pass on to customers. In other words, they'll keep passing along the tax costs until doing so begins to eat into their profits.

Employers, as the country's biggest purchaser of insurance policies, will bear the immediate brunt of the cost pass-through. But they--just like the insurance companies--have a bottom line to watch and owners/shareholders to take care of, so they'll seek some insulation from the cost increases, too. There are lots of ways they can do this: restrict other benefits, limit wage growth, hire fewer people, fire more people, reduce hours, require employees to pay more for their health care, downgrade to a less expensive medical plan, etc.

People who work for these employers (or who might have worked for them had not the employers' costs just gone up), and individuals who purchase insurance on their own are at the bottom of the proverbial hill down which all of this shit flows. They are the ones who will end up bearing most of the costs in terms of restricted benefits, limited wage growth, job loss, reduced hours, greater out-of-pocket costs, reduced plan quality, etc. In other words, they are the ones who, at the end of the day, will have effectively financed the tax on insurers. But because the tax was just that--a tax on insurers rather than families and individuals--the Obama administration will be able to say that it kept its $250k promise.

Now you see why the important issue is not whether the administration keeps its promise, but whether the promise actually ends up meaning anything.

Footnote: By the way, this isn't only applicable to health care. The administration can raise an essentially unlimited amount of revenue by taxing entities that ultimately will pass those tax increases onto individuals and families. That's how a value-added tax would work, how the permits under cap-and-trade would work, and so on. The government treats business as its piggy bank, and business treats you the same way. When you get angry, the government says, "Don't look at us. We didn't raise the cost of your new TV or that bag of groceries. That was mean old Big Business." But business was just responding rationally to what government did do.

No do-overs!

During a state of the union address, Bill Clinton once said--quite famously, in fact--"The era of big government is over."

Isn't there some way we can hold today's Democrats to that?

Stimulus: How do we know if it's working?

By now, everyone has probably seen or heard about the Obama transition team's chart indicating that in the absence of an economic stimulus package, unemployment would rise to 9 percent. Well, we did a stimulus package, and unemployment is currently at 10.2 percent. So, critics say, "Your stimulus didn't work. In fact, it made matters worse." The Obama people say, "No, we just underestimated how bad things really were. If it weren't for the stimulus, things would be worse still."

Now, admittedly, I'm not an economist, but I can't see much basis in economic theory for believing that the stimulus money worsened the unemployment picture (not in the short run, anyway). What's more likely is that the Obama administration: (1) did, in fact, underestimate how bad things were; and (2) indulged a stupid, politically motivated instinct to provide a point estimate of the projected employment impact of their proposed stimulus package.

On the latter point, fiscal policy doesn't operate in a laboratory setting. You can't hold everything else constant, spend more money, and then watch what happens to the employment picture. That means that you can't say, "If we do the stimulus, unemployment will be X. If we don't do the stimulus, unemployment will be X + 1." That, however, is what the Obama administration did.

The truth of the matter is that we don't know whether, or to what extent, the stimulus package is succeeding in creating growth and jobs. What's more, we probably won't know that for years to come, if ever.

Think about that for a moment. Your government is spending nearly $800 billion (more than $1 trillion, when you consider the interest on the borrowed funds) on a policy whose impact is impossible to judge in the short run, and whose impact will almost certainly be subject to intense debate for years to come.

All I can say is, shout-out to the tea partiers...

Useful analogy: Palin and Gore

Over the weekend, somewhere on the Internet, I read speculation that perhaps what Sarah Palin wants is to be Al Gore.  In other words, maybe she doesn't have any intention of running for president. Maybe she wants to make a lot of money, espouse pet causes, and be a political celebrity.

Let's hope so. I think that would be good for her and acceptable to the rest of us.

I fear, though, that Palin wants to be president of "the real America," and will claim as a virtue her utter ordinariness. "Ordinariness" in terms of being a regular mom, being connected to real people, having small town values, understanding middle class life, whatever, is great. But ordinariness in terms of experience, knowledge, achievements, and wisdom is not what I want in a president.

Had Palin served two terms as Alaska governor, or even one highly successful term, I might have given her the benefit of the doubt. Now, though, in my mind anyway, she gets very little benefit from her service. If she wants to prove her readiness, she'll have to blow me away with her smarts, her knowledge, her ideas, and her understanding of politics and policy. I'd be very, very surprised if she were able to do that.

Footnote: Here's the most famous thing that Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska ever said (speaking of Supreme Court nominee Harold Carswell): "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos."

I really, truly hope that Sarah Palin is not embarking on a campaign in which she says, in effect, "I should be president not despite the fact that I'm mediocre, but because I'm mediocre."

Uh...what?

I'm not sure what the hell is going on with Tim Pawlenty.

First, he can't bring himself to say that he's happy to have Olympia Snowe in the GOP. (With Republican members of Congress less popular than bone spurs, Pawlenty should be thankful for any national officeholder who's willing to admit he or she is a Republican.)

Next, he takes partial credit for Chris Christie's victory in New Jersey, saying he's "thrilled our historic team effort paid off." (This is like the kid who played triangle for the Patridge Family demanding an equal share of the royalties.)

Most recently, at a speech to a gathering of Iowa Republicans, he refers to his wife Mary as "red hot, smoking." (You want to know how that went over? Imagine taking a date to a Manhattan cocktail party and saying, "This is my fiancee, Mary. She was George W. Bush's liaison to the pro-life community.")

I used to like Pawlenty because he seemed like a straight shooter. But a straight shooter who's politically tone deaf is just an embarrassment.