The victory of the New York Giants in the National Football League?s Super Bowl is the latest in a series of recent news developments that underscore a principle that might be called Manning?s Law, after the Giants quarterback Eli Manning: The predictions of ?experts? are often wrong.

You can look it up. Sports Illustrated, the venerable, highly profitable jewel of the Time Warner Corporation?s magazine empire, employs a veteran sportswriter named Peter King. The magazine describes him as ?one of America's premier pro football writers.? He?s written at least three books about football, and he?s been covering the sport professionally for more than 30 years. He?s on the board that picks members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Mr. King?s 2011 NFL preview predicted that the Giants wouldn?t even make the playoffs.

I don?t mean to pick on Mr. King or on Sports Illustrated. What about ESPN, which is the Walt Disney Corporation?s entry in the sports journalism category? ESPN has not just one NFL expert but 12. Not a single one of the 12 experts in the ESPN NFL season preview picked the Giants to win the Super Bowl. Only one of the 12 even thought the Giants would make the playoffs.

Andy Benoit writes about football for The New York Times and CBS Sports. His NFLTouchdown.com site bills itself as ?the best NFL analysis and commentary on the planet.? His season preview didn?t pick the Giants to win the Super Bowl this year, either.

Even on the eve of the game, the Las Vegas oddsmakers favored the New England Patriots to win, not the Giants.

We expect a degree of chance and unpredictability in sports, which, after all, are just games. What about really important matters, such as the nation?s economy?

On Friday, Politico?s ?Morning Money? daily email led with its take on the job statistics that would come out that day from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The first prediction cited was this: ?Moody?s Analytics Mark Zandi emails: ?The January employment report will be on the soft side. I expect payroll employment to increase by just over 100K and private sector employment to increase by 125k. Unemployment will edge higher to 8.6%.?

Mr. Zandi, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, was an adviser to Senator McCain?s Republican presidential campaign who is also often described as President Obama?s favorite economist. His own web site describes him as ?a trusted adviser to policymakers and an influential source of economic analysis for businesses, journalists and the public.? But his prediction for the January employment number was as spectacularly wrong as the NFL season previews by Sports Illustrated and ESPN. When the numbers came out Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they showed that rather than edging higher to 8.6%, as Mr. Zandi had predicted, the unemployment rate dropped, to 8.3%. And the non-farm payroll number grew 243,000, more than double what Mr. Zandi had predicted.

What about the stock market?

"Stocks Are Still Expensive" was the headline over a New York Times item posted August 4, 2011 by David Leonhardt, a Yale graduate and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary for what the Pulitzer Board called ?his graceful penetration of America?s complicated economic questions.? Mr. Leonhardt?s ?Stocks Are Still Expensive? item began, "The main problem for the stock market is obviously the economy. But it's not the only problem. Stocks are also under pressure because they are fairly expensive right now relative to earnings." It went on, "stocks would have to fall another 6 percent from their current level to return to the 50-year average." The Times at one point that day was linking the item from its home page.

Later in August 2011, Mr. Leonhardt was praised by Yale President Richard Levin as ?but one of many visible examples of the profound way in which the liberal arts education you are about to experience can help you to develop the capacity to see the big picture.? Mr. Leonhardt has since been promoted to Washington bureau chief of the Times.

Since Mr. Leonhardt posted the ?Stocks Are Still Expensive" item, the stock market, as measured by the Standard & Poor?s 500 Index, rather than falling by 6% as the item predicted, has risen 12%.

I?m not here to make fun of Mr. Leonhardt, Mr. Zandi, Mr. King, or the other experts. The point is that even smart, experienced, and accomplished people can be wrong, which is why humility is so important, and elitism is so dangerous. Complex systems are hard to predict.

Sure, it?s possible to take skepticism of expert authority too far. But the mistake made more commonly is listening to the experts. Eli Manning didn?t pay much attention to them, and look where it got him.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and NewsTransparency.com, and the author of Sam Adams: A Life. 

In his two most famous novels, Snow Crash (1992) and Cryptonomicon (1999), Neal Stephenson demonstrated an aptitude for writing action sequences. But Stephenson?s latest, Reamde (William Morrow), takes that art form to a new level. The book starts with some modest target shooting at a Midwestern family reunion and ends with a 100-page gun battle featuring some of those same Midwesterners, plus Islamic terrorists, Chinese gold farmers, a Hungarian hacker, the Russian mafia, and the CIA. In between, there is an epic, Blues Brothers?like chase scene that spans several continents in both real and virtual worlds.

All the running and shooting make Reamde seem less cerebral than recent Stephenson efforts such as The Baroque Cycle and Anathem. But while his heroes duck and roll, Stephenson offers intelligent treatments of political and technological topics, including the war on drugs, the war on terror, the rise of China, virtual economies, and the Second Amendment.?Katherine Mangu-Ward

The California Redevelopment Association?s Web site is still up and running and still features job postings for redevelopment jobs, although the site does report that the association?s annual convention and expo has been cancelled. It?s just a matter of time before the news reaches the CRA web-master that redevelopment in California is dead. There is weeping and gnashing of teeth in redevelopment circles, but other Californians should rejoice.

After many political battles and court fights, it?s over as of last Wednesday. These heavy-handed and arrogant agencies, which dispensed corporate welfare and abused eminent domain, are kaput. The new successor agencies will merely pay off the debt the agencies had irresponsibly accumulated, but there will be no more projects. Efforts to delay the execution and recreate new agencies went nowhere.

Gov. Jerry Brown?s decision to kill redevelopment?and his ability to keep redevelopment-loving Democratic legislators on board the plan to the bitter end?will perhaps be his best legacy. It makes the many bad things he is doing (tax increases, rail subsidies, protection of union excesses, etc.) nearly tolerable.

This is a sweet reminder to those who have battled in the trenches for a good cause that once in a while it?s possible to win. In the many years I wrote about redevelopment and the sad tales of people being driven off their property, of the misuse of public funds and absurd subsidies to the corporate welfare crowd, I never envisioned a scenario in which redevelopment would end. And I would have laughed out loud had someone suggested that a Democratic governor, with Democratic legislative support would have put RDAs in their well-deserved grave.

Political change rarely happens in ways that we expect. That?s a reminder to remain optimistic (Note to self: Stop being such a nattering nabob). Change rarely follows any blueprint. Here?s a case where a broad coalition of anti-redevelopment activists stuck to the moral high ground and eventually we witnessed a seismic shift in thinking and policy. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the unsustainability of redevelopment became clear. How long could tax increment gobble up more and more of the budget before anyone noticed?

In justifying their opposition to the governor?s plan, many Republicans insisted that redevelopment would never really end. That?s a reminder that it?s sometimes worth being a little less cynical.

This is California, so the end of redevelopment does not mean the rebirth of common sense or fiscal sanity. Surely, bad things will be proposed to fill redevelopment?s void, but it?s much easier fighting the rebirth of these agencies than trying to kill existing agencies. The money source is going away. RDA funds will go to new constituencies, who will immediately have vested interests in protecting those streams.

Some defenders of redevelopment have said: ?The money will now just go to public sector unions and prop up other forms of wasteful spending.? There?s obviously much truth to that given that virtually every dime the government spends is wasted. My readers surely know that I am no fan of public sector unions. But it?s much more sensible to spend money on legitimate public services than on corporate subsidies. Redevelopment agencies are abusive, so shutting them down will help protect property rights. Cities can still abuse eminent domain, but without the funding source they won?t bother as often. And the public-sector pay and pension issue is unsustainable also?it?s a matter of time before cities rein in these costs. Redevelopment let cities delay dealing with the problem by encouraging them to seek out new tax revenues by subsidizing sales-tax-generating redevelopment projects.

Legislators are now trying desperately to save ?affordable housing.? Twenty percent of redevelopment funds were earmarked toward these subsidized housing projects and the affordable-housing industry and liberal politicians in particular are complaining that the poor will no longer have a place to live. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), introduced legislation recently that would let cities keep those low-income housing dollars from RDAs, but it failed to get enough votes to implement this before 2013, according to the Sacramento Bee.

It would be nice if legislators understood economics. (I know, dream on!) The end of affordable housing subsidies is bad for those organizations that rely on government funds to build these units, some of whom portrayed dire scenarios to reporters. But a reduction in subsidized housing funds will not harm the poor.

First, redevelopment agencies often squander affordable housing dollars because the locals don?t like to have low-income housing built in their middle-class neighborhoods. So RDAs would often use the money for projects for the elderly. Second, affordable housing doesn?t necessarily increase the actual number of units that are affordable to poor people. I wrote about one project years ago in Anaheim where the city wanted to knock down a privately owned apartment complex and put up a government-run project that would have housed far fewer people. Third, the government does a terrible job building these projects. It overpays government-approved contractors and at times will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit?far more than the private sector would spend. The projects end up being make-work projects for union contractors and subsidized developers.

Affordable housing advocates believe that poor people should be housed in brand new apartments or houses, which is silly. Thanks to the housing bust, there?s more affordable housing available than ever. The market does a great job providing homes and apartments. Government ?affordable housing? breeds dependency, as people who live in below-market houses lose any incentive to ever move out of those subsidized places.

This is a troubling vestige of the redevelopment process. But it?s still worth raising a glass of champagne and celebrating the end of redevelopment as we gear up for new political battles.

Steven Greenhut is the editor of CalWatchDog.com.

According to I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (Dutton), the greatest thing to happen to popular music in the 1980s almost didn?t happen at all. The plan to launch a 24-hour music channel was initially greeted with derision. ?Businessmen of wealth and experience?worldly men who ran record companies and partied with rock stars, and visionary men who made fortunes by anticipating the explosion of cable TV?scoffed and snickered,? write music industry journalists Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks.

But the channel exploded, in part because musicians of every stripe loved the concept as much as their fans did. Five years after its launch, the network was the object of a $525 million bidding war. Since then, MTV has evolved away from music and toward reality programming. Drawing on more than 400 interviews, I Want My MTV tells the story of the people who remember the channel for what it was: a truly revolutionary way for young people to experience music.?Mike Riggs

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which instigated four grand juries and two trials during its 12-year campaign to put Stanislaw Burzynski in prison, said it did not matter whether the Texas physician?s unconventional cancer treatments saved people?s lives. The point was that he had failed to get the FDA?s permission first.

But according to Eric Morola?s 2010 documentary Burzynski, which compellingly chronicles the doctor?s long-running battles with state and federal regulators, the Phase II clinical trials that the FDA approved in 1996 under congressional pressure have supported what the teary testimonials of patients and their families suggested: Although Burzynski?s antineoplastons are far from a cure-all, they seem to be more effective, and are certainly much less devastating in their side effects, than radiation and chemotherapy for certain deadly, intractable cancers. In 2009, a dozen years after Burzynski was acquitted of the last remaining criminal charge against him, the FDA gave him the go-ahead for Phase III clinical trials. ?Jacob Sullum

Newt Gingrich has an exquisitely sensitive moral antenna, and Mitt Romney's remark suggesting indifference to the poor sent it quivering. "I am fed up with politicians in either party dividing Americans against each other," he said. Yes, he did. Then he fell on the floor and laughed till he cried.

For Gingrich to disavow divisiveness is the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg renouncing modern technology: Without it, we never would have heard of him. Newt has spent his career ceaselessly inventing ways to foment and exploit hatred of one group by another.

He's the guy who warned of "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us." He likened those supporting a mosque near Ground Zero to Nazis.

He said Democrats are "the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness, and the total right to cripple innocent people in the name of letting hooligans loose." Oh, and the poor? He said poor teens don't work "unless it's illegal." Nobody but us unifiers here!

Romney's comment has been described as a classic political gaffe, which consists not of telling a lie but telling the truth. In fact, it was classic political nonsense, in which inartful wording is twisted to pretend the speaker meant something he clearly didn't.

It was done to John Kerry in 2004, when a line intended as a jibe at President George W. Bush -- saying those who don't "study hard" end up "stuck in Iraq" -- was alleged to be a slander on the intelligence of American troops.

It happened to Romney when, referring to the right of consumers to "fire" unsatisfactory health insurers, he said, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." Cut off the last five words, ignore the context, and gotcha!

What Romney meant in his latest episode is that, while he favors providing an adequate safety net for the poor, his primary focus is on generating jobs and economic growth for the mass of people. If he had been caught saying, "Who gives a damn about poor people?" he would be guilty of rank callousness. But he didn't, and his policies on poverty are not readily distinguishable from any other Republican's.

Still, few Republicans will be moved to vote against Romney out of tearful solicitude for the bottom 5 percent. If the economy is floundering next November, swing voters will have no trouble forgetting this incident.

His obstacles lie more with his wooden insincerity and his history of flip-flopping. But those stem from a bigger problem that has largely escaped notice: the mystery of why he's running.

Romney takes pride in not being a career politician, a boast that evoked one of Gingrich's few illuminating retorts: "Let's be candid, the only reason you didn't become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994." If going into politics to create jobs is justified, why isn't it commendable to spend a career in politics to create jobs?

He extols his record of building businesses and creating jobs in the private sector. If he's so good at that, though, why not stay there?

We know why most candidates undertake the race -- Al Gore to avert environmental catastrophe, George W. Bush to carry on the family business, John McCain to serve his country and Obama to heal racial and ideological divisions.

Romney just seems like a rich guy who needs a new challenge. "I have a good life with my family, my wife," he says. "I don't have to win. I just want to win because I care about the country."

Ronald Reagan could have said the same thing, but with him it was believable. Reagan was driven by a distinct vision of what America should be. Romney, by contrast, is willing to serve whatever cause will get him elected.

His attitude is: Tell me what you want me to be and I'll be it. But one thing voters want is someone who doesn't do that.

About Gingrich's motive, there has never been any doubt: to feed an insatiable ego that makes him imagine he has a historic, God-given mission to transform the country. He's a mad scientist, mixing volatile potions that may cure cancer or may blow up the lab. Either way, he'll have fun.

Romney doesn't have an obvious reason to run for president. That's his trouble. Gingrich does. That's his.

Steve Chapman blogs daily at newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/steve_chapman. 

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, ?[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,? one is left scratching one?s head. How refreshing it is, then, to hear a prominent establishment economist?a Nobel laureate yet?tell it straight:

The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system . . . is . . . an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.

Columbia University Professor Edmund S. Phelps, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics, and his coauthor, Saifedean Ammous, assistant professor of economics at the Lebanese American University, write that the U.S. economy ceased to be a free market some time ago, yet the free market is blamed for the economic crisis. (The real question is whether it was ever really free.)

Phelps and Ammous condemn corporatism unequivocally.

In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals? economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has [sic] at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the ?public good.?

State-Chosen Goals

It?s great that their list includes the corporate state?s declaration of goals. Too many people are willing to accept government-set goals (such as energy independence) so long as the ?private sector? is induced to achieve them. Regardless of how the goals are achieved, if government sets them, that?s statism.

The cost of corporatism is high, and Phelps and Ammous provide a partial list:

dysfunctional corporations that survive despite their gross inability to serve their customers; sclerotic economies with slow output growth, a dearth of engaging work, scant opportunities for young people; governments bankrupted by their efforts to palliate these problems; and increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of those connected enough to be on the right side of the corporatist deal.

Again, kudos to them for noting the increasing concentration of wealth. The corporate state, after all, is a form of exploitation, the victims of which are workers and consumers, who would have been better off (absolutely and comparatively) without anticompetitive privileges for the well-connected and government-induced recessions.

The authors are optimistic that time will work against the corporate state. Young people coming of age in the Internet?s decentralized and wide-open market of ideas and merchandise can?t be expected to show enthusiasm for a system that protects entrenched corporations from the forces of competition. Moreover ?the legitimacy of corporatism is eroding along with the fiscal health of governments that have relied on it. If politicians cannot repeal corporatism, it will bury itself in debt and default?.?

Capitalism versus the Freed Market

My main beef with Phelps and Ammous?s essay is their use of capitalism to name the economic system that corporatism corrupted. Like many others, they believe that word ?used to mean? the free market. To be sure, it was used that way beginning in the mid-twentieth century. But there was an older usage (of capitalist specifically), coined by free-market liberals like Thomas Hodgskin who predated Marx, associating it with government privileges for the capital-owning class. That undertone has never left. (Long-time Freeman writer and historian Clarence B. Carson expressed misgivings about the word here.)

It?s tempting to dismiss this as mere semantics. But we are trying to communicate, aren?t we? Libertarian theorist Roderick Long, however, shows that more than semantics is involved. For Long, capitalism is what Ayn Rand called an anti-concept, a term that confuses rather than enlightens. One kind of anti-concept is the package deal, ?referring to any term whose meaning conceals an implicit presupposition that certain things go together that in actuality do not.?

As a thought experiment, Long asks us to consider his coinage of zaxlebax, which he defines as ?a metallic sphere, like the Washington Monument.?  Obviously this is incoherent. Nevertheless,

some linguistic subgroup might start using the term ?zaxlebax? as though it just meant ?metallic sphere,? or as though it just meant ?something of the same kind as the Washington Monument.? And that?s fine. But my definition incorporates both, and thus conceals the false assumption that the Washington Monument is a metallic sphere; any attempt to use the term ?zaxlebax,? meaning what I mean by it, involves the user in this false assumption.

Long sees capitalism in its common usage as similar.

By ?capitalism? most people mean neither the free market simpliciter nor the prevailing neomercantilist system simpliciter. Rather, what most people mean by ?capitalism? is this free-market system that currently prevails in the western world. In short, the term ?capitalism? as generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business.

Similarly for socialism, Long writes. He thinks most people mean nothing more specific than ?the opposite of capitalism.?

Then if ?capitalism? is a package-deal term, so is ?socialism? ? it conveys opposition to the free market, and opposition to neomercantilism, as though these were one and the same.

And that, I suggest, is the function of these terms: to blur the distinction between the free market and neomercantilism. Such confusion prevails because it works to the advantage of the statist establishment: those who want to defend the free market can more easily be seduced into defending neomercantilism, and those who want to combat neomercantilism can more easily be seduced into combating the free market. Either way, the state remains secure.

In sum, the system that most immediately threatens individual liberty is corporatism (with its militarist component) and the word capitalism is too closely associated with corporatism in people?s minds to be useful to advocates of the freed market.

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, where this article originally appeared.

Take yourself back to the good old days of 2006, when the Azzurri rightly ruled the football world and Lana Del Rey had not yet taken icicle form. With a good paying job, and only two more years of the Bush administration in sight, you decide to buy a summer home on Miami Beach. It is a good investment, you reason, until the real estate market collapse and leaves you several hundred thousand dollars underwater. And even though you?ve rented out the home since 2006 and kept your well-paid job, with about 20 percent of homes in America worth less than their mortgage it has been almost impossible to get a modification or refinance the mortgage to buy something more affordable.

Until now.

Under a revised White House program, second homes?whether owned as a rental property investment, as a vacation home, or just as an extra mortgage from a house-flipping project gone array?are now eligible for taxpayer subsidies to reduce the principal on the underlying mortgage. This means that even though you made a poor investment decision with that home in Miami, taxpayers will now help foot the bill to reduce your mortgage by several hundred thousand dollars at little cost to you.

The program is called the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), and it was started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2009. You might have heard about it, as it is one of the Obama Administration's most widely panned programs.

Second (and third) homes had been ?excluded? from federal programs to subsidize housing. But in the wake of changes to the federal refinance program announced in the State of the Union address last week, the Obama administration is now seeking to relax the rules on its loan modification program to increase its impact.

HAMP got started in early 2009 by using $29.9 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (the bank bailout fund). It was supposed to work by offering payments to mortgage servicers in exchange for modifying the principal due on mortgages. However, nearly half of the trial modifications that were started ended in failure. And according to a monthly HAMP report in January, only 909,953 mortgages had permanent modifications through the program?costing the taxpayers an average of about $2,000 each so far. (See page 57 of the Inspector General report on TARP from last week.)

Since the goal from the start has been to modify as many as five million mortgages, the White House is moving to increase the pool of eligible mortgages by reducing the standards necessary to qualify. After all, it is not like reducing mortgage standards in order to accommodate more homeowners has ever been a policy leading to disaster before, right?

Mortgages on rental properties are now eligible for modification?meaning the total amount owed, not just the interest rate, may be reduced to avoid foreclosure. If the home you live in cost you $300,000 (plus interest on the mortgage) when you bought it, but now is worth just $225,000, HAMP could pay a lender to summarily knock $75,000 off the mortgage. If you own a second home and rent it out (even if that was not the original purpose of the home) you could get the same deal for a mortgage that started out at $700,000 but today is worth substantially less.

Remember when companies that bought insurance from AIG got paid 100 cents on the dollar from the September 2008 bailout? This is the same thing, except the recipients are people who flipped homes and were caught holding the hot potato.

Another part of the revamped HAMP is to triple payments (from between 6 and 21 cents on the dollar to between 18 and 63 cents on the dollar) for lenders and servicers who reduce the amounts owed on mortgages. This deal is open to both private lenders and to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (who essentially would be getting a subsidy from HUD to modify a mortgage before asking the Treasury Department to subsidize the rest of the losses). The program will also stay in effect until the end of 2013, instead of its original 2012 conclusion date.

The reality is that we simply have no need for this program. Even for those individuals who favor principal modifications as the solution to the housing crisis, there were still 2.6 million private modifications that occurred during the same timeframe as HAMP, without any subsidy needed.

At best, HAMP wastes resources for something that is being done better without the government?s heavy hand. At worst, HAMP is dragging out the housing crisis by delaying necessary foreclosures. Either way, there is no good reason why investors who bought homes to rent or flip should be bailed out by the taxpayer.

Anthony Randazzo is director of economic research at the Reason Foundation.

?I got ROBBED. I don't mean the Oscars, I mean literally. My pants and shoes have been stolen.?

-- Albert Brooks, in a Tweet last week.

  ***

Commenting recently on the GOP presidential race, prominent political prognosticator Larry Sabato said that in Florida, ?we have what is literally a Category 5 hurricane for the Republican nomination.?

Literally? Yikes. The last time a Cat-5 hurricane made landfall in the United States was seven years ago, when Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Tuesday?s primary was eventful, but nothing as bad as all that. The word Sabato wanted was ?figuratively,? not literally.

He is not alone. About the same time, a Denver TV station was reporting that a young man named Jordan Staucet ?is pounding the pavement ? literally ? looking for a job.? So he was hammering the concrete with his fists? Not exactly. He was simply walking around handing out résumés.

?Pounding the pavement? is an idiom, a figure of speech, and normally nobody would perform a figurative act literally. If you say someone does pound the pavement literally, then you are saying ? well, you know.

Unlike the Denver station, Deadline grokked that distinction when it surmised Dwight Schrute, a character on The Office, could be ?off to greener pastures ? literally.? ABC reportedly has been considering a spinoff that would feature the Schrute family on its beet farm.

It was a different story for The Awl, which complained recently that ?Free Subway Rag Now Literally Destroying America.? (The Awl is free too; maybe free online rags are superior to free print rags. Anything?s possible!) The object of the author?s ire was a publication called Metro, which had written a headline about Barack Obama?s State of the Union address that the Awl writer didn?t like. America, somehow, is still standing.

In that case, the Awl writer was so cheesed off she felt it not sufficient to say merely that Metro was destroying the nation. She wanted to say so even more emphatically, and so added ?literally,? which seems vaguely illiterate.

This is a snooty, pedantic complaint?but certainly not an original one. A ?Dictionary of Jack? YouTube video made the same point five years ago. Minnesota Public Radio has aired the question. Plenty of others have griped about the subject as well. For a while, there was a blog keeping track of slipshod uses of literally?such as when Education Secretary Arne Duncan said starting the school year in September, rather than sometime earlier, was ?literally taking a step backward.? (Because students forget what they learn in the spring.) Or when a spokeswoman for Sarah Palin said ?the world is literally her oyster.? Palin?s detractors would call that casting pearls before swine.

To be fair, this persnickety criticism might not be, um, fair. Jesse Sheidlower, a dictionary editor, let it be known a while back in Slate that we shouldn?t take such statements quite so literally. In ?The Trouble With Literally,? he notes that using literally as an intensifier has quite a literary pedigree. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that Jay Gatsby ?literally glowed,? and Louisa May Alcott wrote that ?the land literally flowed with milk and honey.? They didn?t mean either of those statements literally. They meant Gatsby really, really glowed and the land was really, really plentiful.

To Sheidlower, this is no big deal, since in the strictest sense, ?literally? does not mean what we usually mean it to mean anyway. We have already wandered from the original purpose of ?literally? whenever we use it in any sense other than ?to copy a text word for word or letter for letter.? (The Latin root is litteralis, ?of or relating to letters.?) So if you say you are literally sick to your stomach, and then vomit, you are still using the word ?literally,? as it were, figuratively.

Or at least that?s his theory. Sheidlower is obviously some sort of Bolshevik, in league with the one-worlders at the UN who are pushing Agenda 21 down our throats with black helicopters and lies about evolution and global warming. All patriotic Americans ought to stand up and say enough is enough. We need a law to put a stop to this literally-abuse. If we don?t get one ? and soon ? then the Almighty is sure to send another Flood as punishment for our transgressions.

In fact, it may already be too late. As these words are written, it is raining cats and dogs outside. Literally!

A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where this article originally appeared.

Like anyone born before Newt Gingrich was actively attacking Ronald Reagan as the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain, I grew up in a different America, one anticipating imminent doom not from fat kids and Iran's nuclear ambitions but from killer bees and Russia's nuclear reality. As my colleague Jesse Walker once said, the past is a different planet. Indeed, it may be a whole other galaxy.

I played soccer throughout the 1970s, back when defenders were called "fullbacks" and midfielders were called "halfbacks" because (American) football was the only possible analogue by which to name positions. For a brief shining moment, the full-blown adoption of the metric system was only a second Ford adminstration away from becoming a lead-pipe cinch and the New York Cosmos of the NASL (look it up on the Google, kids) were outdrawing the football Giants at the Meadowlands.

Yet even in New Jersey, a state stuffed to its sweetly toxic gills with Irish, Italian, Cuban, and other recent-immigrant types who played soccer without apology or acknowledgement that it marked them as unmeltable ethnics, the feets-don't-fail-me-now game was officially an oddity.

In good old Middletown, New Jersey, the kid leagues were sponsored only by the Catholic church, which was trying to branch out from its decades-long stranglehold on the unambiguously American sport of basketball (god bless the C.Y.O.). And even then, my Romish high school only added a varsity team around 1979. We lost every game our first season and the minor high points came only when an opposing team scored on itself.

Pele, Shep Messing (who posed for Playgirl), and Kyle Rote, Jr. be damned: Donning short-shorts and running around a field without using your hands and wearing a helmet and shoulder pads was seen as bizarre and inherently girls-only as synchronized swimming (which was called water ballet back then). That soccer (yeah, yeah, futbol) was big in Europe only emphasized the innately femme nature of the game and its obviously Marxist origins. The "men" in Europe held hands, cried at the drop of a hat, and carried purses, fer chrissakes.

So it came to pass that throughout my adolescence, I was regularly accused of being gay and communistic simply for preferring to play soccer rather than engage in the openly homoerotic butt-slapping that characterized (American) football.

That experience taught me to be suspicious whenever anybody makes claims that a particular non-political activity is inherently ideological. So I was especially well-prepared for the seemingly weekly columns written by Fred Barnes, then at The New Republic, and others throughout the 1980s about how Americans would never accept soccer because, well, it was sort of collectivist and totally faggy. In a post-9/11 world, Barnes finally acknowledged that soccer wasn't all bad as long as the American boys were "world-class.?

Which brings me, on the eve of the Super Bowl, to the latest dumb-dumb piece in which jock-sniffing right-wingers lay claim to a particular athletic activity as supremely conservative.

The article in question is double-plus-good on this score, as it's titled "Move Over, NASCAR: Why Mixed Martial Arts Is The True Conservative Sport!" and appears at National Review Online, the website of the magazine founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. in the 1950s to stand athwart history yelling stop. To stand athwart history, not a groggy, punch-drunk, scantily clad man you've just spent the past 40 minutes intimately feeling up.

So why exactly is MMA so conservative? The reasons, argues Arlen Delgado, are really pretty self-evident and include the following points:

To be fair, it's not only the right that tries to claim certain games or even athletics writ large for its side. The Nation devoted a whole issue last year to sports, with the unappetizing subtitle, "Views from Left Field," and featuring such ripped-from-the-Comintern-headlines as "Class Struggle on the Court" and "Revolution on Eight Wheels: Roller Derby marries an underground vibe with the fun of athletic competition? (as if we needed another pinko take on roller derby after Raquel Welch?s epic Kansas City Bomber, easily the agit-prop equal of anything Eisenstein churned out).

Indeed, the heavyweight champs of using sports to score cheap partisan points may well have been Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who, while awaiting their execution for atomic espionage in 1953, still found time to share jailhouse thoughts about the Brooklyn Dodgers. "It is the Dodgers' unconquerable spirit which makes people love them," Ethel wrote to her husband at one point in letters they knew would be published. "The victory of the Dodgers over the Phillies quickly restored me to my customary good spirits." As the great literary and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler observed caustically, such a transparently stagey and ham-handed gesture shifts us "from melodrama to comedy." That the comedy is unintended is besides the point, as was Ethel?s grasp of the proletariat pecking order of the Senior Circuit. If there was a team more worthy of working-man, hang-dog solidarity than the Bums, it was surely the hapless Phils who, despite their recent success, own the world record for total losses in any league of any sport.

But at least Ethel Rosenberg could plead distraction due to a date with the electric chair. In 2000, when the loathsome Yankees squared off against the equally rancid Mets in the World Series, conservative scribe Peggy Noonan unconsciously channeled Mrs. Rosenberg and actually wrote:

The Mets, my Metties, are the team of square, flat Long Island and the striving unchic boroughs?the team of the middle and working class... In a country in which status is everything, the Mets are the team of the nobodies. They are the team of those lacking in status, the ones with no special claims, the people who?ll never be in style. God bless all Met fans, a hardy crew that don?t give a damn....

Such a characterization isn?t simply wrong (though it is that). It blasts common-sense out of the park like a Dave Kingman moon shot circa 1976. As a kid growing up in New Jersey and in a National League household (like the Rosenbergs, my father had been a Brooklyn diehard growing up, though he never once pondered whether Carl Furillo or Cookie Lavagetto supported the Taft-Hartley Act), I saw my first two dozen ball games in the late, unlamented Shea Stadium. And I lived in Queens when the Mets beat the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series, so I have some familiarity both with certifiably obnoxious Mets rosters over the years and, worse, their even more obnoxious fans. Mets fans may never have style, but they have long believed themselves to be a chosen people, an arrogance that even Gary Carter?s poodle haircut, Lenny Dykstra?s rotting teeth, or the Jim Fregosi trade can diminish.

None of this is to say that politics and sports don?t overlap in profound and typically stupid ways. The modern Olympics were political from their start, conceived by a Frenchman as a means to avenge defeat in the Franco-Prussian War; later, they became one of the great Cold War proxy battles, spurring personal and taxpayer sacrifice in pursuit of international bragging rights in shot-putting, race walking, and team-pursuit bicycle racing. Baseball, America?s supposed pastime, translated the nation?s original sin of slavery into sport by banning blacks from competing for decades; the rigged and near-absolute control of team owners over players in baseball provided management with government-sanctioned power that Andrew Carnegie could only have dreamed of. The Edifice Complex subsidies that build stadiums everywhere and by every level of government are first and foremost political issues.

But discussing any of that is as distinct from anointing this or that game as truly conservative or liberal or libertarian or whatever as soccer is distinct from synchronized swimming. As the Super Bowl beckons, word comes that Gisele Bundchen, the supermodel wife of Patriots QB Tom Brady, has conscripted her friends and family via email to beg God to suit up for New England on Sunday. Mrs. Brady wrote:

Pray for [Tom], so he can feel confident, healthy and strong. Envision him happy and fulfilled experiencing with his team a victory this sunday.

Given how beautiful and rich and successful Brady and Bundchen already are, even atheists would be forgiven for asking whatever gods still exist to let the Giants win (even if it means giving yet another triumph to a New York team and another ring on the fingers of the lantern-jawed Manning Brothers, themselves annoyingly successful). But however distasteful Bundchen's special pleading may be?the New York Post called her email campaign "disgustingly sappy"?at least she doesn't mix politics and sport in the way that so many others do.

We politicize just about everything these days, which is surely one of the reasons why there is so little joy in Mudville and even why the housing market first inflated and then popped. Surely, we can get by in our leisure time without reflexively mapping our preferred sports to our preferred ideology. Soccer had no inherent ideology when meatheads were denouncing it as gay or communistic and MMA is not any more conservative than NASCAR isn't. If that small truth gets in the way of whiling away the weekends, well, maybe you're not half the fan you think you are.

Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv and co-author with Matt Welch of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America. He hopes both teams lose in the Super Bowl.