This government is so getting overthrown.

Not that this is at all surprising, but Ali Karimi and Mehdi Mahdavikia are legitimate Iranian national heroes. In fact, it was Mahdavikia who scored what ultimately turned out to be the winning goal against the USA at World Cup '98.

Don't look now...

but there is a distinct possibility that, in next summer's World Cup hosted in South Africa, the United States will be paired with North Korea along with two other teams (most likely one from Europe and another from either Africa or South America). In one of the biggest stories in world football, the North Korean national team managed to beat out Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UEA for a place in the World Cup finals for the first time since 1966. President Obama has already expressed an interest in the tournament (suggesting that the US play host in 2018). Who could imagine a cozier atmosphere for the President and Dear Leader to get together for a chat?

An even more outrageous scenario would be if North and South Korea (who qualified with ease) were to advance from their respective groups and meet in the knockout stages. Tensions were high last year when a qualifier between the two nations had to be moved from Pyongyang to Shanghai after Kim's government refused to allow the South Korean team to sing their national anthem and display the country's flag prior to kickoff.

This wouldn't be the first time that the US has faced a political rival in the tournament: in France 1998, the Americans had their dejeuner handed to them in Lyon by a highly-motivated Iranian team in a 2-1 loss. Even more timely is the rumor that the US team may travel to Tehran to play a friendly match some point in the next six months as a tune-up for the World Cup. Recent political events, however, may have diminished the likelihood of such an exhibition. Still an exciting prospect, nonetheless.

Edit: According to Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, Obama has accepted an invitation to the opening of the World Cup finals next summer.

It was 105 years ago today...

Although Ulysses was written over a span of seven years (1914-1921), the entirety of James Joyce's novel is set in Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904, when Joyce and Nora Barnacle went on their first date together. A short 27 years later they were married. To commemorate that famous day, here are the opening lines of chapter 4 in which we are introduced to the character of Leopold Bloom:

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

Delicious.

Additionally, these tit-bits from the Times, the Guardian and the Examiner.

steve phillips is a moron.

thanks, joe posnanski, for pointing that out. i was watching a mets game over the weekend in which i heard steve phillips be distinctly critical of carlos beltran for not being 'a leader' and being 'inconsistent'. (Also the butt of Phillips' criticism? David Wright.)

Carlos Beltran OPS+ by season since joining the Mets (OPS+ is a crude measurement of a hitter's combined ability to get on base and hit for power. the "+" refers to the fact that a perfectly average hitter's OPS in a particular season is normalized to 100, so anything above 100 is above average, and anything below is below average. A 120 OPS+ is considered all-star caliber, and a 150 OPS+ is MVP caliber)

96, 150, 126, 129.

Keep in mind: he is a superb defensive center fielder, winning Gold Gloves in the last 3 years. Oh yeah, and his OPS+ this year: 167.

David Wright's OPS+ in every full season with the Mets: 139, 133, 150, 141, and 159 so far this year. But I'm sure Steve Phillips doesn't like Wright or Beltran because they're not vocal enough . AKA, they're not the chair-throwing, tobacco-chewing dirt dogs that all these baseball 'purists' love.

Shut up, Steve Phillips. The Mets fired you for a reason.

JESSE VENTURA

what can i say? he calmly vaporizes elizabeth hasslebeck and sean hannity. i think i might need to marry him.

sigh.

Decorated officer Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach is being dismissed using the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" statute. Nary a peep from the Obama administration, except to uphold the existing statute, and 'no immediate plans' to change it. Lovely.

john roberts

Pretty good stuff from Jeffrey Toobin (author of The Nine) on how Roberts steers the now quite conservative Supreme Court. It's a good read but hardly surprising - would anyone have expected Roberts, a graduate of the Reagan administration who faithfully represented George W. Bush in Florida in 2000 to be anything but strictly conservative? I think its an interesting read if only to understand the motivating factors behind Roberts' decisions - a lot of it comes down to his hesitance to have the Court involved in constructing any sort of policy. He certainly feels that the role of the judiciary is strictly to uphold laws put into effect by legislators, a position that entrenches him firmly against any idea of activism. His stance against affirmative action, asserting equivalance between forced segregation and forced integration is quite telling (I happen to agree with Breyer). In this way, it makes Obama's statement following Souter's retirement more telling - that his view of the role of the judiciary is not in line with the Robers/Rehnquist view:

Obama is the first President in history to have voted against the confirmation of the Chief Justice who later administered his oath of office. In his Senate speech on that vote, Obama praised Roberts’s intellect and integrity and said that he would trust his judgment in about ninety-five per cent of the cases before the Supreme Court. “In those five per cent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision,” Obama said. “In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions . . . the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” Obama did not trust Roberts’s heart. “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” the Senator said. The first bill that Obama signed as President was known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; it specifically overturned the interpretation of employment law that Roberts had endorsed in the 2007 case.

Certainly, debates on the the new nominee (whoever it is) will be quite interesting, and I wonder if we'll hear any peeps from current sitting justices. Probably not.