A ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has sent a letter to Alex Rodriguez asking him to meet with committee staff members to talk about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

Why do members of Congress continue this nonsense? Why is a Democrat wasting time on this issue when the stimulus bill and a general plan for resuscitating the economy remain in limbo? Such grandstanding and diversion, one can only assume, derivefrom an individual representative’s desire to demonstrate leadership. Rep. Cumming’s letter, however, is about as far from effective leadership as a similar missive to Michael Phelps.  

If only constituents would communicate that they prefer Bud Selig and the MLB organization to set standards and sanction offenders, then we might avoid the salacious C-SPAN coverage of Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens refusing to talk or affirming their innocence. Instead, investigations that matter, i.e., the gross misconduct of the war and Hurricane Katrina during the Bush presidency, would top the agenda and be disposed of well before the end of President Obama’s first term.

For the first year and a half of this blog, there were no comments, and the blog operated quite successfully. I added comments in the middle of 2004. (Comments you find earlier than that are probably comment spam that was added later on.) Many blogs have developed successful communities of commenters, with many very interesting and substantive contributions and discussions. Unfortunately, this has not happened here.

Volokh and Above the Law, two of the most widely-read sites (for entirely different reasons), also have introduced new default rules or policies.  All three posts appeared within one week of each other. What explains this? I haven’t the slightest clue at the moment, but there must be some focal point emerging through the networking power of the blogosphere. Stated less pretentiously, people are starting to agree that nasty language is bad. It would be fascinating to know whether these authors are taking their cues from each other or if some other force is pushing them toward consensus.

Since I have not yet received any comments in this space, feel free to post whatever you want on the topic, invective or otherwise.

For my two cents, I think the main point is that you need to think seriously about what kind of issue you’re talking about. What bipartisanship requires, at the end of the day, is not politeness but a willingness to identify issues that cut across normal divides. (emphasis added)

How well does this measure up as a necessary or even sufficient condition for bipartisanship? I would begin by saying that the cynicism latent here is right on point. When Washington claims to seek or that Congress has achieved a bipartisan solution, we shouldn’t pretend that members received cookies on their way out of chambers (as President Obama was reported to have done at the White House). Politeness counts for very little among the entrenched political elite.

But if bipartisanship simply requires issues that cut across normal divides, why don’t we observe more truly bipartisan solutions in Congress? Take two of the more notorious laws from the Bush presidency: the PATRIOT Act and the AUMF. The roll call shows significant support on both sides of the aisle on an issue that captured the entire nation’s imagination (the threat of terrorism). But was passage the product of bipartisanship? Probably not. One could argue that partisan tactics (dropping off the PATRIOT Act late at night; very few legislators reading it) and fear-mongering (with the AUMF) were responsible for their successful path through the House and Senate. 

I’m less convinced, then, that identifying and adding so-called universal issues to the agenda is the secret to bipartisanship. Individual legislators rarely put aside their personal preferences or those of their constituencies simply to achieve consensus. They do so after whips and the White House apply significant pressure or offer quid pro quos on other issues.

So, if

[w]hat a commitment to running a bipartisan administration would have to mean, if not to be vacuous, would be a determination to use the president’s agenda-setting powers to focus legislative activity on those sort of questions,

I have serious doubts that issue spotting will be the secret to a post-partisan landscape. As long as we have two major parties fighting a (mostly) zero-sum game over seats in the Senate and House, the realities of political warfare and permanent election calculations will usually mean that bipartisanship has been shrouded in smoke and mirrors.

“What will cause you to lose billions instead of millions? Something rare, something you’ve never considered a possibility. Taleb calls these events ‘fat tails’ or ‘black swans,’ and he is convinced that they take place far more frequently than most human beings are willing to contemplate.”

The illiteracy to which I refer in this post’s title admittedly is not Safire’s own. Still, the consumate word hound might have pursued the topic’s origins more deeply. Mr. Safire clearly did his homework in other respects; he included passing reference to Carl Gauss, a mathematical genius (lamentably) less renowned than Einstein or even Isaac Newton.

I raise this point mainly because I could not have been blessed with a more fitting column for this blog’s opening week. I will save discussion of confidence intervals for another post (or perhaps never . . . ?). But what’s so striking about the fat tail concept, as described by Taleb, is how plainly wrong it is. In short, fat tails signal greater likelihood that an event considered rare under a “normal” distribution will occur. Designating fat tails as repositories of events “you’ve never considered a possibility” therefore makes little to no statistical sense. 

Linguistic illiteracy, which still plagues many too communities in this country and entire countries across the globe, demands thorough attention and eradication. In the meantime, statistical illiteracy propogated by popular books (in the wake of bestsellers like “Freakonomics”) should bother number crunchers as much as poor grammer infuriates the Safires among us.

“With record high job losses, and weakening economic forecasts, we’re focused on working with Congress to pass an economic recovery bill so we can create the jobs and make the investments necessary to get our economy moving again,” [the Treasury Department] statement said.

 President Obama’s economic team seems to be learning the (very) hard way that even a unified government cannot ensure swift action against a prolonged, eminently frustrating crisis. While this political reality sheds no new light (see Clinton I), one might wonder: is the executive branch actually moving to the sideline? Is Obama extending a conciliatory hand to his partisan allies in Congress as he has with partisan rivals over the last few weeks?

I hope the answer is no. Although the president has every incentive to promote cooperation with Congress during these crucial first months of his term, he should heed Larry Summers’s words:

“If there was ever a moment to transcend politics, this is that moment and that’s what I very much hope will take place as this legislation moves forward”

Obama should have ceased walking on eggshells around Congress and instructed Treasury to move ahead as planned. The 111th Congress continues to live up to the “do-nothing” standards set by the 109th and 110th. The president would do himself–and more important, the country–well by grasping the executive reins and demonstrating the leadership of which the legislature seems incapable.

Might a win for one of the lesser-known artists boost sales for output released months–or in some cases–years ago? Reuters reports that:

As in years past, Grammy nominations can help boost artist awareness and album sales. Last year, in the days following his nomination for album of the year, Herbie Hancock’s Joni Mitchell tribute “River: The Joni Letters” experienced an 80% sales increase. A week after its surprise win, “River” exploded 967% to 54,000 copies sold. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, the jazz legend’s best sales week since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking data in 1991.

Similarly, in the week following Plant & Krauss’ nomination for “Raising Sand,” the Rounder release — which also garnered nods in four other categories — had an 88% boost in sales. The duo’s first collaborative album has now sold more than 1.1 million copies in the United States, according to SoundScan.

Rounder GM Sheri Sands doesn’t expect the sales to stop there. “I anticipate when they win that we will see somewhere in the neighborhood of a 1,000% increase,” Sands says. Last year Plant & Krauss received a best pop collaboration with vocals Grammy for the track “Gone Gone Gone.”

I’ll believe in the Grammy boost if a Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” leads to another 100,000 paid downloads (above the 3,2 million sales registered last year) in markets outside California and New York. That or My Morning Jacket selling more post-awards albums than the Jonas Brothers.

Last night I begrudgingly watched “The Uninvited” at a cinema in North Haven, CT. Rarely do I get the chance to venture outside downtown New Haven for a movie. In doing so this weekend, I experimented with a genre (teenage horror flicks) that typically has me running for the nearest exit door. If over half of the audience is marginally above or below the PG-13 threshold, chances are the theater experience will be scarier than the gallons of fake blood and choreographed, perfectly predictable nail-biting scenes. 

More interesting (depressing?) than the state of the mainstream horror film in 2009, though, is the fact that “The Uninvited” is credited as a remake of “A Tale of Two Sisters.” This Korean film from 2003 itself was the recycled product of a well-known folk story. Compare the Guard Brothers’s grabbing ”The Uninvited” premise from Asian writers with Martin Scorcese’s Oscar-winning reformulation of the Hong Kong hit “Infernal Affairs” in “The Departed.” On the one hand, two unknown directors have offered up another screamfest for the notoriously slow January and February box office. On the other, one of the most gifted auteurs of the 1970s and 1980s served up a satisfying blend of comedy and action that mostly left me wondering what else Alec Baldwin had up his sleeve. (Thankfully, we now have “30 Rock.”)

That both films owe their exitence to Asian screenwriters must be a sign of significant changes in this country’s erratic movie market. Why did Scorcese’s first Academy Award win come from a film set outside his native New York and based on the routine formulae of ”cops and mobsters” films? Why do current American screenwriters, known for such enduring gems as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Friday the 13th,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” find more success with international mash-ups like “The Ring” and “The Grudge?” Maybe Americans now want their entertainment outsourced along with many of the services from which they escape on Friday nights. Perhaps the American silver screen inkwell is drying up. For further proof that call centers aren’t the only Indo-American collaboration in the 21st-century economy, see this story from Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Never did I imagine a marquee promoting Sylvester Stallone in a film entitled “Kambakkht Ishq.”

Whatever the explanation, the Best Picture win I expect for “Slumdog Millionaire” might signal that American demand for foreign cinema has caught up with the excellent supply. At the same time, our economy’s reliance on repackaging–from sampled music to Broadway revivals–should concern American consumers about our creative productivity. While it might not grab national attention to the same extent declining auto sales and a disappearing manufacturing base, in this case art truly has imitated real life.