The Dish

Readers keep the thread alive:

You want to talk about offensive mascots?  My high school (Patrick Henry High School in Glade Spring, VA) has the Confederate soldier, i.e., The Rebels, as a mascot.  The Confederate flag is painted on the football stadium, and the marching band – of which I was a member – plays Dixie when the team scores.

Another sends the newspaper clippings seen above:

In 1980 Pekin (IL) High School changed its sports team mascot from “the Chinks” to “the Dragons.” Angry students protested, carrying signs that said “Chinks 4-ever” and the like. I especially like this quote: “My dad was a Chink and he doesn’t want it changed, either.”

Another shares a more amicable controversy at the local level:

My daughters attended, and I taught at, Arapahoe High School in Centennial Colorado – one of the first high schools in the nation to officially modify its mascot, with the assistance of the Arapaho tribe. The mascot was and still is the Warrior, fitting since the high school sits on ground once occupied by the Arapahos; their reservation is now in Wind River, WY. Ron Booth, principal at the time and part Indian, reached out to the Arapahos during mascot controversies in the Early 1990s. The result was a redesign of our mascot by an Arapaho artist to depict the warrior accurately; many educational and ceremonial visits by tribal members each spring to answer questions and relate tribal stories and lore; visits by AHS groups to the Wind River reservation and Denver Indian Center to donate goods, food, and share camaraderie, and the attendance at Arapahoe graduations by tribal leaders to deliver words of congratulation.

Our school is richer from the connections with the Arapahos, and I feel the tribe has gotten more respect and pride in return.

More discussion on our Facebook page.

Jeremy Stahl looks at the polling firm’s analysis of where it went wrong in the 2012 election:

It found that four areas most likely combined to result in the disparity between the polling firm’s final prediction of a 49-48 Romney popular vote win, and the actual result of a 51-47 Obama victory. Those four areas were as follows: how they weighted likely voters, underrepresentation of the East and West coasts in geographical controls, underrepresentation of nonwhite voters based on how Gallup determined ethnic backgrounds of survey respondents, and issues in how it contacted landlines that resulted in an “older and more Republican” survey sample. … At the time of the fiercest criticism, Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said that there was “no evidence” that his company’s likely voter models were off. Now he’s saying they’ll do better next time.

Nate wins! Enten indicts the polling industry more generally, noting that “there are proven ways to poll that produce more consistently accurate portrayals of the election than doing a single live telephone interviews of a randomly selected population in a national poll”:

The average of polls done in the final week, excluding Gallup and Rasmussen, had Obama’s lead over Romney more than 2pt too low. I might be willing to look the other way, except the polling average in 2000 had George W Bush winning and had a margin error of again more than 2pt. The error in margin in 1996 was off by 3pt. The 1980 average saw an error of more than 5pt. The years in between 1980 and 1996 were not much better. In other words, the “high” error in national polling even when taking an average isn’t new; in fact, it seems to be rather consistent over the years. …

The state polling, meanwhile, did not show an analogous large bounce. It consistently had Obama leading in the states he needed to be leading in. Moreover, it showed Obama holding very similar positions to those he did prior to the first debate in the non-battleground states.

Yglesias, meanwhile, believes that the differences between Gallup’s numbers and the Obama campaign’s internal numbers polling “did exactly what it was supposed to do”:

[W]hat [the Obama campaign is] doing isn’t what Gallup is doing which—again—is trying to drum up media interest in Gallup polls. And compared to the Obama numbers, the Gallup numbers are really interesting. You could write lots of articles about those numbers, while the Obama numbers tend to suggest that you shouldn’t bother.

I’m not a huge fan of the “we should be gambling all the time about everything” school of thought, but it would be useful in this realm. If public polls were released by people who were placing large financial bets on the outcome of the campaign, then pollsters would work to purge their models of excessive volatility. But in the world that exists, the incentives are all wrong. “Incumbent President presiding over economic growth and falling unemployment will probably win and nobody’s paying attention to the campaign” is a terrible news story. It just happens to be true.

Nate Cohn thinks Gallup could prove more accurate next time:

The survey is extremely well-funded and has huge samples, especially over a multi-week period. They’ve brought in a highly regarded team of survey methodologists, and their commitment to transparency means that analysts should ultimately be able to confirm that their efforts have paid dividends. It just might be enough to restore confidence in America’s oldest polling firm.

Tim Grierson compares the latest Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn vehicle to “watching two aging fraternity brothers try to convince each other that they haven’t lost a step since college”:

If the movie was just the two guys hanging out, The Internship might have been enjoyable. But Vaughn has put them into a really creaky underdog tale that’s part Animal House, part Revenge of the Nerds, and a large part “Homer Goes to College”—The Simpsons episode where Homer has to hang out with a bunch of smart, nerdy college kids and teaches them how to have some fun. That setup makes The Internship sound like a raucous comedy, but unlike Wedding Crashers, which was rated R, this PG-13 offering is actually pretty tame, no matter how many “shit”s the characters get away with saying. …

As for the Google setting and downsized-America topicality, the movie actually takes it seriously, hoping it’ll give the movie some emotional resonance. But according to The Internship, Billy and Nick are meant to represent all of us, the aging workers scared about an uncertain future in which we’ll be replaced by brainiac millennials who are too busy on their iPhones to, like, experience life, man, and get laid.

For A.A. Dowd, “it’s enough to make a lifelong Googler want to switch to Bing”:

Product placement is one thing; building a whole movie around the glorification of a multinational corporation is something else entirely.

Essentially a feature-length sponsored post, The Internship casts Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as middle-aged salesmen who find themselves competing against braniac college kids for a job at Google. As the film incessantly reminds viewers, the company—envisioned here as a professional paradise, where the food is free, diversity is key, and cars drive themselves—is regularly voted the greatest place to work in America. Characters go further, describing it as an “engine for change,” the “Garden of Eden,” and “the best amusement park you’ve ever been to, times a million.” If this excessively flattering farce is to be believed, Googliness is next to godliness.

Lydia DePillis has more on the corporate propaganda:

As the Los Angeles Times reported recently, Google charged neither location nor licensing fees for the privilege of shooting at its edenic headquarters, but did enjoy veto power over its contents. Accordingly, the script fully buys into the company mystique: Intern teams competing for full-time jobs are told they’ll be judged on their “Googliness,” which one character describes as “the intangible stuff that made a search engine into an engine for doing good.” And when Wilson’s love interest, a workaholic middle manager, says she puts in long hours because she thinks her job “makes peoples lives just a little bit better,” we’re clearly supposed to admire her.

The film’s advertorial nature hasn’t gone unnoticed. Early reviews have focused on the movie’s all-encompassing product placement, the Googleplex perks it highlights, and how it could be useful recruiting tool. (One critic even went so far as to suggest tickets to the movie, since it’s one long advertisement, should be given away for free.) It’s all true: In the world of The Internship, Google is basically paradise, the pinnacle of modernity and meaning in work. No wonder the company’s head of HR is so happy with it.

Previous Dish on the movie’s extreme product placement here.

Buster Olney reports (paywall) that a war is exactly what most MLB players want:

I’ve written this here before and it’s worth repeating now: In 1995, the players used as replacements during the MLBPA’s strike were treated as scabs thereafter, because they were perceived to be a threat to the union’s stance, and to the other players’ ability to make a living. Well, in 2013, players who choose to take performance-enhancing drugs to gain a competitive advantage over other union members are a far greater threat than the replacement players ever were, and worthy of much harsher treatment from their brethren. Because the players who choose to cheat have effectively chosen to try to take jobs and money illicitly from other union members.

Jonah Keri observes:

Fifteen, 20 years ago, the league and mainstream media were both content to let players smash home runs and fire 97-mph fastballs while said players consumed performance-enhancing substances; the league hadn’t properly codified which substances were allowed and which ones were not, while the media wrote fawning profiles of players who were later found to have used. No one likes to get duped, especially publicly. So we got an onslaught of hysterical articles slamming the league and its players for the spread of PED use. And now we have a league determined to beat back any criticism of its policies, even if it means suspending minor leaguers with flimsy evidence because they can’t defend themselves [because they don’t have a union], firing arbitrators for making honest decisions with which the league didn’t agree, and building cases based largely on the testimony of a broke alleged drug dealer.

Readers chime in:

I don’t have stats or figures or anything resembling first-hand knowledge, but I still think it’s worth pointing out the difference in the two situations. The drug war has been a decades-long bust. It has created many more problems than it has solved, and has not gotten near reducing drug-usage or any of its social or political or economic side-effects.  The baseball war on steroids, however, has certainly been a success.

The period of time from 1996-2010 alone saw the amount of people with 600+ career home runs more than double (Ruth, Aaron and Mays have been joined by five others). Records and precedent were constantly smashed, from Brady Andersons’s 50+ home runs as a leadoff hitter to the single-season home-run record being broken several times over. Of course, most importantly, many of these feats happened in the twilight of players careers, and statistically, Bonds, McGwire and Sosa (not to mention Clemens) had most or some of their best seasons in their 30s. Most athletes bodies break-down as they age, not get better (see: Ken Griffey Jr.).

Since baseball started getting serious about drug testing (not that it’s been a perfect system or successful quite yet), we have seen a return to the status quo. Albert Pujols, after one of the finest first-ten years of baseball ever, is slowing down. Derek Jeter’s been nursing an injury since last October, and has seen most of his stats trickle downwards. Alex Rodriguez has been injured consistently the last two years, as well. Star pitchers like Steve Strasburg or Josh Beckett and Cliff Lee are also breaking down in totally normal ways, that we just didn’t seem to see during the most prominent portion of the steroid era.

There will always be “cheats”, and as many point out, baseball has a wonderful history full of sign stealing, spit balls, and other questionable acts. But steroids are very rarely if ever now tainting the game and de-legitimizing it in ways that was prevalent a few years ago. Policies are definitely working and having an effect. The same cannot be said of the drug war.

Another:

The baseball steroid issue and war on drugs analogy is appropriate, but not for the reasons listed. The real issue is more free market oriented, i.e. about the money. Just as an inner city teen may wonder why he should work for minimum wage at McDonalds when he could make a ton of money selling drugs, look the income and lifestyle discrepancy between minor league baseball players and major league players. In the minors, you ride a bus from Rochester to Brooklyn and salaries range from $30-$125k a year. In the majors you get a private plane flying you from city to city and the league minimum of $480,000. If the steroids can bump you from the minors to the majors, that’s an immediate 284% (minimum) increase in your salary. And MLB clubs can’t void your contract if you test positive for PEDs.