NO LONGER THE SAME AS IT EVER WAS

What is up with Phil Mickelson all of a sudden? After years of toiling away in near mediocrity, now he’s lighting up the leaderboards, this week at the FBR Open in Scottsdale, AZ. Has he taken a dip in Lake Agassi?

I don’t care much for golf, but even I know that Mickelson’s chronic underachievement is one of the constants in sports, right along with George Steinbrenner firing people and the NCAA investigating SEC football programs. If Mickelson keeps this up, Jim Rome will have to find another golfer to pick on.

9,901

I should go over 10,000 visitors sometime very late tomorrow night or very early Sunday morning. Therefore, I plan to celebrate this milestone by sleeping right through it.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

has vanished into a vast black hole. My head hurts. My wife and child aren’t back from school yet (everything’s OK, they’re just not back). There’s nothing good on TV tonight. I want a Dove bar. My local grocery store doesn’t stock RC Cola. And there’s several other minor things wrong with the world today.

POLIBLOG HITS A MILESTONE; TBP STILL MILLSTONE

PoliBlog has now received its 100,000th visitor. Congratulations to Steven on achieving this milestone.

By the same token, TBP will probably get its 10,000th visitor sometime in the next three or four days. Maybe a little sooner, now that I’ve been mentioned on the Volokh Conspiracy–I’ve had at least 25 visitors referred by Volokh today.

Then again, it all depends on whose statistics I choose to believe. SiteMeter says I’m currently at 9,805 visitors, but my hosting provider’s internal stats show that this site actually has over 5,000 unique visitors per month, though about 40% of those are search-engine hits.

I think I’ll stick with SiteMeter, though I like my host’s numbers a lot better.

LIQUID ATTENTION SPAN

So now the Internet professorial types are fulminating about the kind of beverages you need to get through a hard day at the brain factory. The esteemed James Joyner sticks up for coffee:

Coffee is the far better alternative in a variety of ways:

* The caffeine level is infinitely variable rather than predetermined by an evil apparatchik in Atlanta
* Ground coffee–or even beans and a grinder–take up decidedly less space than a commensurately caffeinated batch of soda
* Coffee–even good coffee–is far cheaper by volume, let alone caffeine unit–than soda
* Coffee has that wonderful coffee aroma and flavor, which soft drinks ordinarily do not

Q.E.D. coffee is better.

But James notes that other academicians have differing opinions, preferring the less cardioactive nature of soft drinks, particularly of the diet variety.

We clergy are nonacademic types, as the academicians will be quick to assert. Never mind that most of us have master’s degrees and are fluent in at least four languages. Never mind that we’ve got to produce between 20 and 45 minutes of polished rhetoric every week. But we can live with that. “Blessed are you when they persecute you for my name’s sake,” and all that.

However.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, knows more about the proper stimulant beverages than we do. And six out of five Protestant clergy will tell you that the most dangerous place in the world is between them and the coffee pot.

Anybody who’s ever been to a gathering of clergy can testify to this. I’ve been to my share of 3-day pastor’s conferences where 30 pastors drank as much joe in those 3 days as an army platoon drinks in a week. I’ve seen riots break out when hopelessly-naive convention center managers attempted to enforce a “no food or beverage on the arena floor” policy during synod assemblies. I’ve seen the kind of carnage that a group of grumpy theologians can cause when the caterers tear down the coffee service at the brutishly early hour of 8:30 pm.

We’ll drink our coffee any way we can get it–Starbucks is good, but we’re not above restaurant coffee. Heck, we’re not above gas-station coffee. (Given the amount of time we spend in our cars, how could we be?) When a guy’s daily grind (HAW!) is a pot and a half of church-basement Butter-Nut with a generous helping of non-dairy creamer that gives every sign of having been manufactured during the Carter administration, you know the coffee jones is strong in that person.

I mean, diet soda? DIET SODA? Diet soda is for people who’ve never had to read anything by Thomas Altizer. Diet soda is for people who haven’t gone to lectures discussing all three volumes of Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology and therefore don’t understand the joke about the prayer that starts off “O Great Working Hypothesis.” Diet soda is for people who don’t have the Athanasian Creed committed to memory.

A 7-ounce cup of coffee has anywhere from twice to three times the caffeine of a can of Diet Mountain Dew . . . and I don’t know a pastor who will even bother with a cup less than 20 ounces. Crimony, when I was in seminary, I drank three or four of those 20-ounce cups a day.

Please, people, listen to what I am saying. Diet soda is for pretenders.

THE VINDICATION OF THE XFL

Oh no, Tommy Maddox isn’t the only XFL-to-NFL success story. After all, He Hate Me will be playing in the Super Bowl.

MMM . . . TOES

Okay, it’s looking like Clark will probably come in third. I’m still not impressed; a solid showing for him would have been second, or at least within single digits of Dean. He can keep throwing money down the rabbithole if he wants, but right now he’s a Miata on glare ice– a lightweight with no traction and, consequently, going nowhere.

POLITICAL HONESTY CHECK

Alright, be honest–before today, who expected that Kerry would win by double digits in New Hampshire?

Howard Dean is not done, even if I said so–he’s still got lots of money and a fairly strong organization, most of whom have not just folded up their tents after last week’s non-coronation in Iowa. But unless he wins at least one of next week’s primaries, he’s going to be un-nominatable. And I really don’t think the eventual nominee would want to put Dean on the ticket. He’d be a boat anchor. Maybe it’s fair and maybe it’s not, but there’s a lot of people out there (like me) who really aren’t sure they want Howard Dean one heartbeat away from the presidency.

Popular punditry tonight is saying that the real loser here is John Edwards, who carried 31% of the vote in Iowa last week and looks to be drawing about 13% this week. Now, honestly, who thought Edwards’ soft, cuddly, agreeable personality would ever play well in the Granite State, where rugged individualism reigns supreme and the Manchester Union-Leader actually gets read? No, the real losers in New Hampshire tonight are Clark and Lieberman, whose strategy of ignoring Iowa seems to have done them both absolutely no good. Neither of them needed any extra effort to beat Kucinich and Sharpton, and that’s about all they both managed to do tonight.

I don’t anticipate much to happen in the next couple days–Lieberman may drop out, as might Kucinich and Sharpton, but that’s about all. The real test will be next week in South Carolina–if Edwards can’t win there, he’d better start thinking about the vice-presidency. Clark needs a strong showing next week as well, or he’s gonesburger; he can’t survive any more fourth-place finishes.

The Dems should be glad Dean is going to stick around for a while, even if he complicates the nomination situation. He’s good at stirring up the anti-W feelings, and capitalizing on those feelings is probably the shortest path to the White House this year.

It’s still about two months until I get to vote in the Wisconsin primary. I can wait.

(For formerly continually updated coverage, go to Outside the Beltway.)

WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION

Heard a radio discussion the other day about this: Schools in Nashville are now refusing to release their honor rolls or post any outstanding schoolwork:

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A-students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways — all at the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, Nashville school system lawyers warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

Obviously, anybody who makes the honor roll would be likely to give permission for their information to be released. So the gist of the complaint is the old “exception proves the rule” argument. Since the honor roll recognizes academic achievement, it’s reasonable to infer that anyone whose name is not on the honor roll didn’t achieve at a noteworthy level. And that’s an awful thing to have to face about yourself.

But I have intimate knowledge with this matter. As a bored, underchallenged high-school student, I routinely got grades a lot lower than I should have, because I couldn’t see the meaning or purpose behind the busywork I had to do. The fact that I only made the honor roll once in four years of high school didn’t bother me at all. I knew I was smart; I didn’t need a report card to remind me, and getting my name in the local newspaper meant exactly nothing.

Honor rolls are fine, no matter what thin-skinned parents who can’t abide the possibility of their children being average say. But there are better ways to motivate underachieving students. I’d suggest, oh, I don’t know, talking to them, trying to discern their areas of interest, finding ways to give them the challenges they need, maybe even (gasp) finding ways to recognize what they do well, even if it doesn’t fall into the sphere of traditional academics.

As you may have discerned, I didn’t get any of that. All I got was moral approbation and about a million “not working to potential” comments on my report cards. Not one teacher ever bothered to find out why I wasn’t working to potential; it was just too easy to slap the “underachiever” label on me and write me off.

I became a success in spite of myself. Mediocre grades didn’t stop me from doing well on standardized tests. And when I got to college, I quickly found that I excelled in courses where my grade was based on one or two papers or exams instead of an endless stream of “justify your existence” assignments. I wound up graduating magna cum laude and I got my first year of grad school totally paid for.

Sure, there’s some lightening up that needs to be done in this case of political correctness run amok. But it’s not what you think. The problem with honor rolls isn’t that some people get their names on them and some don’t. The problem is that the real world doesn’t have an honor roll, so it’s better to learn how to motivate yourself instead of counting on a “yay! hooray!” for every little achievement you make. Making the honor roll is certanly nothing to be ashamed of, but as a predictor of success later in life, it’s about on a par with your favorite pizza topping.

But I’d still say the Canadian bacon-and-pineapple folks are pretty smart.

(Submitted for today’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM.)

MY 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ENDORSEMENT

goes to this guy.

(Arigato, Dean.)