Interestingly, the top collegian in the NBA Draft in terms of Dave Berri’s “win score” slipped all the way into the second round where the San Antonio Spurs picked Pittsburgh’s DeJuan Blair. I’m not going to say this guy’ll turn out better than Blake Griffin, but it looks to me like a real steal for San Antonio with the 37th overall pick in what was generally regarded as a weak draft. Last season the kid put up 15.7 points and 12.3 (!) rebounds on .593 FG% in 27.3 minutes per game.

I assume he went so low because at 6’7″ he’s too short to be an NBA power forward. But here’s the thing. College stats don’t project all that well into the NBA except for rebounding which is clearly the aspect of the game at which Blair excels. If you look at a high-scoring collegian, you do need to ask yourself “will this really work in the NBA?” and start worrying about the guy’s physical attributes and so forth. But it’s almost always the case that someone who’s able to grab a lot of rebounds in college can also grab a lot of rebounds in the pros even if he doesn’t look like the kind of guy who could pull it off. We’ve already seen a bunch of this kind of guy—Paul Millsap, Carl Landry, etc.—fly under the radar into the NBA and it looks to me like Blair could do it too.

Edward Luce of the FT writes that Barack Obama should pay more attention to the long-term structural deficit:

A plausible alternative scenario is that Mr Obama will head into next year’s midterm congressional elections, which will help determine his re-election chances in 2012, facing a sullen electorate that fears the Democrats are taking their country towards bankruptcy. It might not be fair – Mr Bush, rather than Mr Obama, deserves most of the blame for America’s deepening structural deficits. But it is the kind of message that could help bring a moribund Republican party back to life.

If this strikes me as somewhat politically naive. For one thing, there’s no reason to think that the midterms “will help determine” Obama’s re-election chances. Note the divergent outcomes in 1994 and 1996, or in 1982 and 1984. If anything, it’s arguably easier for a president to play off an opposition-dominated congress. Meanwhile, the basic geography of the 2010 Senate midterms is very favorable to the Democrats, with open GOP-help seats in New Hampshire, Missouri, and Ohio.

Last, I think there’s just common sense. With the common bad and getting worse and long-term deficit projections looking grim, sure voters say they’re upset about the deficit. But if by the fall of 2010 unemployment is lower than it is today and heading downward, how worried are people really going to be? By contrast, if things keep getting worse, how impressed will they be by an improvement in the projected state of things in 2024? Something’s going to have to be done in the 2011-2014 period to make this graph look different but doing climate and health (which is related) in 2009-10 looks substantively and politically justifiable to me.

Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander’s column on Dan Froomkin ends with the observation that “With his loyal followers, he’ll survive. So will The Post.” I’m not certain that the Post won’t survive, but like Brad DeLong I don’t think it makes a ton of sense for Post employees to be that confident that the paper will survive either.

The Post employs a lot of people, and a lot of those people are very good. But if you think about a highly-competitive digital marketplace, it’s not obvious to me that the thing as a whole is nearly good enough to survive. I think it’s clear at this point that most American newspapers are too small to survive in traditional newspaper form—people will presumably continue to want news about Cleveland and about Ohio, but they won’t also get their national and international news from that local news source. The New York Times works as a fully globalized English-language news media outlet. So does the BBC, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and maybe a few others. Is the Washington Post in that league? Maybe, but maybe not.

You could imagine a very pared-down version of the Post competing with Politico and Roll Call and The Hill and National Journal and CQ as offering niche non-ideological coverage of Beltway politics. But do we really need five publications like that? And would something scaled-back to that level really count as The Washington Post we know today? I don’t think the answers to these questions are totally obvious. Dan Froomkin, by contrast, pretty clearly will survive.

Like a lot of Americans, I’ve sort of let myself get distracted away from the news out of Iran, which has taken a turn for the worse lately. But I did like this post from Peter Juul at the Wonk Room:

While I can’t read minds (I’m no Charles Xavier or Emma Frost), I think Roger Cohen hit the dynamic on the head in another recent column: “…the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails.”

These two Irans – the vibrant, diverse coalition that voted for change and then demonstrated in the streets versus the authoritarian, rule-by-force regime – will remain in conflict no matter if the government manages to disperse street protests in the short run. Khamenei and his successor(s) may be able to hold onto power by force for years, but they must do so now knowing large swaths of the population find their rule illegitimate and their system discredited. As Cohen wrote earlier, “Whatever happens now, all is changed in Iran.” We can only hope that the change is positive for the Iranian people, and that it comes sooner rather than later.

One way to think about this is in terms of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. The geographical scope in which Shi’a Islamism and velayat-e faqih could possibly become the dominant form of government is obviously pretty limited because there aren’t that many Shia Muslims in the world. But despite that limit the Islamic Revolution represented the only real example I think you could come up with of a true ideological alternative to liberal democracy in the world. And part of what we’ve seen over the past several weeks is the collapse of that alternative.

The Mullahs haven’t been willing to contest the basic democratic idea that he who gets the most votes ought to win the election. Nor have they been willing to actually permit fair voting. They can, plausibly, get away with this just as lots of autocrats (most importantly, though hardly exclusively) get away with all kinds of things. But when that’s done, it’s just unmasked as rule by force and by fraud rather than some genuine alternative political model that people can embrace.

Like a lot of Americans, I’ve sort of let myself get distracted away from the news out of Iran, which has taken a turn for the worse lately. But I did like this post from Peter Juul at the Wonk Room:

While I can’t read minds (I’m no Charles Xavier or Emma Frost), I think Roger Cohen hit the dynamic on the head in another recent column: “…the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails.”

These two Irans – the vibrant, diverse coalition that voted for change and then demonstrated in the streets versus the authoritarian, rule-by-force regime – will remain in conflict no matter if the government manages to disperse street protests in the short run. Khamenei and his successor(s) may be able to hold onto power by force for years, but they must do so now knowing large swaths of the population find their rule illegitimate and their system discredited. A

My colleagues at Progressive Media put together a 60 second compilation of yesterday’s floor debate on the American Climate and Energy Security Act:

To make just one semi-serious observation about this it was striking to me watching some of this unfold on C-SPAN how often complaints—particular from Boehner to the end—would come down to the observation that a bill comprehensively overhauling American energy policy was really, really complicated. And, indeed, it’s a really complicated bill. But to anyone being halfway honest about it the reason a comprehensive overhaul of energy policy requires a complicated bill is that existing energy policy is already very complicated and has tons and tons of legislative language behind it.

So what kind of congressman looks at a complicated effort to overhaul a complicated subject matter, then kind of shrugs and says “well this is complicated and I’m too lazy and stupid to be bothered to figure out what’s happening!” Well, I know what kind of congressman does that. But it’s pretty irresponsible.