Over at TPM, David Kurtz highlights a reader’s email: ”Imagine what would have happened to Joe Lieberman long ago if Lyndon Johnson were President.”

WWLBJD! I feel like I hear things like this all the time in lefty circles. In this particularly case, it’s a nice scenario to ponder, indeed. Would LBJ have threatened to build a federal highway atop Lieberman’s house? Relocated his personal office to Alaska? Done all while wiping his ass right in front of Holy Joe in the Oval Office washroom?

Once upon a time, good liberals were supposed to disdain Johnson as a lying, manipulating, war-prosecuting bully. Robert Caro has dedicated, what, 312,000 pages or so to uncovering the 36th president’s conniving ways. And most of the efforts at LBJ rehabilitation in recent years have focused on his policy stances: He signed a Civil Rights bill even though he knew it would doom his fellow Southern Democrats. His Great Society, for all its mistakes, represented the last serious federal effort to help the poor. And so on.

But I think the under-appreciated reason why liberals of the post-Vietnam generation have warmed to LBJ has less to do with the noble policy ends and more to do with the ignoble means: We love that Johnson was such an ass-kicker! After years of having their hats handed to them by nasty GOP operatives, while finding their own side led by pols who seemed to have skipped their Machiavelli 101, the notion of a president willing to kick the other side in the balls is very appealing.

And, back during the campaign, it was part of Obama’s appeal, too. Yeah, the rhetoric was all hope and earnestness. But supporters in my circle, at least, all waxed rhapsodic about one of the fouding myths of his political career: The way he got an opponent kicked off the ballot in his first State Senate race. This was, people whispered, an ass-whupper.

Is he? I think the jury’s still out. His campaign tacticians won themselves enough respect that, since his election, conciliatory gestures–like his forgiving stance towards Lieberman’s endorsement of McCain–tend to be viewed as evidence of strategic genius, rather than as signs that he may be wishy-washy. And when his rhetoric does get partisan, as Matt Yglesias points out today, it’s invariably followed by stories suggesting he’s somehow betraying the promise of his campaign.

I suspect most Obamaphiles wouldn’t feel that way. Yeah, they voted for a guy with JFK’s air of cool. But I think a lot of them dug the idea that he also had LBJ’s inner thug on board, too.

Is it just me, or does the launch of the 20-story, $1.5 billion, 6,300-passenger Oasis of the Sea seem like the beginning of some bad movie? The ship has a golf course, an ice rink, a number of luxury suites with the same square footage as my rowhouse. It left its shipyard Friday. In other words: It’s doomed!

The only question is what symbolic comeuppance will this hubristic ship receive? Icebergs have been done before, or course, as have undersea earthquakes and giant, reptilian sea creatures. But there’s still hijacking, Legionnaire’s disease, tsunami, a drunken captain, and that old favorite: murder.

Oh, yeah, there’s also this one: Unprecedented, massive global financial panic that strikes between when the ship was ordered and when it first set sail.

The Royal Caribbean ship makes its US debut Nov. 20. I’m not planning to be there.

Here in Philadelphia–where I’ve remained for most of this blog’s recent hiatus–baseball fever is running high, despite the lengthening odds that the Phillies will beat back the Yankees.

As someone who moved here as an adult, I’ve never managed to make myself a serious fan of any of the local teams. Unlike the others, though, the Phillies do have a claim on my affection, albeit not the serious, tribal claim that marks the natives in these parts. For an outsider, especially one reared in transient-heavy DC, that tribal love is a thing to behold. I remember walking back from a party the year the Eagles lost the Superbowl and seeing grown men sitting on rowhouse stoops crying. Last year, when the Phillies actually brought home a title, people didn’t know what to do. The streets clogged with revelers and the air filled with the sound of pots and pans being banged, the sort of old-time tradition I imagine is lost in most other parts of the baseball universe. Predictably, trouble ensued: Winning is really not an established habit in these parts, so, inevitably, the combination of alcohol and revelry and crowds in the streets led to some bad things alongside the good. But the joy was real, and remains so: The night the team won the penant a couple weeks ago, I was coming back from New York and arrived just in time to see a girl, on some guys shoulders, flashing the throng of tough young Philadelphian guys. So when you do the math on this Series, you still have to conclude that Philadelphia, the city, needs it more. Even with their win last year, and even with the Yanks’ drought.

This isn’t necessarily a compliment to Philadelphia, the city, since if there was more going on here the rise and fall of sports teams wouldn’t be so important. But there you have it.

As it happens, this passion has seeped into my own house in the unlikely form of my wife. Never a sports fan, she’s taken to listening to sports-talk radio. These days, she’s up on all the outrages of the day in local sports. (The broadcasts really are better when the teams are losing; no one quite knows what to say when there isn’t anything to vent about). I see her enthusiasm about Eagles and Phillies as of a kind with her enthusiasm, say, for the movie Tommy Boy, or for our ill-trained Saint Bernard, or Owen Wilson’s Dignan character from Bottle Rocket, or for pretty much every character Will Ferrell ever played: In this case, the not-that-bright, not-that-polite, absurdly enthusiastic and ultimately well-intentioned protagonist is the oft-doomed universe of Philly fans.  And, in good movie form, of course their season would climax in a showdown with the rich, worldly, efficient titans from New York. Alas, I don’t think the Phillies will pull this one out via some screwball trick-play and the theft of a key Yankee’s underwear.

Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, has died. But the debate about her legacy continues.

Back in 1997, the fast-food chain rolled out a new commercial starring Gidget–playing a male dog–as a determined consumer of Taco Bell products. Her signature line, “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” anchored the spots for three years. “The ads made the Taco Bell mascot wildly popular,” explains the AP, “although they provoked criticism from activists who accused them of promoting Hispanic stereotypes.

In the world of dog-lovers, though, Gidget was controversial for another reason. Like the Dalmatians in 101 Dalmatians, it was feared, she would lead to a run on Chihuahuas, a circumstance that would lead puppy-mills to start producing the animals in wretchedly inhumane conditions–and would lead to their adoption by frivolous, dog-as-accessory types who would quickly abandon them. The fact that a Chihuahua-equipped Paris Hilton kicked off a celebrity-lapdog craze a few years later only seemed to reinforce this fear.

A funny thing, though: A  researcher who studies the strange business of why breeds of dogs suddenly rise and fall in popularity  crunched the numbers and found almost no correlation:

Not surprisingly, some breed fads are initiated by the media. The best example is the Disney movie 101 Dalmatians. In the eight years following the 1985 re-release of the film, the annual number of new registrations increased spectacularly, from 8,170 puppies to 42,816 puppies. The peak in 1993 was followed by the steepest descent in popularity of any breed in AKC history—a decline of 97% within a decade. An even more dramatic example is the 100-fold increase in Old English Sheepdog registrations over the 14 years following the 1959 Disney movie, The Shaggy Dog.

It is often assumed that fads are inevitably instigated by media exposure. This is not the case. As Lieberson (2000) points out in his study of baby names, it often is impossible to definitively link an increase in the popularity of a cultural variant to a movie or television show. With dogs, there are only a few instances in which there is a clear, causal relationship between a movie and a breed epidemic. The fact is that 101 Dalmatians and The Shaggy Dog are the exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of the many hundreds of movies, television shows, and commercials featuring dogs have had little or no impact on the popularity of obscure breeds. Take the well-known Taco Bell television ad campaign that ran between 1997 and 2000 featuring a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua named Gidget (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”). The extensive exposure of the breed during 3 years of media saturation did not produce an increase in the popularity of Chihuahuas. Indeed, registrations for the breed declined 43% between 1998 and 2003.

The same goes, it turns out, for breeds that win the Westminster Kennel Club show. The winner may get to show up on the Today show, but the publicity doesn’t translate to showing up in more households, at least according to the admittedly incomplete stats on our national pet habits.

When I was working on my book about the pet industry, I had assumed that trade in pets would mirror the booming–$45 billion, nearly triple in 15 years–trade in goods for pets. But while there are business researchers who make a solid income telling would-be pet-business entrepreneurs about, say, just how many lines of upscale pet shampoo were introduced in the year 2005 (answer: a lot more than 1995), there was almost no one on the business side who knew anything about the rather more fraught question of where the animals came from in the first place. This boils down to commerce, to some extent: Buying and selling pets can be an ugly business. People who sell organic dog food to customers who see their pups as ersatz children realize that those customers might look askance at them if they were also selling those ersatz children like so many crates of tomatoes. One side-effect of this is that commercial breeding exists in a kind of statistical gray area.

Whatever the morality of it, though, its awfully interesting. It turns out that breed fads work kind of like baby-name fads–given to booms and busts, shaped more by random chance than by major events. “Barack,” it seems, is not necessarily any more likely to become a huge US baby-name as is “Barney.”

Which means that Gidget doesn’t necessarily have puppy mills or packs of euthanized dogs to answer for. Of course, she still spent three years shilling for Taco Bell, which is another question entirely.