I went to high school in Gainesville, Fla., home to the mighty University of Florida Gators, who will be seeking their third national college football championship on Thursday night in Miami. My mother and stepfather have season tickets, a bottle-opener that plays the Gator fight song every time you pop open a brew, and a DVD of the last 100 years of Florida football. Just this past Christmas, my brother gave me a Percy Harvin jersey that I'm wearing right now in honor of this blog post (and also because it gives me superhuman powers to type really fast).

I tell you all this to provide my readers with some important context before we all contemplate the request by Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., asking Nancy Pelosi to postpone some congressional votes scheduled for Thursday night, so that he and some other representatives could attend the game. (A very special thanks to Amy Leonard, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, for bringing this important matter to my attention.)

Brendan Farrington from the Associated Press reports:

Stearns [whose district includes Gainesville] wrote, "As you may be aware, on Thursday January 8, the University of Florida and the University of Oklahoma will play for the national football championship. Members of the Florida and Oklahoma delegations have expressed interest in attending the game as the congressional schedule allows. However, votes are currently scheduled to continue into Thursday night and Friday afternoon. We ask that you move these votes to either Wednesday and/or Thursday morning to allow Members to attend this historic game."

Seems reasonable enough, no? I mean, it's not like there's anything important on the schedule that day. Farrington reports that "Among the votes to be considered Thursday afternoon is certification of the Electoral College vote that gives Barack Obama the presidency." Come on! Florida and Oklahoma, two great football powers who amazingly both boast Heisman-trophy winning quarterbacks at their helm but have never played each other in all of recorded football history. How does certifying the election of the first black president even begin to compare?

But Nancy Pelosi said no. Perhaps we can blame her intransigence on the fact that she graduated from Trinity College in Washington, D.C., an NCAA Division III school that doesn't even have a football team! So maybe she just doesn't understand how important college football is in Florida and Oklahoma. But I fear that she is making a grave mistake. Not only is she contributing to the stereotype of San Francisco Bay Area Democrats as un-American haters of all that is good and great about the gridiron (left-leaning 49er, Raider and Cal Bear fans excepted) but she's also not thinking strategically. Sure, Oklahoma is never going to come into the Democratic fold, but Florida is the ultimate swing state! Don't disrespect the Gators, Nancy! It'll come back to chomp ya.

The U.S. private sector lost a whopping 693,000 jobs in December, according to the ADP Employer Services survey.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its own "official" count on Friday, but that's little consolation -- the ADP survey has historically come in lower than the government total. And if the BLS declares that the U.S. lost 700,000 jobs in December, reports the Financial Times, that would be the worst number in 59 years.

However, after undershooting the government numbers in November, the ADP changed its methodology, so the past doesn't offer us too much guidance. Still, no wonder the markets are upset this morning, (The Dow was down 185 an hour after opening). On Wednesday, Time Warner announced it was writing off 25 billion worth of losses for the fourth quarter of 2008, citing a decline in advertising revenue for its cable operations, and Intel reported that fourth quarter revenue would decline 23 percent, due to slacking worldwide demand for semiconductors. Two other industrial giants, IBM and Alcoa, both announced imminent job cuts.

"This is shockingly awful," the FT reported one economist's reaction to the ADP numbers. "We await Friday with trepidation."

But doom and gloom do not own the entire corporate universe. The Wall Street Journal reported that Monsanto is doing just fine. The agricultural biotech giant reported record sales and a doubling of profits for its fiscal first quarter, based largely on sales of its Roundup herbicide to Brazil, and genetically modified corn and soybeans.

Are GMO technology and industrial strength herbicides (and pesticides) recession-proof? Or are we still witnessing the lagging effects of the great agricultural commodity price boom of 2007-2008? One might assume that if China's economy continues to collapse, it's hunger for Brazilian soybeans will soon be sated, and Brazil's appetite for Monsanto products would consequently diminish. But then again, recession or no, everyone's gotta eat. For now, while the rest of the business world scrambles to avoid the floodwaters, Monsanto is high and dry.

Why do I love Archaeology Magazine's "Top 10 Discoveries" of 2007?" Maybe it's because I just finished reading two superb books that masterfully synthesized recent archaeological findings while explaining vast narratives of human existence on the planet: Charles Mann's "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus" and David W. Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World."

Now I just can't enough of Polynesian chicken bones found in Chile, ancient squash seeds in Peru, and Biblical characters from the Old Testament popping up on cuneiform tablets from the Babylonian city of Sippar.

Each new discovery is another clue that helps solve the mystery of who we are, today, in 2009. So I just want to send a big shout out to each and every archaeologist who spends his or her days counting the number of horse and sheep bones buried in nomad cemeteries 5000 years ago in the southern Ukraine so that I have a better understanding of how the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European influenced my life in Berkeley.

"1491," by the way, is considerably more readable than "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language." Mann is a fluid writer; Anthony interrupts his narrative in nearly every paragraph to back up each segment of his argument with a detailed analysis of burial patterns or Indo-European linguistics or the traces of bit-wear discernible on ancient horse teeth. He is not for the faint of heart.

The most telling point to take away from both books -- especially Mann's -- is how relentlessly the constant accretion of knowledge keeps upsetting older theories and accepted histories. The honest reader is forced to accept that the process is, for all practical purposes, eternal. Whatever we think we know now is not what our children will learn tomorrow. The past may not change, but our understanding of it sure does.

(Incidentally, the recommendation to read "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" came from a Salon reader in response to last year's post, "Fragments of the Tocharian.")

The big news from Macworld so far, according to the Wall Street Journal: Apple plans to change its pricing structure for iTunes downloads, with most songs now available for 69 cents, while highly-in-demand tunes will now cost $1.29 (instead of 99 cents).

Much more significantly: "Apple is also likely to drop digital rights management, or DRM, copy protection from the vast majority of the eight million songs in its catalog."

The Journal appears to think that the price adjustment is the big news, but I am neither excited nor bothered by it. A 30 cent price hike is not going to stop me (or my kids) from buying the latest T.I. tune. But the DRM news is huge. I can't imagine Apple could take such a step without the big record labels acquiescing.

That fat lady has sung -- and been digitized, ripped and distributed worldwide. The recording industry has finally recognized the inevitable. They're declaring surrender.

Whether this is a good or bad thing for recording-industry bottom lines, musicians or listeners is a question that I'll leave to readers to argue about. If you really want my opinion, I went to great lengths to express my thoughts on the matter three years ago in a feature for Salon, "Music Rules." The point here is: Anyone with a brain could see this coming 10 years ago, when illicitly ripped MP3s first started percolating through the Internet consciousness.

As I wrote back in March 1998, also for Salon, in "Mutiny on the Net":

For years Net pundits have been predicting that the Internet will erode intellectual property rights; now, it's finally beginning to happen -- and in an industry with billions of dollars at stake. Music is now software, and the Internet is the new middleman on the block....

The problem for the music industry is that the horse is already out of the barn: All the music that has ever been released already on compact disc is up for grabs, unprotected and easily transferable to the Net.

"They are in a pickle," says Michael Robertson, the Webmaster at MP3.com. "People are going to have access to these songs if they want them -- that's why [the recording industry] needs to embrace a more open approach."

But they did not embrace a more open approach. Instead, they went to war with their own listeners, alienated an entire generation, and essentially handed the music distribution business to Apple. The failure of the recording industry to cut a deal with Napster and take over online music distribution themselves will go down as one of the great boneheaded business mistakes of modern history.

I know, I know, the future of the music industry is still quite uncertain. Digital sales grow every year while overall revenue continues to fall. Musicians are being deprived of their rightful property. Yet somehow, as a listener, I have ended up with more access and exposure to more music, new and old, than I ever dreamed possible.

I'm still waiting to see the downside. Meanwhile, if the record companies had gotten their druthers, I'd be much worse off. As I wrote in "Music Rules":

If the entertainment studios had their way, every time a format changed, you'd have to buy all your records all over again. In their ideal world, we would hold restricted licenses to our content, not ownership. Digital rights management would cripple our all-powerful computers, creating backups would be impossible, and the basic human impulse to share the wealth of information that helps define who we are would be beset with obstacles. This is not paranoia. At every step of the way, intellectual-property-right holders have resisted technological innovations that give ordinary people more scope to enjoy and consume music, television, movies or any other content....

...There is no denying that P2P networks are popular because they are a great way to get free access to proprietary intellectual property. It's a big problem for the music business as it is presently constituted, and I have some sympathy for the executives trying to cope with it. If I were in their position, I'd try to stop it, too.

But I would fail because no matter how the Supreme Court rules in this case, [MGM vs Grokster] the entertainment industry will not succeed in its efforts to stop widespread piracy. New distribution protocols will continue to be devised and people will continue to use them. It only gets easier to copy and distribute content. It never gets harder. Digital-rights-management software will continue to be cracked as soon as it appears. Or it will simply be irrelevant. Even the DRM software included in, say, Apple's iTunes, is a joke. I can buy a new album by the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. on iTunes, burn it to a CD, and then rip that CD into DRM-free MP3s and make it available for sharing on a P2P network in a matter of minutes. There might be some downgrade in sound quality inherent in the process of burning and ripping, but not enough to matter to anyone who really, really wants to hear the song "Galang" right now and is unwilling to pay 99 cents for it.

Now Apple promises that it's going to abolish DRM for most of its 8 million songs. This leaves me with just one remaining question. What's it going to do about the DRM on the songs I've already bought from iTunes?

Dean Baker asks a good question in an Op-Ed published Monday in the U.K. Guardian: Where's the sense in rebuilding or extending the U.S. highway network if one of our national goals, going forward, is to encourage Americans to drive less? There's been much talk about pursuing "green" goals through the stimulus package, but wouldn't a massive highway infrastructure upgrade just exacerbate our existing fatal dependence on the automobile?

While not all highways are bad, highways that promote the pattern of sprawl that we have seen in many metropolitan areas over the last 30 years are bad.

We should not be making it easier for people to live long distances from their jobs, so that they have lengthy commutes each day. This would directly counteract efforts in other areas to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Baker suggests alternative measures, such as subsidies to local public transportation agencies allowing them to lower fares, or directly paying Americans to turn in their old, polluting cars.

Even better would be a government push to fund a massive public transportation infrastructure upgrade, but that's the kind of project that won't happen quickly. And right now, the emphasis appears to be on "shovel ready" projects that can be set in motion immediately.

Which means that, despite the green contradictions, we're likely to do what is easiest, and that means building more roads.

Over at Slate, Eliot Spitzer wrings his own hands. He's not fundamentally opposed to repaving roads, but worries that such projects are insufficiently "transformative."

The "off the shelf" infrastructure projects that can be funded immediately and provide immediate demand-side stimulus are almost by definition not the transformative investments we really need. Paving roads, repairing bridges that need refurbishing, and accelerating existing projects are all good and necessary, but not transformative. These projects by and large are building or patching the same economy with the same flaws that got us where we are. Our concern should be that as we look for the next great infrastructure project to transform our economy, we might rebuild the Erie Canal and find ourselves a century behind technologically.

According to news reports on Tuesday, Obama has set a six-week deadline for getting his economic recovery plan passed. By that point, everyone with access to a megaphone and a keyboard will have submitted their two cents as to why his plan is fundamentally flawed and what it should really include. Even if you grant that much of the criticism is warranted, you've still got to wonder, has there ever been this much carping from all quarters before a president actually started governing?

If the first week of January is any indication, 2009 will be the Year of the Financial Journalist. Last year, everyone was scrambling just to keep up with the events of the last hour, but now, the big guns have had time to report, to ponder, and to spew out umpteen thousand words explaining it all. Get used to it. There's undoubtedly much more to come, and I personally can't wait to build a new addition to my house just for all the books that will soon be on their way.

So, in the February Vanity Fair, we have the excellent Bethany McLean on the saga of Fannie and Freddie Mac. In Sunday's New York Times we get Michael Lewis and hedge fund manager David Einhorn's co-authored, two-part series, "The End of the Financial World as We Know It" and "How to Repair a Broken Financial World." And to cap it off, the Sunday New York Times Magazine gives us Joe Nocera's explanation of how the the math wizards of Wall Street screwed everything up, in "Risk Mismanagement."

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn get credit for the best single sentence in this mini-library of financial catastrophe: "Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics." They also get credit for delivering the most heaping doses of withering scorn -- Hank Paulson, the credit rating agencies, and the SEC all take turns in the stockade. Joe Nocera employs 8,000 words to tell a pretty simple story -- all the mathematical models in the world assuring you that your investments are 99 percent safe aren't worth anything if the great huge calamity that has only a 1 percent chance of happening shows up and smacks you in the face. But Bethany McLean's piece on Fannie and Freddie is probably the most interesting, because there's something for everyone in her epic of out-of-control lobbyists, arrogant CEOs, grandstanding ideologues, and unrestrained avarice.

McLean calls the right-wing contention that Fannie and Freddie, with their government mandate to increase homeownership, were the primary culprits in inciting the financial crisis "absurd," but she also makes it clear that their quasi-governmental status was a huge headache for regulators, politicians and competitors. It is also fascinating to see how some Democrats and Republicans went to bat for the two "government sponsored entities" and other Democrats and Republicans wanted them more tightly regulated. If you hate lobbyists, CEOs, Wall Street, and politicians, "Fannie Mae's Last Stand" is grist for your mill.

The money quote:

Another thing that's clear is that the critics were both right and very wrong about Fannie and Freddie. Yes, their executives and shareholders made fortunes in the glory years, and, yes, taxpayers are now bearing the brunt of whatever losses there are. Just as critics always warned, it's "the privatization of profits and the socialization of risks." But what the critics missed is that that wasn't unique to Fannie and Freddie. It turns out our entire financial sector was operating under that same premise -- and to a far greater degree than Fannie and Freddie.

Taken in toto, the amazing thing about Nocera, McLean, Lewis and Einhorn's pieces is that no matter what part of the financial system you investigate, the more you know, the more incredulous you become at the awesome spectacle of how incompetently grown-ups in the 21st century operate. The great financial crisis of 2008 did not happen by accident -- it took the willful efforts of thousands of politicians, business executives, Wall Street financial geniuses, lobbyists and economists to make this big a mess. As we sift through the wreckage, we cannot help wondering how we could have been so stupid. But maybe the answer is: We're just not that smart.

A quick note while I catch up on two weeks' worth of economic reading: On Friday, the Wall Street Journal's Justin Lahart contributed yet another chapter to the Great Book of Economic Doomsayers Who Were Proved Right by informing us about the unpopular prescience of Raghuram Rajan, who presented a paper in 2005 called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier? (Lahart also summarizes his story in a blog post here.)

At the time, Lahart tells us, Rajan, who is now the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, "came under attack as an antimarket Luddite, wistful for old days of regulation." Among his critics, none other than Lawrence Summers, the former Clinton-era treasury secretary who has been reborn as one of Obama's chief economic advisors.

Rajan looks pretty good now, as do all the gloom-and-doomers. But the man wasn't completely ignored back in the day. Longtime readers of How the World Works may recall that back in April 2006, just a few months after the inception of this blog, I found Rajan's thesis pretty compelling, and well-supported by events that were well under way at that time.

As I wrote back then:

After pondering the astonishing growth, last week, of credit derivatives -- financial instruments designed to slice and dice risk and spread responsibility for it widely throughout the financial community -- we were more than ready for a 43-page analysis of whether innovations in risk management may have increased the chances of financial instability.

Of course, back in April 2006, the answer to that question was still unknown. No longer.

As much as 40 percent of the Obama administration's $775 billion economic recovery plan could come in the form of tax cuts, report the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The early political entrails-reading suggests that Obama and his economic advisors are hoping to assuage moderate Democrats and Republicans who are worried that the new administration will show no restraint with its "open checkbook" spending agenda. The Financial Times' Edward Luce also reports that Obama isn't interested in just getting the 60 votes necessary to hold off a Republican filibuster, "[his] team has spoken of wanting to attract significant Republican support, not simply picking up votes from a Republican moderate or two."

Paul Krugman is dubious. While acknowledging that tax cuts are probably the quickest way to get help to strapped-for-cash Americans, he fears that Obama is already showing signs of "weakness."

Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40 percent of the package tax cuts, they'll demand 100 percent. Then they'll start the thing about how you can't cut taxes on people who don't pay taxes (with only income taxes counting, of course) and demand that the plan focus on the affluent. Then they'll demand cuts in corporate taxes. And Mitch McConnell is already saying that state and local governments should get loans, not aid -- which would undermine that part of the plan, too ... I'm really worried that [the Obama people are] sending off signals of weakness right from the beginning, and that they're just going to embolden the opposition.

Whether the Obama plan is a canny piece of jujitsu designed to sweep Republicans off their feet before they even know what happened or a pusillanimous hoisting of the white flag of surrender is the kind of question we won't be able to answer for some time to come. It is clear that there will be a protracted political battle over all aspects of the recovery plan -- any dream that Democrats would have legislation ready for Obama to sign by Inauguration Day is already dead in the water. But before we dismiss the tax-cut gambit entirely, it's worth remembering that not all tax cuts are alike.

When George W. Bush took office in 2001 and immediately started pushing for the biggest tax cut in history in the middle of a (mild) recession, the political debate did not center on whether tax cuts, per se, were good or bad, but on the question of what kind of tax cuts would best help get the economy going. People like Paul Krugman argued strenuously that tax cuts should be targeted to the low- and middle-income workers who were most likely to use the money for consumption purposes, rather than to the rich, who didn't need a break in the first place and wouldn't feel any economic pressure to spend their newfound bounty.

The bulk of the tax cuts that the Obama administration is proposing are exactly the kind of tax cuts that Democrats and left-of-center economists were pushing eight years ago. They're also exactly what Obama was promising throughout his campaign (minus the tax hikes for the rich, which now will have to wait until Bush's tax cuts expire in 2010), so you've got to give him some credit for follow-through. With two weeks to go before Barack Obama takes office, it may be premature to start jumping ship.

How the World Works is taking a two week break for the holidays. I'll be back at work January 5.

In Bonita, Florida, the city council is fast-tracking a road-improvement program while crossing its fingers and hoping that the Obama stimulus plan will pick up the bill. In Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, local leaders have already prepared a $98 million "wish list" for a slew of environmental cleanup projects. In Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick announced the state has $4.7 billion worth of projects ready to go, including, for example, "$18 million in library renovations at UMass Dartmouth."

No wonder the Obama economic team has been spreading the word that they will push for a bigger stimulus package than previously discussed. Just a few weeks ago, they were talking about a $500 billion "economic recovery" plan. But now, reports Bloomberg, the number up to $850 billion. Judging by the number of applicants already lining up with their hands out, that money will go fast.

Which is probably a good thing, considering the state of the economy. And wouldn't it be nice to spend $850 billion actually building things, instead of buying stock in Wall Street banks?

All eyes should be on the stimulus package. In recent days, the political commentariat has been obsessed with parsing every possible detail about the latest Obama cabinet picks -- is Tom Vilsack too Monsanto-flavored? What could possibly be the motivation for Ray LaHood as Transportation Secretary? Will Hilda Solis at Labor satisfy a suspicious left? But all that kremlinology is a distraction from a truly astonishing story. In just a few weeks, a new Congress will be in session, and the incoming Obama administration plans to have a shopping list the likes we haven't seen in several generations ready and waiting for the Senate and House to sign off on.

If you think the squabbling over the auto bailout has been messy, then maybe you better buckle up. Because the very first order of business for Obama is going to be a massive showdown over his spending plan. And for now, nothing else matters.