There’s no question that Marc Canter is a friendly guy, both online and off. Sitting in front of me, stealing bites of Hunan pork in between one sizzling proclamation after another about the future of the digital lifestyle, Canter is the epitome of gregariousness. And Orkut isn’t his only playground. On Friendster, the most popular social networking venue, he has 124 friends. On Tribe.net, a kind of Friendster spinoff, he has 444. At press time, he was up to 749 on Orkut.

But to me, Canter’s numbers did not compute. How can a person have 500 friends? I struggle to keep close to half a dozen, much less half a thousand. When so many people are your friends, can those “friendships” be worth much?

Canter acknowledges that his Orkut network isn’t what anyone would call a closely knit pack of bosom buddies. The word “friend” is a bad term for describing someone you link to online. Reducing friendship to a click on a yes/no button is, Canter notes, “a complete joke.”

The accumulation of those connections on Orkut, for Canter, was part game, part marketing exercise and part simply a test of what in early March was the newest, hottest offering in the swirling nexus of hype and hope that is online social networking. Not since the glory days of the dot-com boom has a buzzword so thoroughly captured the attention of the media, the geeky early adopters, the venture capitalists and the mainstream. Social networking has arrived on your PC, and is coming to your phone, your favorite computer game, your chat program and anywhere else you might consider tapping into the Net. Depending on how you define the term, there are already at least 250 social networking sites or companies, and the mergers-and-acquisition crowd is eyeing them all hungrily. (On May 24, in the most recent such move, Monster.com bought Tickle, a site that includes social networking and boasts millions of users. On June 3, Friendster brought in NBC Entertainment veteran Scott Sassa to run the company.)

The promises made by social networking proponents are sky-high: They’ll get you jobs, get you laid, get you a party invite or a mountain-biking partner for next Tuesday. Social networking will empower communities, combat existential alienation and, best of all, could even be the key to ending spam. Social networking software — with its idea that human relations can be hacked, that community can be programmed — is a geek wet dream.

On the flip side, the critique is equally charged. Social networking sites are a hotbed for data-miners and marketing strategists, controlled laboratories in which the question of what human beings like to do and with whom can be studied with greater accuracy and detail than ever before. That geek wet dream turns into a nightmare; the social network is a state-of-the-art Panopticon. (Not that most people appear to care. Promise someone a date, or a chance at a job, and they’ll happily expose their most intimate secrets.)

Panopticon or panacea, social networking is hardly new. Most people started networking socially online, one way or another, the first time they logged on. It’s the fundamental fact of network existence: You connect. But what once was done by early-adopter pioneers typing from the command line over puny modems in primitive chat rooms and bulletin board systems is now standard practice for the broadband-hooked up, digital camera-equipped, blog-and-instant-messaging obsessed masses.

The venture capitalists and start-up CEOs call this “the return of the consumer Internet,” but the truth is that nothing ever went away. Our attention may have lapsed — I know mine did. After the dot-com crash, 9/11, corporate scandal and war, what people are doing online just doesn’t seem as world-changingly important as it once did, last century. But that doesn’t mean that we stopped doing things online — on the contrary, more people are doing more things online than ever before, and social networking is an essential part of it. Like e-mail, like using a search engine, social networking is a part of the Internet way of life. And it’s barely getting started.

One evening this spring, I attended an event at Trader Vic’s in Palo Alto, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California. The topic was social networking, a subject that members of the club were predisposed to be interested in, since, although it bills itself as a “public affairs group,” the Commonwealth Club is really an old-school social network.

The panelists that night included Jas Dhillon, CEO of ZeroDegrees.com, recently purchased by Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp.; Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, whose 1973 paper “The Strength of Weak Ties” is a foundational document in the young discipline of networking science; Ben Smith, CEO of Spoke.com, which provides social networking services to corporations; and Valerie Syme, executive vice president of Tribe.net, a company that aims to employ social networking as a tool for the delivery of local online classified ads.

A posting on Tribe.net had led me here. I found out about the event after joining a “tribe” called “social software intellectuals” — originally created by Marc Canter. A tribe, on Tribe.net, is what would be called a “group” or a “conference” or a “forum” on other community sites. Tribe.net is part of the second generation of social software networking sites (along with LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace and others) founded by people who witnessed the explosive growth of Friendster in 2003 and wanted a piece of the action. (The founders of both Tribe.net and LinkedIn were early investors in Friendster.)

If you join a tribe, notice of relevant events to that group will be posted on your Tribe.net home page. It’s a simple, intuitively useful idea. Who wouldn’t like to be able to check their home page and be spontaneously informed of local events of interest, as recommended by your friends, or even as advertised to the specific communities you’ve chosen to join? Your network becomes your filter on the world, and the more carefully you cultivate and nurture that network, the better the filter becomes.

At Trader Vic’s, the audience had come for some clarity, but arrived armed with skepticism. For some Silicon Valley veterans, their carefully and painstakingly accumulated personal networks were their stock in trade, their competitive edge; why should they lay them out for all to see on the Web? For others, burned one too many times before by venture capital-spawned fool’s gold rushes, social networking sounded like the latest sucker’s pitch. To still others, the whole idea of linking up with friends — complete with a picture showing you to your best advantage and a profile calculated to make you look cool — seemed distastefully high-schoolish. On Orkut and elsewhere, random strangers were asking others to be friends on the flimsiest of bases. I read your blog, can I be your friend? Like you, I’m a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan, can I be your friend?

But the not-so-secret secret of social networking is that flimsy is good! Flimsy is where the action is. Seek out flimsy, and you shall be rewarded. As Mark Granovetter explained, for what must have been the thousandth time this year, the counterintuitive key to social networking is that its value doesn’t inhere in linking up to your best friends and soul mates. You are far more likely, argued Granovetter, to find leads on a good job or a prospective date from the networks of people you don’t know very well.

You are already probably familiar with the friends of your best friend, or spouse, or close office colleague. There’s no fresh territory to plunder there. It’s those people with whom you have “weak ties” — the vague acquaintances, that guy or gal you once kind of knew, a little bit — who offer a path into possibility that you didn’t know was there. The essence of social software networks is that they are a clever way to organize access to the networks of people you aren’t actually friends with.

People, especially in the business world, especially salespeople, have been trying to figure out how to do this forever. But it’s a tough problem, because once you start dealing with a network that consists of the friends of the friends of your friends, you are confronting big numbers and big complexity. I have 50 “friends” on Orkut — my resulting network has 410,000 members, and is growing by 20,000 every week!

The human mind is not built to deal with networks that large. But computers make it easy. As sociologist Duncan Watts argues in “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age,” serious research into network theory wasn’t really feasible until the development of fast, powerful computers. Doing the math involved was simply too arduous.

In the past, the supernetworkers, the salespeople with the fat Rolodexes and the eidetic memory of names and faces, were exceptional cases. But today, creating an online Rolodex has never been easier. Point and click a few times, and boom, not only do you have a little network of your own, but you can suddenly browse through the hundreds of thousands of people you are linked to. Keeping all those hordes of almost-but-not-quite-complete strangers organized is a snap.

But if you can keep track of all those strangers, they can also keep track of you.

“There is something fascinating about collections of people,” says Bernardo Huberman, the director of the Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. Huberman boasts a résumé that stretches back to the famous Xerox PARC and includes groundbreaking work in a multitude of disciplines. Of late, one of the things he and his team of researchers have been studying is what you can learn about people from their interactions on a computer network.

In 2003, Huberman, Joshua R. Tyler and Dennis M. Wilkinson published a paper titled “E-mail as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure Within Organizations.” In it, they reported on their analysis of a year’s worth of e-mail sent back and forth between the 500 or so employees of HP Labs. They paid no attention to content; they concerned themselves only with the “to:” and “from:” sections of the e-mail header. But from that data set they were able to create an intriguing map of relationships — clusters of HP workers who e-mailed among themselves at particularly high rates.

Many of these clusters mapped directly to explicit HP Labs work groups or departments, as one might expect. But others jumped across groups and transcended departments, revealing communities that did not exist on any official corporate map.

“Discovering that you and a great bunch of other people that are not obviously in the same organization seem to be exchanging a lot of messages and have some things in common might be very interesting,” says Huberman. In the paper recounting their research, the authors note that one potential application could be to identify terrorist networks.

“The Internet is a fantastic opportunity to learn about the behavior of very very large groups of users,” says Huberman. “There is, wafting around all of us, a cloud of information — we have cellphones, we have PDAs, we have the e-mail that we read … There is information that is implicit there … and we have been very interested in seeing whether we could do something with it.”

A growing number of companies are already applying similar research to their social networking services. If a corporation signs up with Spoke.com, Spoke will analyze corporate e-mail traffic to see who is connecting to whom and map the networks that result. So rather than have you assemble your own network, as one might do on LinkedIn or Ryze, Spoke derives your actual network from an automated analysis of your behavior.

“The real value to businesses in the current groundswell of social networking services is in the potential utilization of the conceptual underpinnings of these services to help uncover and connect to, as appropriate, the human nodes in their organizations,” says Judith Meskill, a technology consultant who maintains the Social Software Weblog.

Increasingly, pundits like to tell us, we live in a “network society.” Our most important relationships and communities are no longer primarily determined by family and geography. Particularly in the developed world, our atomized, alienated, transient lifestyles have resulted in our seeking community from those who share the same interests, or workplace, or some other kind of tribal loyalty.

“Networks,” writes Duncan Watts, “are the signature of social identity — the pattern of relations between individuals is a mapping of the underlying preferences and characteristics of the individuals themselves.”

“One of the main questions I start asking myself is about constructions of identity,” says Danah Boyd, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley who is a ubiquitous pundit on the topic of social software. “How do people make sense of their identity? And over and over again it kept coming back to the fact that people make sense of their identity by the people around them.”

In other words, to quote one of the panelists at the Commonwealth Club: “You are who your network is.” You are who you know.

If all this is true, then online social networks are God’s gift to sociology. As late as the mid-’90s, notes Watts, sociologists who wanted to research social networks — how people related to each other, who became friends with whom, how information traveled through a social network — found their job very difficult. Information had to be gathered by hand, by passing out surveys, and the data was always suspect, because people might not answer truthfully, or even if they attempted to be truthful, might not be accurate. “A much better approach is to record what it is that people actually do, who they interact with and how they interact,” writes Watts.

And that is exactly what an online social network enables. When we sign up on a social networking site, we are diving into the petri dish, and gladdening the heart of every scientist with a key to the lab. If the network can figure out what groups you are part of simply by the patterns of e-mail sent back and forth, imagine what it can learn when it knows every last bit of data you have input into a five-page profile, which might include everything from your favorite breed of dog, your sexual orientation and marital status, to your turn-ons, bedroom accessories, and tastes in music, movies and books?

But that’s only the tip of the data iceberg. What if, in addition to that, it knows everything you’ve ever searched for on the world’s most popular search engine, it has access to your blog and it has been scanning the content of your e-mails so as to better target ads to you? Researchers with access to that network — to that online neighborhood where modern men and women spend ever greater amounts of their disposable time — will know more about you than you do about yourself.

Read Part 2 Orkut, the satisfaction of lust, and a promising antidote to spam: Where social software is headed

Not only does the foreclosure deal add up to peanuts compared to the $350 billion tobacco settlement, but it also pales before the size of the problem that it is theoretically supposed to address. The amount of negative equity held by Americans in their homes is currently calculated at around $700 billion. As a result of the foreclosure settlement around 750,000 Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure will receive checks of around $2,000 and another million homeowners will see the size of their outstanding loans reduced by an estimated average of around $20,000. Sure, any additional stimulus will be sorely appreciated in today’s demand-constrained U.S. economy, but a $2,000 check isn’t going to make up for a foreclosed home, and it is silly to think the banks will feel more than a slight pinch. The banks have already reserved enough capital to cover the checks that they are going to have to cut (around $5 billion). Compared to the damage caused to American families by both the financial crisis and the rush to foreclosure, the banks are getting off easy.

Obama may be technically correct to say that the settlement “will deliver some measure of justice for some families who have been victims of abusive practices,” but it’s wrong to treat the news as any kind of real payback for bank misdeeds. It’s just nibbling around the margins.

So is it a sellout — “another raw demonstration of who wields power in America,” as Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith, — undoubtedly the harshest critic of the Obama administration on housing policy and bank reform — argues? That’s a little harder to say, and a lot depends on the future course of events.

Some defenders of the settlement are arguing that the size of the deal is smaller than it might otherwise be because the government has retained the right to sue the banks for a wide variety of mortgage-related bad behavior stretching beyond the fraudulent processing of foreclosure paperwork at the heart of this deal. In particular, the states attorneys general of New York and California can continue their own separate investigations. As Felix Salmon writes, “other big-money lawsuits over securitization can and almost certainly will still be brought — which means that the big banks all still have significant litigation risk hanging over their heads.” As if to punctuate this point, on Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal regulators plan to sue some of the largest banks on charges of fraud related to the dodgy securitization of mortgages in 2007 and 2008.

The proof of this theory will only come when we see how hard the Obama administration and states like California go after the banks in the future. Given the track record of this administration, that may be doubtful. (Although, it may be worth noting that at least one conservative critic of the settlement, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, bases his critique precisely on the fact that banks still can’t put the whole crisis behind them. The administration can’t leave well enough alone, complains Holtz-Eakin, or “resist the political temptation to rouse its base with finger-pointing and lawsuits.”)

A more interesting question to consider, however, is how the housing relief contained in this settlement fits into other administration housing policy efforts currently in the works.

First off, government negotiators are still working on roping another nine mortgage providers into the deal, which could raise the overall settlement total from $26 billion to around $40 billion. In March, the rejiggered HARP refinance program will kick in, presumably allowing hundreds of thousands of homeowners to refinance at currently rock bottom mortgage rates. There is also strong pressure coming from the Federal Reserve and the White House to convert currently unoccupied foreclosed homes owned by the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into rental properties, a step that would remove excess inventory from the housing market.

Each individual nibble here is unlikely to make a profound difference, but taken together, all these initiatives add up to the most concerted effort the Obama administration has taken to date to bring relief to the housing sector. It’s also worth noting that it’s all happening without any help whatsoever from Congress. The approach does not address the desire for punishment that so many would like to see meted out upon the banks, but it will likely help spur additional economic growth. At a point when the economy already seems to have solid momentum toward recovery, every extra bit of help is gravy.

President George W. Bush cut taxes for almost everyone who paid income taxes. Romney would make the Bush tax cuts permanent. But that’s only a first step.

He would also raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college.

Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.

To be fair to Romney, when the candidate made his comment on not caring about the poor, he did it in the context of noting that there is a “safety net” for the poor, and if it was broken, he would “fix it.” But it’s a little difficult to square the idea of fixing a broken safety net with the plan to eliminate tax breaks that benefit poor families with children who aspire to a college education. (Not to mention the little problem of figuring out how to pay for that safety net, while at the same time committing to making permanent budget-busting tax cuts.)

Romney’s tax plan appears tailor-made for an Obama attack team to rip to shreds. Of course, judging by the results from the primary and caucus contests so far, poor people don’t seem very inclined to vote for Romney, so maybe he figures he’s got nothing to lose.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Lin. He was a high school phenom in Palo Alto, Calif., and I know some Asian American kids out here in Berkeley who worship the ground he walks on. Lin didn’t make the NBA because he’s freakishly tall, like the 7-foot-4 Yao Ming (Lin is “only” 6″3′). He’s there because he can play ball, because he has a wicked fast first step when he drives to the basket, and he knows how to deliver the rock to the big guys (a skill a surprising number of “legitimate” NBA guards show little interest in mastering). He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles.

But you can like Lin, and you can root for him, and yet still find his instantaneous, Tim Tebow-like ascent (in more ways than one!) to pop-cultural phenom — LINSANITY! — to be more than a little disorienting. Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.

We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.

And the crazy thing is, we’re figuring this out as it goes along — and giving the phenomenon more power. As we understand this new world, and submerge ourselves in it, we are beginning to take our cues from it.

Just want every one to know that I wrote about #linsanity this morning long before it became “hip” this afternoon: bit.ly/Apjdq4

— Jon (@viewmyseats) February 8, 2012

The mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself. It’s startling, but also natural: When you see a fire start to blaze, you run to cover to it. And so Linsanity breeds more Linsanity.

You want highlights? Here’s a distilled package of nine minutes of Lin’s exploits from his 28-point explosion on Monday night. You want a tribute video with an original rap soundtrack on top of some T.I. beats?  Someone is recommending it to you on Facebook or Twitter right now. You want analysis, pro or con? Plug “Jeremy Lin” into Google News and say goodbye to the rest of your day.

You want vaguely disconcerting racially tinged jokes playing on Asian, black, and white stereotypes? Twitter’s going crazy:

Jeremy Lin is a huge pickup for the Knicks. Not only is he scoring a ton of points but he is also tutoring his teammates children in math.

— The Bill Walton Trip (@NotBillWalton) February 7, 2012

“We know that Lin has been playing along, but honestly, fellow Knicks, stop bowing to him after a great play.” nymag.com/daily/sports/2…

— Angry Asian Man (@angryasianman) February 8, 2012

Lots of sterile white folks offer to adopt Jeremy Lin, concerned with the all black family he is currently with.

— The Fake ESPN (@TheFakeESPN) February 7, 2012

On Monday, the social media world was also getting worked up about Michigan Republican Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s racist Super Bowl ad, featuring a Chinese woman (labeled “yellowgirl” in the HTML code for the Web version) gloating over all the jobs her country was taking from the U.S. Once thrown into the 24/7 crazy cultural mashup perpetual motion machine, it didn’t take long before anger about that ad ran head on into Jeremy Lin pride. I have seen tweets urging Jeremy Lin to run for the Republican nomination for the Michigan senate seat, tweets warning that the only American jobs in danger from Asians are those belonging to New York Knick starting point guards, and even a tweet riffing off Kobe Bryant’s self-identification as “black mamba” — Jeremy Lin is suddenly  the “yellow mamba.”

It’s a tricky, tricky world. We get pissed off when we learn that an HTML jockey has labeled a Chinese woman “yellowgirl” but we grin when see Lin dubbed “yellow mamba.” Or maybe not; maybe we get mad at both. The tweet-stream moves too fast too tell for sure. It’s just one non-stop improv jazz riff frenzy.

The craziest thing is, from his record so far we know absolutely nothing about Lin’s staying power as a potential long-term starting NBA point guard. Lin won a state championship as a senior high school and broke all kinds of Ivy League records at Harvard, but he wasn’t drafted by a single NBA team, sat on the bench last year as a rookie for the Golden State Warriors, was cut by both Golden State and Houston before this season, and was playing in the NBA’s developmental league just two months ago. He’s had two great games against two bad teams, and once the league figures him out, he could easily become old news as quickly as he became the news. Or he might tear his ACL next week, be out for the season, and never manage a full comeback. His incredible domination of the basketball world right now tells us nothing about his future.

But one thing we do know for sure: There will be something to replace him, sooner rather than later. We’re strapped to a new kind of rollercoaster — the only thing we can be certain of is that our passions will be constantly roiled by whatever new outrage or delight seethes our way via our new information channels. You know that the Susan G. Komen foundation is reeling from their contact with this world. And you’ve got to guess Jeremy Lin is having a strange week.

Who’s next?

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.”

And there’s more where that came from! Banking analyst Dick Bove complains that the government has “basically castrated these companies.” Sorry, Dick, but it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of testosterone-crazed bulls in the entire global economy pasture. Hard times for investment bankers? It’s hard to imagine anything in the world that the average American could care less about, at this particular juncture in time.

2) As proof, amazing as it may seem, that the Dodd-Frank bank reform law is achieving exactly what the U.S. economy needs most: a reversal of the long-term trend in which the financial sector steadily gobbled up more and more of the U.S. economy.

Sherman makes a persuasive case that, even before the full implementation of Dodd-Frank, in anticipation of the new rules the big banks have been forced to make major changes to their businesses that have had a serious negative impact on their bottom line.

What is even more startling about this reversal is that few thought the much-vilified Dodd-Frank act would have much effect at all … And yet, from the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16 — in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent. Partly, this is a function of the economic headwinds. But the bill’s major provisions — forcing banks to reduce leverage, imposing a ban on proprietary trading, making derivatives markets more transparent, and ending abusive debit-card practices — have taken a pickax to the Wall Street business model

If true, this is great news. In 1986, Wall Street accounted for 19 percent of all U.S. corporate profits. Just before the financial crash that figure had grown to 41 percent. That’s not a healthy economy. That’s an economy of speculators trading with each other and blowing up financial bubbles. Obama has gotten no end of grief from the left for not breaking up the big banks immediately after becoming president, even though one could make a good argument that to do so in the middle of the crisis would have damaged the U.S. economy even further. If, in fact, the long-run resolution of this drama is a Wall Street that is withering on the vine, while the “real” “Main Street” economy gradually strengthens, then we are looking at something remarkable: a profound transformation of the U.S. economy, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Reagan administration.

3) As unwarranted hype.

Of course, Dodd-Frank has not been fully implemented, and financial sector lobbyists are busily exerting tremendous pressure to make sure every new rule gets written so as to have the weakest effect possible. At the same time, Wall Street will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign of Mitt Romney, who has promised to make rolling back Dodd-Frank one of the primary goals of his presidency. Profits may be bad this year, and bankers might be whining about their bonuses, but Wall Street will regroup, Dodd-Frank will be neutered, and it will be business as usual in just a few years.

Readings 2 and 3 are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. It’s possible for Dodd-Frank to already be having a salutary effect and for that effect to be short-lived. In some ways, Dodd-Frank’s legacy may be what November’s election ends up deciding — although whichever party wins the White House in 2012, the power of the financial sector over the political process is unlikely to diminish significantly.

But regardless of which reading you choose, the piece itself is amazing if only for the plethora of quotes from bankers lamenting how the times have changed. There’s a self-awareness of the fact that the country headed down the wrong road, that maybe, just maybe, there was something wrong with all the easy money. Wall Street sounds chastened. Whether or not the Occupy movement, or Dodd-Frank, or the bad economy is most responsible for this reality is impossible to say, but for now, let’s call it progress.

For the conservative bomb-throwing blogger Michelle Malkin, Eastwood’s stance was an affront to free market principles:

“WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???”

For liberal Michael Moore, it was an endorsement of President Obama.

“Your sermon seemed 2 b a call 2 give O his ‘second half.’”

Charges of hypocrisy poured in like Giants defensive linemen collapsing on Tom Brady. Clint Eastwood has long been regarded as a solidly libertarian conservative, and he is on record as having opposed the auto bailout. Yet here he was, cashing in, indirectly, on the auto bailout: taking what must surely have been a hefty paycheck to tout Detroit’s comeback!

Of course, Eastwood is also a smart man, and by the evidence of his long career, he is not crazy. So maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he saw what’s happened since the auto bailout and decided that in this case, government intervention was good policy. And maybe he’s been looking at what passes for conservativism in the United States over the past few years, and he’s disgusted. Because whatever you might think about the hypocrisy issue, there’s absolutely no question that “Halftime in America” has a clear political subtext.

The commercial analogizes Detroit’s comeback from hard times to the still unrealized recovery of the United States from the Great Recession. And it bemoans not just the hardship, but the hard feelings and disunity that currently define our political landscape. Here’s one key section:

I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.

Not only is that passage clearly a reference to the political fighting and harsh rhetoric of the past three years, but during that section, the commercial shows images of demonstrators in Wisconsin, protesting the effort by Gov. Scott Walker to break public sector unions! You can’t get more political than that. Sure, as John Nichols at the Nation reports, the pro-union signs of the demonstrators were surgically removed from the shots, but even that revisionism doesn’t obscure the power of the reference.. As a country, we’re fighting each other, Eastwood is saying. Let’s come back together … and support government intervention in the economy!

Seriously, what else are we to make of this?

It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.

As commentator Greg Mitchell pointed out almost immediately at the Nation, mister straight-shooter Clint is not being factually accurate. We did not all pull together. Obama bailed out Detroit, and faced enormous criticism for it. It’s exhibit A in the case for Obama’s supposed campaign to create the United Socialist States of America!

The conclusion seems clear: If we’re all supposed to pull together to reach a full economic recovery, just like we pulled together to rescue Detroit, then clearly we should be pulling together to reelect Obama. It certainly wouldn’t make sense to all pull together to elect the guy who wanted us to let Detroit go bankrupt, would it?