Her legion of devoted fans will no doubt be overjoyed at this news: English character actress Phoebe Nicholls will be returning to American TV screens later this year, in Prime Suspect 6. Phoe-Nix and Helen Mirren, together at last: what a time to be alive !!!

Some thoughts on the 4th:

... Independence Day was designed by the first state propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information (CPI), created during World War I to whip a pacifist country into anti-German frenzy and, incidentally, to beat down the threat of labor....
-Noam Chomsky

Discuss.

After a six hour drive, I can now begin a long weekend in the Bay Area. The holiday is tomorrow, and my sister's baby shower is the day after. Other then that, the weekend is open....

As matters stand entering tonight's action, the Dodgers are 4 1/2 games behind in the NL West, and a game and a half back in the wild card, but you could hardly tell that if you live here. The contempt for the team locally is almost palpable, especially after getting swept by the Angels last weekend, scoring only two runs in the process. The Dodgers not only reek in comparison with the defending champions, but also their hated rivals from the north, the Giants, and this year's media darling, the Oakland A's.

The team has remained in contention entirely because of its formidable pitching staff; if Gagne, Perez, and Nomo were to pull up lame, the Dodgers would be as bad as the Padres. Outside of LoDuca (and maybe Jordan, who's now on the DL), the everyday lineup is atrocious, while former scapegoat Gary Sheffield compiles MVP numbers in Atlanta.

The problem starts at the front office. News Corp. originally purchased the Dodgers for all the wrong reasons, but principally to corner the local sports cable TV market. It succeeded, but Rupert the Mad has done little, if anything, to correct the atrophy that began in the front office with the death of Walter O'Malley in 1979. The team took pride in the fact that its players played baseball "the Dodger way", but failed to take account of the changing nature of the sport.

Dan Evans, therefore, is merely the latest in a series of incompetent general managers, going back to the 1980's. It started during the tenure of Al Campanis, who, for all the controversy later associated with his name, actually provided the tools for the long-term growth of the team in the '70's. However, beginning in 1982, he made a series of colossally stupid trades (Sutcliffe for Orta, Dave Stewart for Rick Hunnycutt, Sid Fernandez for Bob Bailor), and had he not put his foot in his mouth on Nightline in April, 1987 (Quickie Trivia: Name the other historic sporting event held that same night--winner gets the usual night on the town, compliments of me), he would have been fired in a year or two anyway. Fred Claire did make a couple decent moves to help the team win the '88 Series, and he pretty much forced Lasorda to play the products of the farm system after the '92 season, but otherwise failed spectacularly, and his tenure will forever be linked to the Piazza trade (which, ironically, he didn't have anything to do with). Kevin Malone actually seemed to know what he was doing, rebuilding the farm system, trading for Shawn Green, and sending a message to the rest of the baseball by signing Kevin Brown, but never survived his boast about being the "new sheriff in town", and ultimately was bullied out of town by the local media.

Now it's Dan Evans' turn. One would be hard-pressed to find a sensible trade or personnel move since he took over. Although he's only been in charge for two years, he has the misfortune of being the exact opposite of Billy Beane the same year MoneyBall gets published. Beane is famous for signing players almost exclusively based on their ability to get on base; the Dodgers don't seem to know what OBP means. Beane makes a virtue out of necessity by ignoring the conventional wisdom, and drafting players according to their potential to do some very elementary things, like draw walks; the Dodgers draft high school pitchers in the first round. The A's value their farm system; the Dodgers use it to acquire Terry Mulholland at mid-season for the pennant drive.

As a fan of the team for what is now going on thirty-two years, I would almost be relieved if they were to fall out of contention in the next few weeks. At the very least, it would speed up the time table for Fox to sell the club. But most importantly, it would alleviate any pressure on Dan Evans to make a quick-fix trade. Better just to wait til the end of the season to blow the whole dang thing up.

Thanks to the oft-overruled progressive Ninth Circuit, it looks like I can update my blogroll, as this post is no longer operative.

As long as we're talking about bigots, check out this diatribe. If I were a Palestinian, and I thought that most Israelis shared this writer's racist sentiments, I would join Hamas tomorrow. Non-violent political action is worthwhile only if the other side is willing to acknowledge your humanity. [link via Michael Totten]

The reviews are in: NaziPundit's latest screed is, shall we say, a little short in the fact department. Incidentally, a thought experiment for those who believe that the above nickname is unfair: simply replace the word "liberal" (or any variation of same) with the word "Jew", and don't tell me that the quoted passages don't read like something out of Mein Kampf.

Although I have supported, and will continue to support, his inevitable promotion to the Supreme Court, I have to say that Prof. Volokh uses a very imperfect analogy in defending Clarence Thomas against the attack that he has used race to get to where he is, only to "pull up the ladder" once he got there. The issue isn't whether Thomas' opposition to affirmative action is based on principle, on how he reads the Constitution. While contrasting that stand with his personal history (I think it's safe to say that he was not the most qualified person for nomination to the high court back in 1991) is amusing, it's no more so than noting Hugo Black's membership in the KKK in light of his subsequent liberalism on civil rights. One can argue that it is a sign of growth that someone can look at the advantages one has received and question their fairness. In any event, as far as I can tell no one is demanding that he vote to preserve affirmative action solely because he has benefitted from it.

What is at issue with Justice Thomas is his recurring use of race (and racism) to defend himself. He can't have it both ways: denouncing affirmative action as little more than "racial aesthetics", while making semi-annual pronouncements of his victimization for not "toeing the line" on the lib'ral civil rights agenda, is going to piss a lot of people off. I, for one, will start taking his opinions as seriously as I take Scalia's the moment he cans the self-pity.

And he apologizes to Anita Hill.

Jesse Taylor of Pandagon has happened accross a blog posting that may well challenge Andrew Sullivan's infamous attempt to parody a Maureen Down column as the dumbest thing ever published over the Internet. George Santayana was right.

Rumor has it that the Charlie's Angels sequel just out this week leaves a lot to be desired in the plot area, which for me makes it an ideal moviegoing experience. Films that are more substance than style can be viewed more comfortably (and cheaply) in the privacy of one's home, whereas a movie like this (or last week's example, The Hulk) needs to be viewed on a big screen to be wholly appreciated.

BTW, it's only been out a day, and I'm already tired of the hype about Demi Moore. Of course she looks great--she's Demi Freaking Moore. And if I could spend $400k on plastic surgery and a makeover, I bet I'd also look damn good in a pair of Speedos.

This story is impossible to read without having your heart broken: a mother's reaction to the death of her son, soccer star Marc-Vivien Foe.

I often disagree with him, but Michael Totten speaks quite eloquently in this post, about the non-response by the U.S. to the ongoing tragedy in Liberia.

As expected, LaBron James was the first pick in the NBA draft, taken by the Cavaliers (dig their new unis !) The Lakers selected Brian Cook out of Illinois, and Luke Walton, whose dad still owes us for '77, from Arizona. Special congrats to Tommy Smith of ASU, who got drafted by the Chicago Bulls in the second round: he's the uncle of my former lawclerk's son, and is a tremendous shotblocker who moves like a point guard.

FREE AT LAST !!

"State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision...."
--Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting opinion, Lawrence v. Texas

Hmmm, Governor Steve Smith...it does have a nice ring to it.

Since he can no longer fashion a coherent argument, Mr. Samgrass has now taken to defending the human rights record of North Vietnam in the 60's and 70's, in an attempt to slam the war record of John Kerry, to wit:

"...not even the most Stalinized of the Vietnamese leadership ever ran a regime, or proposed an ideology, as vile as that of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh in 1945 modeled his declaration of independence on the words of Thomas Jefferson, appealed for American help against France, and might have got it if FDR had lived. Uncle Ho shared in the delusion that there could be an anti-colonial and anti-dictatorial empire."

Pardon my french, but, is he shitting me? Try going into Fullerton or Costa Mesa sometime and saying that. Uncle Ho, Pol Pot, and the rest of those SOB's could match Saddam, corpse for corpse.

Remember the story a couple of months ago, that various documents had turned up showing that a British M.P., George Galloway, had taken payoffs from the Iraqi government. Well, as it turns out, one set of the documents turned out to be forgeries.

Many visitors to this site don’t spend every waking hour, either at the office or in their mom’s basement, glued to the blogosphere. For those of you who don’t know who George Galloway is, he is a bete noire among the far right, a left-wing British politician who was publicly opposed to our great adventure in the Persian Gulf. After the war, a journalist for an English tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, “discovered” documents purportedly linking Galloway, through a Jordanian third-party, to a scheme in which he was to be paid a percentage on barrels of oil sold by the Iraqi government. A couple of days later, the Christian Science Monitor published an article concerning documents that showed direct payments to Galloway.

The usual suspects in the b-sphere jumped all over this; for them, it proved that a “Fifth Column” actually existed, that opponents of the war were acting not out of sincere disapproval to aggressive action, or out of skepticism at the tall tales concerning WMD’s, but out of a desire to coddle fascist dictators. In combination with the “mass graves” argument, it was an effective rejoinder to those who had any questions about the direction of American foreign policy.

As it turns out, though, the documents published by the CSM were forgeries. Their source had been an Iraqi general who had also attempted to pass forged documents implicating Galloway to another English tabloid. Since the forged documents had been potentially more damning, dealing as they did with direct payments to the M.P., rather than efforts by a third party to obtain some bakhsheesh using Galloway’s good name, that would have seemed to stick a fork in the “scandal”. After all, the “self-correcting” mechanism that is supposed to be inherent in the blogosphere, that is supposed to make what we do the next stage in the evolution of journalism, would demand that those bloggers who hyped the story in the first place make the appropriate apologies, retract their earlier posts, and hopefully promise to be more careful (and more skeptical) in the future.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the response has been to downplay the CSM’s retraction, even asserting that the article “authenticates” the Telegraph’s documents. No references to their earlier posts, when they based so much of their attack on the tangible “proof” that Galloway had taken bribes from Saddam Hussein; instead, it is as if their original post had never been published. How Rainesian. Blogosphere loses.

In fact, in order to keep this story going, they use a bit of dowdification in citing the CSM article. The Monitor alluded that the experts they employed to analyze their documents also reviewed copies of the Telegraph’s documents, and concluded that they “seemed genuine”. This gets trumpeted to mean that those experts had determined that those documents were not forgeries. But, in fact, the article doesn’t conclude that.

For one thing, the Monitor’s experts were dealing with copies of the documents, and could not therefore make any analysis as to the ink, the paper or any other aspect that might have called the original documents into question. More importantly, however, was the context in which the experts reviewed the copies of the Telegraph documents. According to the Monitor, the determination made by the experts concerned whether the Monitor documents and the Telegraph documents were textually consistent with other documents generated over the years by the Iraqi government. Their expert concluded that while the Monitor documents were too neat, seemed to advance too quickly through the bureaucracy to be genuine, and were too direct in naming the officials in question, rather than using euphemisms, the Telegraph’s documents were “…consistent, unlike their Monitor counterparts, with authentic Iraqi documents he [had] seen.”

The above passage is the only reference to the alleged authenticity of the documents purported to have been discovered by the Telegraph. What isn’t mentioned is that the above review only called into question the authenticity of the Monitor documents; it wasn’t until they analyzed the ink and paper that they concluded that the documents in question had been recently generated, and were therefore forgeries. No such review was done by the Monitor’s experts on the Telegraph documents. It is therefore disingenuous to suggest that the Telegraph documents were authenticated, when the originals weren’t even reviewed. And, of course, where two of the three sets of documents contemporaneously discovered on this subject turned out to be forgeries, a fair-minded observer might wonder about that third set.

No one blames the bloggers in question for running with the story when it first came out. It was juicy, it seemed to come from a reliable source, and it allowed them to smear their adversaries without a second thought. However, if the blogosphere is going to maintain its credibility, it must be quick not only to respond to errors, but to make the appropriate retractions when we make mistakes. Our blogs are our own little newspapers, and the permalinks we set are our sources. If we screw up, then we are obligated to go public, and not stonewall behind bogus interpretations of the truth. That sort of thing makes bloggers no better Jayson Blair.

I haven't bought (and hadn't really intended to buy) either the Sidney Blumenthal or the Hillary Clinton memoirs; autobiographies really aren't my cup of tea, and spending upwards of $35 on a hard-cover book that I probably wouldn't read for months anyways does not appear to be a good investment. But I'm starting to vacillate on The Clinton Wars, especially after reading this Richard Cohen column today. As he points out, the twisted mentality of the right during the Clinton Presidency has survived, and many of the same people in both the government and the media who pushed the "scandals" of that era are in power today. Blumenthal's history of that era covers events that are still fresh in the memory, and certain people have a vested interest in trying to discredit the messenger.

The Supreme Court's split decision on the affirmative action programs at Michigan is the big news today. I'm not going to read the decisions for awhile (those who care for more thorough legal analysis should go here, here, or here), but I can't help but think that this is at least a huge symbolic victory for supporters of the policy. Since the Bakke decision, there had been an inexorable movement in the courts towards banning race-based remedies, and I think that a lot of people assumed the Supreme Court would definitively strike down affirmative action this time. Although the Court's ruling left state laws like Prop. 209 in California on the books, it takes a lot of the momemtum away from affirmative action opponents, who must now acknowledge that government programs that seek racial diversity as a goal are constitutional.

Excellent piece by Michael Kinsley on why George Bush's dishonesty in leading our country into war hasn't resonated with the public, a sizable percentage of which believes that we have discovered WMD's. [link via Roger L. Simon] It's a cynical take, though, and one that I don't necessarily buy. I think that the issue will linger, in much the same way that the public expressed hostility to the efforts to drive Bill Clinton out of office, but nevertheless remembered Monica L. at the ballot box in 2000. When conservatives like George Will, Bill Keller, and William F. Buckley say that the non-discovery of WMD's matters, it matters.

Two other points bear repeating. First, public opinion in America always believes that we are in the right, at least initially. It believed that invading Mexico was justified in 1846 (and almost ended the career of an anti-war congressman named Abraham Lincoln in the process). It believed that the Spanish really blew up the Maine. It believed that the U.S. really was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. For many people, patriotism literally means, my country right or wrong.

Second, it is always important for our elected representatives to tell the truth, especially about matters of policy. Those who say that it doesn't matter that Bush stretched the truth a little to trick us into a war, since Saddam was an evil dictator, have a hard time explaining why we should believe him on that issue, or anything else (ie., Iran). Supporters of the President can't plausibly use the discovery of "mass graves" as a justification for the war, as a point of comparison to the liberation of Auschwitz and Treblinka at the end of World War II, since the U.S. didn't start that war: we were attacked, remember. FDR didn't invent Pearl Harbor.