A day like any other...I had one of those experiences that makes me proud to be a lawyer.

A bit of background, first. To supplement my income, I do court appearances for other attorneys, where I can use the same cunning and guile that all of you have come to know and admire. The two areas I usually get work are in bankruptcy and unlawful detainer (ie., the procedure by which the owner of a property evicts a tenant), although for the right price, I will handle other sorts of cases as well. There are about four attorneys who use me exclusively to do their appearances, and it provides me enough money to get by, even when my normal caseload isn't high.

Last night, one of my sources decided to freelance my services. Just before midnight, I get a phone call asking if I would be available to do an appearance at the downtown L.A. Superior Court on a motion to set aside an entry of default. The way the intermediary described it, the hearing would be a slam dunk: our client had been improperly served with the complaint in the unlawful detainer, filed a Motion to Quash Service, only to have the court enter default the following day. An entry of default, btw, is a clerical ruling which notifies the court that a party has been served with a complaint but has not filed a response. If you are a defendant and the other side has entered default, that is a bad thing. The hearing had been held over a day due to the other side not stipulating to having the case heard by a commissioner, and the attorney of record had to be in Victorville (about 150 miles away) on another matter.

Since I was going to be downtown anyway, on another case, I agreed, and gave him my home phone number, which also doubles as my fax number. Bad Move !!! First, because the attorney he was working for didn't get around to actually faxing me the documents until two in the morning. Second, because said attorney decided to fax over eighty (80) pages of repetitive filings in that case. Third, his fax machine couldn't handle the strain, so it frequently broke down in the wee hours; that, of course, meant that my phone rang repeatedly between two and four in the morning. And fourth,...we'll get to that later.

With only a few hours sleep, I drag myself down the Cahuenga Pass to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse downtown. As I'm arriving, I get a phone call from someone who identified himself as "Joe Marmon", counsel of record for my client. He basically tells me that the hearing is a slam dunk, and that there is no way I can lose, and that the judge told him at the initial hearing yesterday that he felt that the opposition was in such bad faith that he wanted to impose sanctions. My bullshit detector immediately went off.

Arriving in court, the judge immediately called our case, and began grilling me as to how I was retained in this matter. After about five minutes of obtaining the minutiae of my legal background and education, he asked if I had ever met Mr. Marman or my clients, what I knew of them, etc. As it turns out, at the appearance the day before, a number of other attorneys had recognized him under another name, as a lawyer who had been disbarred a decade ago. According to the right honorable judge, the only attorney licensed to practice law in the state of California named Joseph Marman practices law up in Sacramento, and that this case was news to him.

As you might have guessed, things didn't go well from there. Regardless of whether the judge bought my story, I had been exposed in a courtroom full of lawyers as a "front", an attorney whose practice exists only to provide a public face to a grifter engaging in the unlicensed practice of law. Needless to say, the judge threw out the motion, adding insult to injury to the real victims of this scam, the clients who had unknowingly retained a conman to prevent their eviction.

This can't be good: Miramax Studios, which rose to prominence in the mid-90's when it took a flyer on Pulp Fiction, has decided to bifurcate the next Quentin Tarantino movie, cleverly titled Kill Bill. Besides the fact that the plot synopsis reveals a movie that might well suck big time, directed by Hollywood's biggest self-parody this side of Brian de Palma, and includes a cast consisting of largely washed-up performers (what, no Demi Moore?), is chopping a film in two really the best way for an independent film to be sold to the public?

A Thought for Bastille Day:

"There were two 'Reigns of Terror', if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors of the... momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

--Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

My favorite right-wing columnist, Jill Stewart, is at it again, attacking a number of worthies who are backing Gray Davis in his attempt to survive the GOP mulligan that is the recall attempt. It's worth reading, both as an example of her hyper-charged writing style, and because she has a point, which is that the Democratic governor of California is as purchased as most Republican office-holders (in fact, many of Davis' contributors are Republican, such as Jerry Perenchio).

However, I do have a problem with one itty-bitty little thing. She probably could have used the help of a fact-checker. At one point, she refers to Stephen Bing, who gave $100k to the governor, as a "brat New York heir". In fact, I happen to know that is untrue. The Bing and I attended the same high school, in North Hollywood, back in the day. His parents are big-time donors to Stanford University. His grandfather did make his money in New York, but the whole point is kind of stupid, anyway. What difference could it possibly make, unless "New York" is supposed to be a euphemism for something else?

Bing is, in fact, a brat Los Angeles heir, who happens to give generously to many philanthropies and worthy causes. He has also written scripts for crappy sit-coms and movies (incl. Kangaroo Jack), and has just directed a movie. He got a bad rap for insisting that Elizabeth Hurley take a paternity test to prove he was the father of their lovechild (a not unwise decision, considering the fact that Ms. Hurley was a very active woman during the brief time they were "dating"). He may well be a dirtbag, for all I know, but I would assume that a reason he contributed money to the governor is that he believed, perhaps naively, that Davis is doing a good job, and shouldn't be recalled. But that would require actually accepting that people can disagree with you and not be the spawn of Satan, a concept that may be difficult for Ms. Stewart to understand.

At the command of MaxSpeak, I add William Greider's website to my list of worthies to the right. The "Regular Rants" feature has the potential to metamorphosize into a blog, which would be really keen.

Tonight is the annual Vicki Zale B-day Bash at Joxer's in Culver City. It's open to the public, there will be great music and drinks, and the only present you need bring is a pleasant disposition.

Here's a cagy way out of the California budget impasse: have the State Supreme Court declare that some item (ie., education, assistance for the blind, etc.) is a fundamental right, and order that the legislature approve its funding by majority (as opposed to 2/3) vote. The state gets its budget, the GOP doesn't have to vote on a tax increase, while still getting to play its recall games, and life can go on. Not that I'm supporting such a stunt....

What's wrong with this picture? CBS reports that the White House knew that the information Bush used in the State of the Union address about Iraq buying uranium from Africa was not true (or "might not be true") before he made the speech. Bush uses that information anyway. The White House acknowledges this week that the information was bogus. To date, no one responsible has been fired, no resignations accepted, no heads have rolled, for allowing the Commander in Chief to publicly misstate the facts before the American people. Thus, there is a presumption that the President endorsed the misstatement, at least retroactively.

So why shouldn't we place the blame with the President? Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"? Professor, if I go into court and say something that is untrue, and that untruth is critical to my argument before the court, and I don't take steps to correct the record, I'm gonna get sanctioned big time by the judge, and probably by the State Bar as well (see State Bar of Arkansas v. Bill Clinton). It doesn't matter if I simply garbled my words, or made a statement that I thought to be true at the time; as an "officer of the court", I have an ethical responsibility once I know the truth to act appropriately, and not allow any misstatements I might make to sway the court. If you don't promptly correct a misstatement, you've lied.

One of the more underrated men in American history is Bob Moses, who played a critical role in organizing the voting rights movement in Mississippi forty years ago. Anyone who has ever read the histories of that period will run into his name again and again, whether it be in Taylor Branch's magisterial two-volume biographies of MLK, or Todd Gitlin's memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, or anyplace else that touches on that period in American history. Moses was a reluctant warrior, whose "leadership style" often consisted of asking indigent sharecroppers what they thought their problems were, and how best they thought their problems could be solved, rather than dictating solutions from on high.

In The Nation this week, a number of writers take up the theme of "American Rebels". Included among such noted rabblerousers as Walt Whitman, I.F. Stone, Dorothy Day, and Paul Wellstone is Bob Moses. While it is gratifying to see Mr. Moses get his due, the tone of the article, written by Tom Hayden, as well as the company in which he is kept (the other nine people profiled are dead), is funereal. Far from eulogizing someone who is still amongst the living, and refighting ancient battles from the 1964 Democratic Convention, Mr. Hayden should have spent more time discussing Moses' latest endeavor, The Algebra Project, which attempts to give low-income students the necessary math skills to succeed in the 21st Century. Not every progressive battle need be viewed in the past tense.

A great thing about reading Bill James is that you develop a resistance to the moronic statistical analysis laid out in this Slate article, about the 2003 All-Star Game. Listen, dude, batting average is a cricket stat; don't use it to analyze Troy Glaus, Brian Giles, and Scott Rolen.

The difficulties of fighting terrorism: Newsweek profiles the "Jihad" soccer team, which for a time was both the best team in Hebron and one of the most terrifying collection of suicide bombers in the Middle East.

Requiem for a Sycophant: a devasting "obituary" of Mr. Samgrass, by a former protege. The money quote:

D.C. has finally gotten to him. That must be the main explanation. Yes, there are other factors to consider, but the D.C. Beast frames and distorts the thinking. Few on the Beltway's A List fret about crushing other countries. They enjoy it. They like the view from atop the growing pile of bodies. Always have. You can't live among these types for 20-plus years without some of their madness infecting your brain. And I'm afraid this madness, and the verbiage that covers it, is becoming more evident in Christopher.

I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he's now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.

In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with "Just you wait!" and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets--with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he'd always said so. It's amazing that he'd dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won't care.

[link via Atrios]
More pathetic, though, is the fact that Hitchens doesn't seem to care that the quality of his work has slipped, even though it effects his credibility not only on what he writes now, but what he wrote in the past. Anyone who dowdifies (or is it sullivanates)Paul Begala, here, or, even more recently, is unable to distinguish between John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer calls into question whether he was as careless fact-checking when his subject was Henry Kissinger or Mother Theresa. Or maybe the booze caught up with him.

This doesn't mean much, but according to this test, my ideal Presidential candidate is a tie between John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich, with John Edwards right behind.

I don't think this story deserves much comment until prosecutors decide whether to proceed, but here is the LA Times story on the arrest of Kobe Bryant.

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.

Debuting Monday: NaziPundit. Somehow, I doubt that site will be a fixture on my blogroll.

It's funny, because it's true: For all who have ever attended law school, and for the people who still love them, Prof. Volokh has provided a handy set of maxims on "equity". To which I add, O Equity, where is thy sting?

If there actually was such a thing as the "liberal media", it would look like this. [link via Altercation]

The second edition of Valley Beat is out. This time, other than the cover story (about cyber cafes in Northridge attracting the wrong sort of crowd), there is but a solitary article that has anything to do with the Valley, concerning a West Hills woman who abandoned her baby in a hospital parking lot (unless you count the brief note about the proposed lap dancing ordinance as "Valley-related"). The remaining 55 pages are LA Weekly-lite, with the exception of an "anti-PC" slam at the LA Times (concerning the infamous Carroll Memo, covered here) that was commonplace to the point of banality at the late and lamented New Times L.A..

In any event, nothing's changed. The restaurant review, in a weekly purportedly serving half the city, was about a taqueria in Hollywood. No Casa Vega. No Jill Stewart. A disturbing trend developes.

Blocking the confirmation of a number of judicial nominees has become the painless way for Democrats to act out the role of an opposition party, to paint the President as an extremist without having to take any hard positions on their own. The pending nomination of former Ken Starr protoge/hatchetman Brett Kavanaugh is a sign that the Bush Administration is no longer serious about significantly altering the ideological position of the federal courts: by picking a nominee who has no chance of confirmation, and who can be filibustered even easier than Charles Pickering or Miguel Estrada, he sends a message to his base that he's on their side, without having to concern himself with the possibility that his nominee will embarass him with a controversial ruling from the bench before the next election.

For Democrats, this will be like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. Besides writing the Starr Report, Kavanaugh was one of the more obsessive investigators hunting leads on the death of Vincent Foster, at one point arguing before the Supreme Court that the attorney-client privilege expires upon the death of a client. This nomination allows Senate Democrats the chance to conjure up the spectre of Kenneth Starr, a prospect that already has the party base salivating. Bush, on the other hand, appeases his base, then gets the political benefit of nominating a less reactionary candidate when a Supreme Court vacancy opens up. Both sides win by this doomed nomination; the only loser is the hapless Mr. Kavanaugh.

This sort of mythomania would be hilarious if it didn't impact public policy so gravely: the non-partisan website Spinsanity reports on the invented charge that Senator Robert Byrd criticized the cost of President Bush's stuntflying on board the USS Abraham Lincoln last month. Because Byrd has a well-earned rep for delivering pork to his constituents, the media could charge him with being a hypocrite. Too bad the charge wasn't true: when the senior Senator from West Virginia made his May 7th speech on the well of the Senate, he didn't mention whether taxpayer funds were burned for the photo op. In fact, it was Henry Waxman who requested that the GAO investigate.

It is a thing to behold the Fourth Estate at work...by the time the media got done, Senator Byrd's eloquent speech had been turned into a shrill partisan denunciation. It's not hard to fact-check something. With my limited resources and staff, I still have access to Google, and thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to read the Byrd speech on my own; I would venture a guess that almost all of the people quoted in the Spinsanity piece had access to Nexis, and/or other more powerful search engines, plus interns, a secretary, a staff, editors, etc.

And yet each of those writers chose to propagate a falsehood. Coming on the heels of some other recent myths (ie., the stories of Jayson Blair, the Whitewater "scandal", allegations that Al Gore claimed to have "invented" the Internet, the false claim that the New York Times disproportionately covered the discriminatory policies at Augusta, etc.) that have gained credence, it is fair to wonder if a "free press" continues to serve any useful social purpose. If a reporter does not care about the truth, then what exactly is the Constitution protecting?

No point on trying to improve on this blogger's take on the story that the President is accusing yet another country of having WMD, except to point out what I wrote last week. Oh, what a tangled web we weave....

American sports fans are often surprised at how relatively low the salaries of European soccer players are. A variation of the reserve clause, long outlawed in American sports, continues to exists overseas, allowing a team to keep a player indefinitely. In the case of a few star players, some freedom of movement does exist, but the teams can keep salaries within reason by "transferring" a player to another team, in effect swapping a star for cash.

Such is what happened today, when the world's most famous athlete, David Beckham (as in Bend It Like...) was sold today to Real Madrid for $41 million. The former Manchester United star, who is sort of a combination of Kobe Bryant and Ben Affleck (according to a recent poll in his new home country, he is second behind Brad Pitt in terms being the "sexual fantasy" of Spanish women--btw, that same poll has me in third), and whose rabid following has been known to do some rather unusual things in honor of their hero, will earn about $9 million a year from the transaction, making him one of the most well-paid soccer players in Europe, which is still less than what the average free agent makes in baseball or basketball. Chuck Finley and Brad Radke made as much money last season. Zydrunas Ilgauskas "earned" even more.

Selling a player, rather than trading him straight up for other players or draft picks, allows the team to control the market for the services of athletes. Beckham's only leverage was to refuse the deal, a move he made last week when he refused a deal that would have sent him to FC Barcelona, but he did not have the ability to put his services up to the highest bidder. Obviously, playing in America is no option, as it was back in the glory days of the North American Soccer League; only a few national leagues have teams that have the wherewithal to financially compete for the top players, creating a system dominated by less than a dozen teams. Anyone who thinks that "small market" teams have it bad in baseball should take a look at the English Premier League, where every year the league title is a foregone conclusion for United or Arsenal.

blogomania (bläg‘ō mān‘ēو) n a persistent compulsion to post entries in one's weblog (or "blog"), based on the irrational belief that in doing so, one is providing a benefit to the public.

United no more: our "special relationship" with Great Britain has now been rocked by our ally's unwillingness to share its secrets.

The last word on l'affaire Raines goes to Frank Rich. Remarkable how the three most significant pundits of the past thirty years were not political reporters, but instead were an ad-man turned speechwriter (Safire), a drama critic (Rich), and an economics prof (Krugman). [link via Matt Welch]

If the owner is a man of his word, today the Sherman Oaks Lounge will celebrate its last day on the planet (at least until the football season starts, when it has (hopefully) reopened at its new address) with a real wake: all beer goes for a buck. They ran out of Chimay last night, and the pool table is gone, but still...you can't beat that.

UPDATE: Not a man of his word !! The place was shut all day (and I checked, on several occasions). What I hate about it is that I knew there was a good chance he was lying to me at the time, and he knew I knew he was probably lying, but he made the above promise anyways.

A beautiful day like today is wasted every moment I spend blogging about it. I'm outahere....

Holy moley--I've just been expelled from the comments section of another blog, apparently for posting something truly offensive--I defended David Beckham !! I guess I'm going to have get used to being controversial.

UPDATE: Apparently I wasn't expelled. It appears to have been a problem with the specific type of comments section used on that (and on other) blogs. Whew....

A good drinking game is to down a shot of Cuervo every time Bill Walton uses the word "pathetic" during a game. By halftime, you will have forgotten how dull the NBA Finals is this year.

BTW, Tom Watson is tied for the lead at the U.S. Open, having shot a 5-under 65. Mr. Watson, who made the tournament only after receiving a special exemption (it's being held at Olympia Fields outside of Chicago, where Watson debuted 35 years ago), is 53 freaking years old. Tiger is five back. Quote of the day belongs to one Kevin Sutherland, who said of Olympia, "I'm not saying it's Bob Hope-easy or John Deere-easy. It's all relative. But it's the easiest U.S. Open I've ever played."

You might have noticed the blogroll has been shortened. For a number of reasons, legal and otherwise, I am concerned with linking to sites that are "pseudonymous". Even if I never make reference here to a post on any particular site, the possibilty that I could become a defendant in a defamation action just for including that site in my blogroll troubles me. If I can't actually put a name to the site, I have no idea how credible that person is. In addition, my blogroll has become too large anyway, and this is a good excuse to do some long-overdue editing

Therefore, effective immediately, I will link to no political site unless I can be assured that there is an actual, reliable, living, breathing person at the other end. I make no judgments as to the reason someone might wish to use a pseudonym, nor will I discontinue visiting said sites on my trips around the Net. If that person wishes to remain anonymous, it is none of my business what his reason is, or what his name is. I just happen to distrust news articles that rely on anonymous sources, and I won't traffic in such a practice on any site that has my good name on it.

Disappointment is the word, after browsing through the first edition of Valley Beat, at least for those of us who were hoping for a weekly that would actually focus on the Valley. So far, I've seen a column about a writer who has just moved back to Van Nuys, some brief notes involving the city of Burbank, the recent letter from local Representative Henry Waxman to the President concerning the use of forged documents to support the war case, and an article about a sexual harrassment case involving the Glendale Police Department (and since when is Glendale considered to be part of the Valley, anyway?) The cover story is actually a good piece, on toxic waste problems at the Rocketdyne facility in Simi Valley, which is in the next county.

The rest of the 63-page weekly consists of stories that were no doubt also published in the sister paper, L.A. City Beat. The club and theatre references are pretty much what you would get in the LA Weekly, which doesn't pretend to care about the world north of Mulholland. The restaurant reviews are of a coffee shop in Hollywood and a couple of Westside pizzerias, and only three establishments listed on the page devoted to recommended eateries are in the 8-1-8. Until they review the Roscoes-of-the-Valley, Casa Vega, I will continue to question its street cred.

Neuheisel's gone: here's the termination letter (many thanks to my crack investigative team, led by Prof. David Johnson, who's been on this story like stink on the Clippers; he needs to start a blog). In order to justify terminating Neuheisel with cause, and thereby save itself a few million, UW is now claiming that he lied to investigators when they first asked him about the charges that he had participated in a pool. As with the Martha Stewart and Henry Cisneros prosecutions, the university is using a prosecutorial bully's favorite tactic: charging the defendant not with the more serious but difficult to prove charge (in this case, gambling), but on a much more selective charge used to intimidate witnesses before the law.

Don't be surprised if the parties agree to a confidential "settlement". Neuheisel has the NCAA dead to rights on this one. The NCAA knows that its regulations, while clearly spelling out whole areas of prohibited conduct involving gambling, do not mention pools. A prolonged legal battle based on the regulation in question is one they cannot win, and the letter from the compliance official at Washington okaying participation in tournament pools is going to be hard to ignore in any wrongful termination suit.

The NCAA also wants this story out of the papers A.S.A.P.; without gambling, college basketball would be followed with all the intensity that college baseball is now, and the popularity of their showcase event largely stems from the participation of millions of people in pools, most of whom have never set foot in Vegas, telephoned a bookie, or set up an off-shore account. Making a common activity seem sinister, and implicity calling many of its devoted fans criminal, are not in the best interest of the NCAA.

Interesting interview with Bill James in Slate, specifically concerning the publication of Moneyball. If I had to pick the writer who has had the most influence on me, it would either be Bill James or Garry Wills.

Who knew they could even use a computer in Norman, Oklahoma?

Excellent take-down of the defenses now being used by the Administration (and their shills in the media) for justifying the Iraqi war: that everyone believed Iraq had WMD's, not just the President. I would add an additional bit of mendacity: that skeptics of the WMD claim are overlooking the fact that Saddam was a monster, the so-called "mass graves" argument. In fact, almost everyone, from Pat Robertson to Noam Chomsky, pretty much agreed that Saddam was a bad guy before the war. Since the planet is filled with nasty dictators, and the U.S. military can't be everywhere at the same time, that rationale won't sell the public on a war unless that dictator is an imminent threat. In Kosovo, President Clinton was able to sell the humanitarian rationale for intervention to NATO, and we went in with French support. And it worked.

For whatever reason, the brutality of Hussein's regime was always a tertiary issue with Bush, behind the WMD and "links to Osama" rationales. Secretary Powell's speech before the UN mainly focused on the weapons, and our justification for going to war, that Iraq had failed to comply with UN Resolutions 687 and 1441, dealt specifically with provisions concerning WMD's. France, Germany and Russia did not agree that the threat was imminent, and for that reason were tagged with the label, "The Axis of Weasels". The Axis of Weasels were most decidedly not of the opinion that Saddam was a nice guy.

But on the issue of WMD's, the Weasels were right. They nailed it. Rather than dissing the French for loving Jerry Lewis, lame rock-n-roll, pretentious filmmaking, and being unappreciative for American support in the two world wars, we should be praising them, for loving Clint Eastwood, John Coltrane, Jules and Jim, and saving our bacon during the Revolutionary War. And for an astute, cautious foreign policy that has now been vindicated.

And no, the fact that Saddam was a monster doesn't justify the rigid certainty that Bush and other used to start a war over WMDs. It means the Iraqis who are still alive, whose families and property survived the war intact, can have a brighter future. For that reason alone, I'm glad we won the war. But as an American, I have to deal with the consequences that my government might have lied to me about what it knew before the war. Already, our government is hinting that Iran has WMD's, as well as ties to terrorists. Those hints may be true, but I have no reason to give Donald Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt. And I doubt other countries will too, especially since the "coalition of the willing" seems to have been treated as a collection of suckers.

Moreover, unlike Iraq, Iran is not exactly a death camp. There is an opposition to the mullahs, an opposition with democratic legitimacy. In terms of civil liberties, it is about as free a country as Singapore, a nation we have not placed in the axis of evil. On the other hand, it has supported terrorism. They may be responsible for the deaths of Amercian servicemen still in Iraq. A case can be made that Iran is a much more imminent threat than Iraq was, but who in this Administration can now credibly make that case. At best, they're incompetent bunglers who put American (and Iraqi) lives in peril due to faulty intelligence. At worst, they're liars.

And that won't be set aside, simply because Saddam was a thug. Warbloggers who make ad hominem attacks on their opponents are no better than pundits who make crude sexist remarks about the Dixie Chicks: they're all idiots. Who perhaps would be more comfortable living in Iran.

With reports circulating that UW has already decided to fire Rick Neuheisel, the NCAA spin that has been lapped up by sportswriters is that the regulations in question are unequivocal: NCAA tournament pools are a violation of the rules. In fact, the conventional wisdom is wrong; one wishes that the sports pages were less filled with "Steno Sue" Schmidts and Jeff "Kneepad" Gerths, and would actually question the nonsense they are being fed.

To wit, NCAA Bylaw Article 10.3 reads as follows:

Staff members of a member conference, staff members of the athletics department of a member institution
and student-athletes shall not knowingly: _{(Revised: 4/22/98 effective 8/1/98)}
(a) Provide information to individuals involved in organized gambling activities concerning intercollegiate
athletics competition;
(b) Solicit a bet on any intercollegiate team;
(c) Accept a bet on any team representing the institution;
(d) Solicit or accept a bet on any intercollegiate competition for any item (e.g., cash, shirt, dinner) that has
tangible value; or _{(Revised: 9/15/97)}
(e) Participate in any gambling activity that involves intercollegiate athletics or professional athletics,
through a bookmaker, a parlay card or any other method employed by organized gambling. _{(Revised: 1/9/96, 1/14/97 effective 8/1/97)}

As you can see, there are a number of activities that are clearly prohibited, such as using a bookie to place a bet, betting a teaser card at a casino, or even the handshake bet on a game that probably constitutes the majority of bets made on sporting events in this country. NCAA Tournament pools, on the other hand, are not mentioned, either specifically or generally, even though that has been a national tradition for almost two decades, and even though the legality of such pools brings into question whether the state views that as "gambling". The sheer randomness of a pool emphasizes the luck quotient to an extent not typically seen in sports gambling; if anything, a pool has more in common with a state-run lottery than the activities the regulation is supposed to guard against, such as point shaving and game fixing. That Neuheisel received a memo from the school stating that an outside pool was appropriate under the regs in question would seem to strengthen any lawsuit he might later file against the university (and the NCAA) for wrongful termination.

This story has James Lileks written all over it.

The bad guys won.

Local legend Matt Welch has teamed up with a blogger from Reno at the new and improved LA Examiner website. Hopefully, this is a taste of what their weekly newspaper will be like...although it seems to be emerging with all the deliberate speed of a Terrance Malick movie.

Why Orwell Matters: Anyone notice that the Bush Administration has gotten better (eg., they were concerned about Saddam's "weapons program", not necessarily the WMD's) at Newspeak since Christopher Hitchens became an ad hoc advisor to the President.

One of the reasons why it's so easy for me to root for Rick Neuheisel is that I've realized who he reminds me of: Bill Clinton. The two of them have a great deal in common. Both were prodigies, who came from the hinterlands of America (Clinton from Arkansas, Neuheisel from Arizona) to become nationally prominent in their chosen field. Both men have law degrees, although neither has ever practiced law for any significant period of time, and both have had a habit of parsing every legal technicality to get away with stuff. Both were caught in embarrassing lies about relatively trivial matters. Clinton was the first boomer President, while Neuheisel was the first Gen-X head football coach, and both were the recipients of a great deal of resentment from the people they passed along the way, particularly their contemporaries. The subconscious image that comes to mind when people think of the former President is him playing "Heartbreak Hotel" on his saxophone, just as football fans instinctively think of the song "Margaritaville" when Neuheisel comes to mind. And both have been nicknamed "Slick" by their enemies.

Today is the day that the Washington A.D. is supposed to decide whether Neuheisel gets the boot, but no matter what happens, I know he has a bright future. Of course, you know and I know that putting money into an office tournament pool is "gambling", just as we all know that sexual relationships encompass all matter of activities, including blow jobs. But as Kenneth Starr and Robert Ray discovered to their horror, trying to nail someone who is smarter than you are on a technicality can boomerang. Regardless of whether Neuheisel relied on the now-infamous internal memo approving tournament pools organized by third parties, the existence of that memo makes it next to impossible for either the university or the NCAA to take action without seeming to be grossly unfair. The NCAA regs in question do not specifically mention office pools as a prohibited activity, even though they have been around for ages, and to do so now will invite a huge lawsuit.

From my own personal experience, I can tell you that Rick Neuheisel is one of the most charming people I have ever met. He's funny, engaging, and brilliant, skills that would make him a formidable politician (he's probably a Republican, so I'm not sure I want to encourage that path). And like Bill Clinton, certain people hate him with an intensity so passionate as to be obsessive. Eventually, if you keep giving your enemies a loaded gun, one of them will fire.

Rick Bragg Dept.: much of the research above was done by my loyal stringer, Prof. David ("Smilin' Jr.") Johnson, who reminds me that NCAA head honcho Myles Brand is also a Philosopher (but more to the point, is he a Straussian?).

At this point tomorrow night, we will know whether the improbable quest of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim to win the Stanley Cup has succeeded. Last night's thorough trouncing of New Jersey in Game 6 has raised expectations in Southern California that this might be the year we capture our first hockey crown, an event utterly unforeseeable as recently as two months ago (even more unforeseeable is the fact that I would be referring to a Ducks' accomplishment in the first person plural, as I could name only a handful of their players when the playoffs began, and had seen probably less than two dozen of their games not involving the Kings since the franchise came into existence). Local baseball fans had a good feeling about the Angels as they entered the playoffs; if not expecting them to win it all, we knew going into the Yankees series last October that they were one of the best teams in baseball. No such expectation accompanied the Ducks first round series with Detroit, of which the local consensus was that they would be lucky not to be swept.

I saw Game 6 at the soon-to-be-shuttered Sherman Oaks Lounge, in the company of bartendress/singer/guitarist Annette Summersett, and noted character actress Shannon Ainsworth. It was Annette's last night behind the bar (she goes back to the U.P. for a sister's wedding, and won't return until the bar has its last call next Sunday). I followed the honorable course of action: I gave her a hug and a nice tip, allowed her to beat me in pool, and then let her have it for rooting against the Ducks the entire playoffs. I also vowed that if the Ducks won Game 7, I would quit smoking....

The Ari Fleischer of Iraq, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, has a new (and surprising) job. One can only hope he is able to restore credibility to that American institution.

One area where I try to cut the President some slack is his daughters. Or, I should say that I try to cut the First Twins some slack, especially when they're pulling the same sorts of stunts that a lot of people, myself included, were doing at their age. The gist of this story is that Jenna and Barb went to a karaoke bar in DC last weekend, got royally hammered, and then didn't tip the D.J. I'm sorry, but since when is it expected that a patron has to tip the D.J. on karaoke night? Doesn't the cover charge and the mark-up on the drinks pay his salary already? Leave 'em alone, and let's concentrate on their dad's extremist policies instead.

This blogger raises a good point about the relative insignificance of the blogosphere in the recent NY Times controversy. He calculates that even if the mighty Instapundit and his numerous minions were to all post something critical of Howell Raines on the same day, it would reach less than 150,000 people, or less than 0.04% of the American people. Taking into account that much of that traffic is from overseas, and a pretty fair share consists of people misdirected from Google and other search engines (I assume that Tennessee law profs have an even worse "Pornikova" problem than I have), and who are less interested in politics, you're dealing with fewer people than those attending ball games this afternoon, or watching Mexican soccer games on Univision each day, or the national audience for anything on MSNBC. If Andres Cantor was to denounce the leftward tilt of the Gray Lady's editorials during a Toluca-Club America match, it would have a much greater impact than anything written by Andrew Sullivan (speaking of which, blogger Roger Ailes has an example of journalistic mendacity by Mr. Sullivan in a recent column that is at least as troubling as anything the NY Times has done recently).

It's humbling to realize how insignificant my favorite little cult really is....

Remember when the Houston Astrodome was called the "Eighth Wonder of the World". I used to think that was the height of pretentiousness, a symbol of Texan pomposity and vulgarity. The Astrodome was viewed as an ugly eyesore by the rest of the country, and the teams that played in it never really obtained an advantage from the home crowd, which was usually seated too far away from the action to provide any assistance. Perhaps the two most memorable events held in the Astrodome, the King-Riggs tennis match and the 1968 Houston-UCLA basketball game, were played on surfaces that were hundreds of feet from the front row of fans, giving the TV viewer the antiseptic experience of watching a practice in an empty gym.

The city of Houston has now built two "modern" stadiums for their baseball and football teams, and the world's smallest indoor football stadium lies dormant for most of the year, according to this Washington Post article. The logical thing would be to tear down the monstrosity, since any effort to renovate the Astrodome into a museum or shopping mall would be incredibly expensive. However, sharing an opinion that is held by no one outside of Harris County, some locals want to maintain the stadium as an historic landmark, and I think they're right. Like the ugly uniforms the Astros used to play in, the Astrodome might have been tacky and vulgar to the rest of us, but to the people of Houston, it meant something grand, and it was what gave them an identity. Like it or not, we shouldn't only try to preserve the beautiful things in our society, since we're much, much more than that.

This news really made my weekend !! The San Fernando Valley is finally going to be served by a weekly paper, after years of non-existent (or worse, condescending) coverage by the LA Weekly, called the Valley Beat. Even better news, though, is that this might lead to the return of Jill Stewart. For those of you who have never read her column, Ms. Stewart has long been a guilty pleasure of mine, comparable to those half-hour ads Lyndon LaRouche use to run during the Presidential elections, or to a movie like J.F.K.. Just as LaRouche tried valliantly to warn America about the nefarious dealings of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, and would obsessively spin loopy stories involving the Queen of England, Ms. Stewart would dwell on the nefarious dealings of L.A. School Board administrators and the teachers' unions, and would obsessively spin loopy stories about Kevin Murray. The return of Jill Stewart is even better news than the Cubs besting the Rocket this afternoon. KOBE AKBAR !!!

UPDATE: Jill Stewart is not going to be writing for Valley Beat. Her fans will have to settle for her vanity site for the time being.

This will probably kill any chance I have of winding up on Tony Pierce's blogroll (well, that and sponging off him at the Dodger game in April), but I must sadly report that the selection of his current amore as the new Miss Universe has not been a popular one among pageant aficionados. Eighteen year old Amelia Vega, Miss Dominican Republic, won the title in spite of being described as "very immature", and having allegedly been involved in "several incidents" with her competitors.


Miss Universe 2003

The high school senior becomes the ninth winner from Latin America in the last nineteen years(and third straight), leading to some complaints that the process for choosing a winner is little different from how the W.B.C. ranks boxing contenders.

Howard Owens has a thoughtful analysis on the aftermath of the Iraqi war (well, duh, all of Mr. Owens' takes are thoughtful; any conservative on my blogroll has to be thoughtful--I ain't linking to a right-wing version of Smythesworld). He doesn't try to soft-pedal the non-discovery of WMD's, or pretend that it doesn't matter in the face of the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

When we attacked Iraq on March 19, I listed what I thought were twelve inarguable points about the war. Since I started this blog last year, I have made any number of statements that I regret, that were unfair, unkind, and/or just plain daffy. Visiting my own site's archives, I find posts that are truly cringe-worthy, exacerbated by the fact that this blog is read by many dozens thousands of people each day. The problem with self-publication and self-editing is that anyone can smell the cerebral farts I cut.

That post was not one of them. If only I could be half as brilliant the rest of the time, I could start charging for the privilege of dispensing my wisdom. That post alone should place my talents in demand as a foreign policy expert; a post in a future Administration awaits.

In particular, Point No. 6 is more interesting now than it was when I wrote it: "The U.S. withheld evidence from the inspectors that might have made discovery of WMD’s possible, but didn’t provide it so as to not minimize the case for going to war." As it turns out, the evidence we "withheld" was that we weren't really sure if Iraq had any WMD's. This is no small thing, since the primary justification we used to attack Iraq before the international community was that they had violated U.N. Resolutions 687 and 1441 in not disarming. Bush also used Iraq's ties to terrorist organizations as a rationale, but since any direct connections to Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attack were tenuous at best, it took a back seat to the WMD issue. It was most decidedly not that Iraq had a poor human rights record, or that Iraq might have a WMD program in the future, or that a "free" Iraq would get both sides to the table over a Palestinian state. Skepticism about the extent of the Iraqi WMD program was the principal reason France and Germany opposed going to war before the Security Council; for such statesmanship, those countries were deemed part of the "Axis of Weasels".

If we weren't certain that the information we were providing to the world was accurate, but continued to act as if it was, then we were lying. Even if WMD's are ultimately found, it will not lessen that lie; it will only mean that our hunch paid off. A free people do not deserve to be lied to by their government, especially over an issue as fundamental as whether to go to war.

Well, this story ties up two threads on this board: the Ducks, and unethical journalistic practices. It now turns out that the New York Post, the infamous Murdoch-run tabloid aimed at people who can't read, fabricated a boast allegedly made by Anaheim owner Michael Eisner, to the effect that he "guaranteed" there would be a "victory parade" in Anaheim after the sixth game of the Stanley Cup finals. The only person who's guaranteeing Ducks' victories around here is me !!

Let's see: you accept the resignation of the managing editor of your newspaper, ostensibly because of credibility problems in some of the stories your paper has recently covered. Then, as his replacement, you re-hire the editor on whose watch two of the biggest frauds in journalism history, the Whitewater "scandal" and the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, were published. The New York Times will never learn !!

How on earth is Hans Gruber ranked behind Joan Crawford? Behind Freddie Krueger? Behind (egads !!) Annie Wilkes?

When even William F. Buckley is questioning the validity of the WMD rationale, you know the President has some 'splaining to do. [link via Hobbs]

Lord Love a Duck: I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the winner of tonight's game wins the Stanley Cup. Obviously, if the Devils win, they're up 3 games to 1, needing to win only once in the two games scheduled at New Jersey. After their incredible, mind-addling win in Game 3, a repeat performance tonight by Anaheim will tie up the series, reinforce their mystique as a team-of-destiny, and stick a dagger so deep into the subconscious of New Jersey that I don't think they could recover. Anyways, a stool awaits at Over/Under....

In the wake of the current troubles coming out of New York City, several controversies have recently arisen concerning our own hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. The first concerns an opinion article written by Robert Scheer that called into question the Pentagon's account of the "rescue" of Jessica Lynch; the second, a memo written by a Times editor attacking "liberal bias" in an article about an anti-abortion measure recently enacted in Texas.

In both cases, the more important story was the reaction by the right to any journalist who dares criticize one of their shibboleths. In the case of Robert Scheer, his original article summarized the findings of a BBC report that questioned the official Pentagon account concerning Private Lynch's capture and liberation. As Scheer correctly points out in a follow-up, subsequent reporting by such lefty rags as the Chicago Tribune have reaffirmed what the Beeb originally reported, that while certain claims made by witnesses were unlikely, such as the use of blanks in the raid, the full scale raid to "rescue" Private Lynch may have been executed more for show than necessity. Conservative outrage at Scheer's opinion should be humbled by the pattern within both the Pentagon and the Bush Administration for consistently dissembling to the public during the recent Iraqi adventure.

Others on the right are also having a field day with a memo written by Times editor-in-chief John Carroll, attacking one of his own writers for allegedly putting his leftist leanings into an article about a recent law passed in Texas, requiring pregnant women to receive "counseling" about the link between abortion and breast cancer. Perhaps in the journalistic tradition of finding someone in the Flat Earth Society to rebut claims that the world is round, or quoting an economist who actually believes that the Bush tax cut will help the economy, Mr. Carroll was upset that the writer mentioned the overwhelming evidence that there is no such link, but didn't give equal time to medical "experts" who believe that it does exist. Of course, the writer did quote such an expert, but nevermind.

The other examples of liberal bias consisted of the writer referring to the law as requiring "so-called counseling" to pregnant women, and his reference to the fact that a legislator who supported the bill was not a doctor. The latter point is too trivial to expand on; the former, far from being an ideologically-slanted phrase, reflects the fact that there is a dispute about whether pregnant women who are being told something that the vast majority of experts do not believe to be true are receiving "counsel".

Ironically, abortion is one issue where complaints about liberal media bias have some merit. In fact, the most famous study concluding that reporters tended to be pro-choice, and that bias seeped into articles on the subject, was published in the LA Times back in 1990, by media analyst David Shaw. Eric Alterman devotes an entire chapter in his recent book to exploring that very fact. I would be very surprised if most reporters covering national affairs didn't vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, or even Al Gore last time. After Shaw's study came out, newspapers took great pains to confront this alleged bias, which can be attested to by the fact that the article Mr. Carroll complained about gave a supporter of the new law the last word, and made no reference to the fact that the faction in the Texas state legislature that passed the bill recently attempted to use the Department of Homeland Security to locate and arrest their opponents.

The complaint, though, seems to run far deeper than simple ideological animosity. People who whine the loudest about the political bias of the media, both on the left and the right, are those who are most threatened by any sort of independent inquiry into their values and beliefs. So they kill the messenger.

Unfortunately for them, there are not two sides to every issue. Just as a journalist need not quote David Irving in every article about the Holocaust to provide "balance", a writer should not be browbeaten by an editor to pretend that the scientific mainstream believes a link exists between abortion and breast cancer.