Fox has dropped its lawsuit against Al Franken [link via Hamster] As this case was brought in such obvious bad faith, here's hoping that Mr. Franken is not merely satisfied with the free publicity generated by Murdoch's minions, and continues to pursue the legal fees, costs and damages for malicious prosecution that he's entitiled to.

Boomshock has one of the first substantive interviews with dark horse candidate Georgy Russell. The big scoop: she didn't vote in the last election either. [link via Matt Welch at Hit & Run]

Over the years, I've kinda gotten to know two people who later became famous in the Toy Department of Life. One, as those of you visit my college football blog know, is my former law-school classmate Rick Neuheisel. Although we were mainly casual acquaintances, and didn't hang out together outside the Gould Law Center, my memories are uniformly positive. He was (and for all I know, still is) a funny, down-to-earth guy, as far away from being the stereotypical jock as a human can be. I hope he soaks U-Dub for whatever he can take.

The other athlete I knew, sort of, was Kevin Johnson. He either lived in, or palled around with/slept with someone who lived in, the same dorm unit as I, so I'd see him quite a bit. Back then, he was a talented freshman, but far from being a star; his big claim to fame was hitting a buzzer-beating jump shot to send our game with UCLA into overtime (CAL lost anyway). The closest I ever came to a substantive encounter with KJ came when I sat next to him at Kip's, one of the earliest sports bars I remember, watching an SC-UCLA basketball game one Friday night in 1985. Over the years, KJ has become a point of pride for UC graduates, a star athlete and mensch who was a legitimate student, who could quote Camus and go from baseline to baseline in four seconds, in contrast to the Bozeman Era mercenaries (Kidd, Murray, Abdul-Rahim) who had almost nothing to do with the academic side of the university.

This morning's LA Times has an interesting piece about KJ's attempt to transform his high school alma mater into a charter school run by something called the "St. HOPE Corp.". The article only hints at this, but his struggle to get this project off the ground represents everything that is wrong with the educational debate in this country.

The school, Sacramento High, has had declining test scores for years, due largely to what one audit described as a climate of low funding and administrative apathy. However, the honors section of the school has a good track record getting its students into college, and the school itself has a number of fine, experienced teachers. Wanting to incorporate that quality into the rest of the school, a number of parents led a petition drive to begin a charter school, and KJ's group won a narrow vote by the Board of Education over a proposal by the teacher's union (btw, this being California, the school board members who backed KJ are now the subjects of a recall drive).

What KJ's solution for this remains unclear. He proposes to divide the school into six charter schools, which would allow it to remain independent of administrative regulations binding to other schools. How this would be different from the way the school was run last year, or how it would be run by a more standard charter school proposal, is hard to say, except when the only idea that is being spit out is to reduce the due process rights of teachers, you know you're not dealing with someone with creative educational policies. One teacher was at first enthusiastic about the program, only to have a change-of-heart after one meeting ended with the good folks at St. HOPE leading a prayer hymn. Had KJ not had an outstanding career as a point guard, it is hard to see this project being taken seriously.

Johnson, who has no background in education, obviously has his heart in the right place, and his celebrity has attracted some deep pockets from the private sphere, including Bill Gates and the Walton Foundation, to help fund some of the more grandiose projects. It looks like he will have a shot at getting this project off the ground when schools open next week. But it is hard to see how this is any different from the vanity projects other athletes sponsor: Magic Johnson has his own theatres, TGIFridays, and 24 Hour gyms, all of which pay tribute to the glorious career of Magic; KJ has his own Starbucks and his charter school. In the long run, schools will only improve with a significant public investment, not just a hope and a prayer that philanthropy tied to a famous name will save the day.

Even I'm a bit skeptical of this poll, which shows Bustamante leading A.S. by 13 percentage points (the same poll had the recall succeeding by only 5 points). What it does indicate, however, is that the G.O.P. now has a real problem on its hands; the real story of this election isn't Ahnolt, it's the surprise showing of a heretofore obscure Latino politician, who seems to be on the verge of being the next governor of the fifth (or is it sixth) largest economy in the world. I can't imagine Karl Rove is too happy that the net result of his master plan is to replace a moderate governor with a liberal, especially one who will be an instant Vice Presidential candidate the moment he gets elected.[link via LA Observed, which gets a well-deserved write-up here]

Her campaign is going nowhere fast, but Arianna Huffington has a blog, where she eviscerates the idiotic column by former Dukakis campaign strategist Susan Estrich. That follows on the heels of Gray Davis' wife, whose blog has to be seen to be believed. No word if Ahnolt, or someone who can write, will set one up, although if the reliquary he has advising him is any indication, he might be hard-pressed to even identify what the internet is.

With the college football season starting today, that can mean only one thing: the return of Condredge's Acolytes, America's premier college sports blog. It's collaborative; anyone with an interest is invited to write. Go Bears !!

As a new poll shows Ahnolt with a slight lead over Cruz Bustamante, he will now have to confront a seething backlash brewing against him among Latino voters. In this piece, the long-time anchor of Univision news, Jorge Ramos, denounces A.S. in no uncertain terms. The money quote [translated into English by Jusiper]: "Arnold is teaching us the classic lesson of what any candidate should to lose the Hispanic vote. Being anti-immigrant in California, sadly, keeps earning votes. But there is nothing worse than when an immigrant forgets his past and turns his back on others like him. And Arnold's back sure is wide." [link via Snark Attack]

Early this year, for a couple of months, I had the honor of writing a couple of college basketball-related posts for Off-Wing Sports, Eric McErlain's terrific sports blog, and a once-a-day stop for yours truly. His post today on what makes a good sports bar is well worth the reading:

So what makes a good sports bar? It's a place you go to watch the game with like minded folks who are looking for the same thing. It's not a place where catching the score is an afterthought. It can have pool tables and arcade games, but they can't be the main attraction...Music is fine, as long as it's in the background, and not dominating the scene.

What else? How about some character? Some history -- and it helps if you're part of that history too. How about some identification with the neighborhood the bar resides in? And how about a crew of regulars, not an ever-shifting cast of twenty-somethings looking for the next hot spot.

And, apologies to my friends who have recently become parents, a sports bar is for adults only. Points off if your favorite place has a kid's menu.

It is a source of irritation that reviews of sports bars always focus on the number of big screen TV's, or the number of extra-curricular activities that go on that don't involve sports. When I go to a sports bar, I don't care about air hockey or pool tables, and I don't want to have the juke box going full blast when my team is playing; I just want to watch the damn games, hang out with my chums, and drink as much Sierra Nevada as I can afford. Anyways, if anyone from SoCal has any suggestions for what their favorite sports bar is, let me know; I intend to publish a similar post shortly.

And for any and all who care, here's Hunter S. Thompson's take on the joys of being a 'Niner fan.

It's a shame that some bloggers do not feel the need to practice the same sort of due diligence that lawyers are ethically required to do before taking on a case. Making a rare trip to Instapundit this morning, I came upon this little gem, to an article by one Austin Bay: "The usual "international human rights crowd" has been slow to condemn the current horrors perpetrated by Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. During the Cold War, Amin escaped their condemnation because he was "anti-colonialist."

Hello !! Idi Amin was one of the most vilified people on the planet while he ruled Uganda. Many of the stories about his regime, while he was in power, eventually mentioned rumors of cannibalism and the like. If, like most of the rest of the human race, his reference to the "usual human rights crowd" includes Amnesty International, they were quite outspoken about the monster, just as they have been in the forefront of the denunciation of Robert Mugabe (see also here, here, and here).

Another terrorist slaughter in Iraq, this time targeted at the U.N. This is starting to get out of control...Bush needs to start taking the war on terrorism seriously.

I reckon this is a common enough phenomenum: I can criticize the people of my state for wanting a do-over on the last election, but when it comes to the lame, warmed-over put-downs of this third-rate poor man's Peggy Noonan wannabe, I get pissed. I'm beginning to think that, like football games on a sunny New Year's Day, backyard swimming pools, and freeways, the recall is one more California innovation for which the rest of the country envies us.

With Cruz Bustamante now the front-runner, according to the most reliable poll out there, the possibility that California will elect a more liberal politician to replace Gray Davis becomes a less-remote possibility (Ed.-it didn't happen). Of greater interest to the media will no doubt be the ethnic background of the lieutenant governor: if elected, Bustamante will be Calfornia's first Latino chief executive since pre-statehood.

How an obscure, hitherto undistinguished politician with a background that can justly be called questionable (in his youth, he belonged to a Mexican nationalist group comparable to the Black Panthers, and as recently as two years ago, he let slip the n-word during a speech) can suddenly be ahead of one of the most popular, well-known figures on the planet reflects one of the key political trends in the country, the rise of the Latino as a pivotal voting bloc in Sun Belt politics.

The story of California politics in the past decade has been about the aftermath of Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigrant referendum which passed with almost 60% of the vote in 1994, carrying the G.O.P. to its strongest state-wide performance in a generation, even enabling the party to control one house of the state legislature for a term. Bustamante's lead is merely the latest sign of a trend that emerged after that election, in which the Democratic Party achieved a dominance hitherto unseen since the end of the Nineteenth Century, at the same time as the Republican Party controlled the national government.

Between 1898 and 1992, California was the largest state in the Union to consistently go Republican, both in Presidential elections and in the governor's mansion. No Republican won the Presidency without carrying California, while several Democrats (Wilson, JFK, and Carter) won office without winning the state. Before Gray Davis, only three Democrats (Culbert Olsen, for one term during the Depression, and the Browns, Pat and Jerry) were elected Governor during the 20th century. From 1950 to 1992, only three Democrats won Senate elections, and two of those served only one term. Besides LBJ, no Democratic presidiential nominee carried the state during that period.

The California Republican Party produced, among others, Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, William K. Knowland, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson, all of whom were national figures who either became President or were touted for the Presidency. During that same period, besides the Browns, California Democrats produced men who were either famous for being effective legislators and mayors, such as Jesse Unruh, the Burtons, George Moscone, Alan Cranston, Tom Bradley and Willie Brown, or politicians famous for having lost (ie. William McAdoo, Upton Sinclair, Jerry Voorhies, Helen Douglas, etc.). With the exception of McAdoo (infamous for having run as the candidate of the KKK for the 1924 Democratic nomination), Cranston, and Jerry Brown, none of them were considered Presidential material, and Cranston and Brown both bombed when they pursued their national aspirations. When Pete Wilson edged Diane Feinstein in the 1990 governor's election, and then routed Kathleen Brown in 1994, it was a continuation of a trend that existed for almost a century, of Republicans beating Democrats for statewide office.

Everything changed in the '94 election. Struggling to overcome a shaky economy, and, like President Bush, having to justify a tax increase he signed into law, Governor Wilson decided to exploit the political shockwaves that emerged from the popular meme of that year, the "angry white male". Anti-immigrant feelings had been stoked by politicians in California for generations; one of the more infamous "newsreels" used in the campaign against EPIC and Upton Sinclair in 1934 showed wave upon wave of Okies entering the state, intent on electing Sinclair to impose his new-fangled Russian-tested ideas about collectivism and the like. Seizing upon the issue of "illegal aliens", Wilson and the Republicans pushed Proposition 187, an initiative that promised to restrict all government benefits to those not legally in the country, from medical services to education. And so, the vivid memory voters of this state have of that election is a campaign commercial showing people sneaking accross the border, with a narrator remind us, "they keep coming...."

According to the LA Times, only 8% of the electorate in 1994 was of Latino ancestry, and those voters tended to split their votes between the parties, with Democrats receiving only a marginal edge. The Republicans won all but two statewide offices, most by large margins, captured the State Assembly for the first time in over 25 years, gained parity in Congressional races, and nearly pulled off a stunning upset in the Senate, where Diane Feinstein barely scraped by to defeat one of the weakest candidates in memory, Michael Huffington (helped, in large part, by the late revelation that the Huffingtons had employed an undocumented nanny for their children). Republican dominance in California seemed assured for the next generation.

And then, suddenly, it ended. Over the next few years, angry over the unsubtle subtext of anti-Latino bigotry behind Prop. 187, Latino voting registration shot up. In 1992, Bill Clinton had focused on California, making it the key swing state in his bid to defeat George Bush, and had visited the state frequently enough in his first term to make it seem like a second home. By 1996, the polls showed that he had such a large lead that he didn't even bother to campaign here against Bob Dole. For the first time in a generation, a Democrat was elected to Congress from the heart of Reagan Country, Orange County. A Latina. The Democrats retook control of the state legislature.

By 1998, the percentage of the Latino vote in California had nearly doubled from where it had been four years earlier, and the Democrats captured all but two statewide offices. Barbara Boxer, one of the most liberal politicians ever elected to the U.S. Senate, who had barely beaten a weak opponent in the year of Clinton's first election, easily beat back a moderate Republican opponent. Two years later, Diane Feinstein repeated the trick.

In 2000, George Bush, en route to his Supreme Court selection, vigorously contested California, while Al Gore ignored the state. It didn't matter. Gore won the state by 13 points, helping him carry the popular vote nationwide. The Latino share of the vote stayed at 13%, which meant that even more were voting in a higher-turnout election.

Which, of course, brings us to 2002, and to the GOP's 2003 Mulligan. For the first time in a century, the Democrats were able to sweep the statewide offices. They control both houses of the state legislature by large margins, and have almost a 2-1 edge in Congressional seats, a margin that was almost certainly self-limited by the need to play it safe during redistricting by preserving the seat formerly held by Gary Condit. Loretta Sanchez, the Latina Democrat who won in Orange County back in 1996, besting "B-1 Bob" Dornan, has had no problem winning reelection since then; Orange County, far from being a Republican stronghold, is now in play. And they did it with an electorate that was apathetic, that viewed the top of the ticket with undisguised contempt, in a big year for Republicans everywhere else.

Before the release of the Field Poll yesterday, it had become trendy to disparage the notion of Latino voters being a significant voting bloc in California. Why, as one blogger noted, their total voting share in the last election was only 10%, which is only 25% higher than it was in 1994. Keeping in mind the old saw about how correlation is not causation, let me point out that the Democratic Party was not sweeping statewide offices before Prop. 187, and its recent success is probably not a result of soccer moms. In fact, the decline in Latino turnout from 1998 to 2002 is a moderate one, especially when compared with the black turnout, which went from 13% to 4% in the last election.

Bill Simon aside, the Republicans who are getting trounced, the Matt Fongs, the William Campbells, are not fire-breathing extremists. Dan Lungren, who was beaten badly by Gray Davis in 1998, had previously won reelection to the second most powerful position in the state, Attorney General, which is usually a stepping-stone to the governor's mansion. In other states, men like that win.

But not California. And now, it is apparently Ahnolt's turn to confront those trends. The only issue that we know A.S. has taken a stand on is Prop. 187; he's for it. Already, he has become the recipient of flack because of his ties to Warren Buffet, who just yesterday called for the revision of Proposition 13, the initiative passed in 1978 to limit increases in property taxes. To many conservatives, it is tantamount to a Democratic Presidential candidate calling for a reexamination of the legal reasoning behind Roe v. Wade. But A.S. may find that he needs the support of an electorate frustrated by politics-as-usual, annoyed that certain issues can't be discussed because of political correctness, whether it be from the right or the left (among those denouncing Buffet's remarks yesterday was one Gray Davis, indicating that his opportunism shows no bounds).

It is still early enough in the campaign to question the reliability of polls. Even to a partisan liberal Democrat like myself, I was surprised Cruz was leading, and it wouldn't shock me if other polls showed S'w'n'gg'r in the lead. What the Field Poll does show is that A.S. has an uphill climb. Only a day ago, it seemed that the election was his to lose, and no one besides the political pros took Bustamante seriously. To overcome the edge Democrats have in this state, he will have to be conservative enough to allow principled ideologues like Tom McClintock and Bill Simon to leave the race, but liberal enough not to alienate the rest of the human race. And, most of all, he must overcome the legacy of Prop. 187.

UPDATE: Obviously, Schwarzenegger won the election, using his status as an immigrant with a somewhat shaky past to overcome the legacy of Prop. 187, even winning a plurality of Latino votes. Any indication that this presaged a return to competive balance between the two parties was discredited, though, by John Kerry's easy win in the state the following year, as well as yet another landslide win by Senator Boxer. In the 2004 election, Latinos made up a record 14% of the electorate. Last year, Schwarzenegger's efforts to pass a series of propositions in the spirit of Prop. 13 failed badly, and he now runs behind two otherwise unknown Democrats for reelection.

The first Field Poll of the recall campaign shows the invincible Ahnolt losing to the unknown Cruz Bustamante, 25% to 22%, with Gray Davis trailing badly in his bid to avoid being terminated (sorry).

Kevin Drum of CalPundit challenges a certain Dixiecrat blogger to comment on the more pervasive phenomenum of white "affirmative action", a system of unacknowledged biases that allow unqualified people to fail upwards due to the color of their skin (the example used is that of Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who "advanced on the career ladder despite weak performance, poor management skills and awkward relations with colleagues," while still managing to spy for the Russians for twenty years.

Unfortunately, membership does have its privileges; real affirmative action is designed to expand participation in programs, jobs, and educational slots beyond the favored class, whilst white affirmative action is geared towards limiting the applicant pool. But both get used by their detractors as examples of the unqualified receiving undeserved benefits, which is indeed a sad commentary on race relations.

Bad Timing: The Washington Post editorialized yesterday about how so, so, superior we are to the Euros, who are having a hard time adjusting to this summer's manifestation of global warning because they don't rely on air conditioning !! And, of course, the Post's headline this morning, presented without further comment.

How did I miss this? Former Princeton basketball star Nathan Whitecloud Walton is among the 135 who are running for governor. Nate, whose father Bill played in the NBA for several years with the Los Angeles Clippers and other teams, told the L.A. Times "(t)hat people are seriously considering Arnold shows you how little they think of the system we have. I actually studied politics at one of the premier institutions in the country, which gives me more qualifications than somebody who was Mr. Olympia."

But no Lazlo Toth: the entire slate of candidates for the upcoming election, complete with phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and a listing of how they will look on the ballot (current estimate: six pages !!). And, of course, an article about why A.S.' campaign is doomed.

Am I not the only person concerned that Ahnolt's campaign is shaping up to be little more than a stand-in for Pete Wilson? If anything can rally the base behind Cruz Bustamante(or even Gray Davis), it's the prospect of having that racist behind the scenes, using his Austrian beard to wage more wedge issue attacks on Latinos and blacks. Anyways, the notion that S-n-g-r is an "outsider" really won't wash anymore: like Perot, when he plunges, he will fall hard.

Proving, as always, that she's five minutes behind the cultural zeitgeist, Maureen Dowd columnizes about blogs, or rather, the blogs of Presidential hopefuls.[link via TalkLeft]

As I predicted, the kids picked the good girl over the gorgeous one last night. Dad seemed heartbroken; Ms. Fichtner's refusal to allow him one last kiss was the only honest moment on the entire series. It is not surprising that this show came out at roughly the same time as Ahnolt's campaign to be governor and Bush's "Op Gun" flight; each represents a nadir for our culture, a rejection of the authentic in favor of the manufactured moment. Which isn't to say I'm not going to need my Christy Fix real soon.

A bunch of polls are now out, with the most recent, by NBC, showing that Ahnolt has a sizable lead over Cruz Bustamante. The article emphasizes the obvious horse race numbers, but ignores the really big story, which is that the unknown Cruz Bustamante has 18% of the vote. Sw'n'g'r is known by just about everybody, but already about half the public has decided that under no circumstances will they vote for him. Besides getting the hard-core partisan Democratic vote, the "deputy governour", as the BBC referred to him the other night, stands to gain a huge boost from Latino voters, many of whom might be drawn to the polls to vote both in favor of the recall and in favor of electing California's first Latino Governor in 150 years.

Reading between the lines here, one can surmise that Ms. Fichtner lost tonight, and/or that she is about the least self-conscious bitch-on-wheels in the country. According to an article in her hometown paper, the former beauty queen admitted that she saw Who Wants to Marry My Dad? as a possible way to jump-start her career as a TV hostess: "I didn't do it as a dating opportunity...I did it as a career opportunity."

She also had a few words to say about the woman she bested in the '86 U.S.A. pageant, Halle Berry:

"I wouldn't trade my life for hers...Obviously we took very different paths in our lives. There are things I could have pursued, but chose family over a career at the time. She has yet to have children."

Meow !!

For those of you wondering, Georgy Russell filed her papers for Governor yesterday...one of the more recurrent themes that defenders of the circus have used is that with all the celebrity candidates, this election will make politics "more exciting" for the average voter. B.F.D. When Hamilton and Burr faced each other in a duel, it certainly was "exciting" politics, but I fail to see how that benefitted the public. The trick is for people to feel that politics is more relevant to their lives, not for politics to be more entertaining to the Fourth Estate.

Just saw my nephew for the first time. It is an unbelievable feeling to hold a days-old infant. His potential is limitless.


UPDATE: Charlie, and his Uncle Smythe.

Classic move !! I just drove about 60 miles north on the 5 before I realized I forgot my wallet.

I'm off to the Bay Area to visit my nephew, and hopefully hook up with friends and bloggers. Does anyone have any appropriate suggestions for the speech I'm supposed to be making at the bris on Monday?

The first sign of a potentially disturbing trend in the Kobe Bryant case: whites are more likely than blacks to presume the Laker star guilty. The Harper Lee, black-man-accused-of-rape-by-blond-girl aspect to this trial is the great unmentioned undercurrent, just as it was in the early days of the O.J. case. BTW, it's been almost a month; when is celebrity ambulance-chaser Dominick Dunne going to see some face time?

Apparently, NaziPundit gets a little bit of help ensuring her books make the best-seller list [link via TalkLeft].

Nephew Blog !!!


Charles Henry Ruderman

I know this is going against the grain here, but Ahnolt's entry into the race probably helps Davis more than it hurts. Riordan had strong cross-over appeal with Democrats, he would have beaten Davis had he been nominated last year, and his presence on the ballot would have salved the anxieties of liberals who were concerned with this recall being another in a string (after Florida, Colorado, and Texas) of right-wing coup attempts. In all likelihood, the announcement on the Tonight Show means that the former L.A. mayor will sit this one out (does that mean the L.A. Examiner will post something again?).

Political campaigns are popularity contests, but they are not just popularity contests. Schwarzenegger has more credibility among political reporters and pundits than he does with the average voters, many of whom still think of him as a self-parodying bodybuilder. Celebrity candidates have a very spotty track record (remember Governor Janet Reno? Senator Geraldine Ferraro? Governor Steve Largent?), and as sycophantic as most of the journalists and pundits who cover politics are, they will seem like Sonny Liston compared with the adulatory coverage Schwarzenegger has received from entertainment "journalists". Moreover, the freakshow aspect of this election will be accentuated by his candidacy; after all, why should he be taken more seriously than Gary Coleman or Dennis Rodman? The more people who see the replacement election as a joke, the more likely it is the recall will lose in two months.

But more importantly, he will not be the only candidate on the replacement ballot (assuming, of course, that the State Supreme Court allows the election to go forward; the law is kind of vague on that issue [ed-never mind !). While Davis simply has to beat one opponent, himself, Schwarzenegger must convince the public both to recall Davis and vote for him. In doing that, he will have to face other opponents besides Davis who will be motivated to knock him out. For all the talk about Davis' use of "puke politics", it is the other candidates in this race that will have to go negative to have any chance to stand above the crowd, while Davis is the only one whose stature in the race improves if he stays positive, and focuses the negativity on the process itself.

The BBC is reporting that Ahnolt is running for governor, where he will have a fight for his life against...Arnold !! Arianna announced today, while the steady and sober Senator Feinstein has decided to take a pass. Come to think of it, for all the grief she's gotten for selling campaign thongs, Georgy Russell is more qualified, and is more thoughtful, than most of the "serious" candidates in the freakshow.

The latest gambit from the GOP on the issue of judicial nominations is to accuse the Democrats of acting out of "anti-Catholic" prejudice. The idea, as I understand it, is to say that because William Pryor, et al., oppose abortion rights, and purportedly base said opposition on the teachings of the Catholic Church, anyone who opposes their nomination is doing so out of religious bigotry.

The logic of that attack is ridiculous, as Joshua Marshall points out here; by that logic, the right is basically stating that Catholics can avoid being held accountable for anti-abortion opinions, but that non-Catholics, or those who wish to restrict abortion rights for reasons not connected to religious principles, are out of luck. For other reasons, though, I hope the far right keeps up the attack. It shows that these wack-jobs have as little understanding of mainstream Roman Catholicism in the U.S. as they do of every other non-white, non-male, non-straight and/or non-Baptist in the country.

The typical American Catholic does not belong to Opus Dei, and does not believe that Cardinal Ratzinger speaks for him. We not only support abortion rights, in numbers greater than non-Catholics, but most of us think that priestly celibacy, the male priesthood, the bans on contraception and divorce, and the reliance on clerics to dictate the tenets of our faith are historical relics. Many of us support gay marriage. And just so you don't think it all goes in one ideological direction, quite a few "cafeteria Catholics" support the death penalty, and backed the war in Iraq, in defiance of the teaching of the Holy Mother Church. In short, we think for ourselves.

So if Senator Santorum wants to follow this strategy, BRING 'EM ON. Lord knows, the Democrats are going to need every Catholic vote they can get next year.

Having received no contributions, utterly betrayed by the lethargy of my supporters, and preoccupied with the pressures and time-constraints of unclehood, I have decided, after close consultation with family and friend, to withdraw from the recall election currently scheduled for October 7. In the meantime, those of you who want to ensure that our message will be heard should feel free to back the candidacies of Neal Pollack, Georgy Russell, and Brian Flemming, who has electrified the state by promising to resign should he prove victorious. Or perhaps the sobering candidacies of Larry Flynt and/or Arianna Huffington, for those of you inspired by the notion of having the state led by former Politically Incorrect regulars. Or better yet, you.

As of one hour ago, I became an uncle for the first time. Congrats to my baby sister Cat, bro-in-law Dan, and to Charles, for getting a crack at making the world a better place. Wherever you are, Dad, you finally have a grandkid !!

Blogger Charles Kuffner had an opportunity recently to appear on a FoxNews panel, where he would have had a chance to dis the President on taking a month-long vacation/photo op at his "ranch". He is one of the few bloggers who actually has a job, though, so he didn't get the message until it was too late. Even so, he is unsure he would have taken the gig, and thereby add to the drone of the media whores and junior orwells who pass themselves off as TV pundits.

Just so there's no confusion, I have no such trepidation. If need be, I will go on any news or cable show at one hour's notice and spout whatever opinion is needed to get face time. Even the O'Reilly Factor.

I can only imagine what his 341(a) meeting will be like. Not surprisingly, Tyson going double toothpicks represents a trend that is all too common among athletes and entertainers. They make an enormous amount of money early in their adulthood, mistakenly think it will last forever, and surround themselves with people who are well-versed in spending other people's wealth. Life, however, has a funny way of outlasting the earning potential of even the most athletically (or creatively) gifted.

What's French for "Orenthal"?: This is one of those stories that would be covered much differently if it had happened here [link via Emmanuelle.net, which also makes reference to the fact that Paris Paris in Vegas has just re-raised the tricolore several months after the recent unpleasantness].

Pot, meet kettle: Christopher Hitchens, whose idea of a joke is to refer to the Dixie Chicks as fat whores, and who has spent the past year sycophantically parroting the Administration's positions on Iraq, pens an obituary ripping Bob Hope for not being funny and for doing stand-up at Que Sanh. At least Hope never glorified David Irving....

This morning's Los Angeles Times notes that over the last six games, the Los Angeles Dodgers have been outscored by the Los Angeles Galaxy, 9-5.

UPDATE: The Times overlooked (and I forgot ) that the Galaxy played three games recently in the World Peace Cup, where they scored once and were shut out twice. As the Dodgers have scored four runs since I originally posted this, over the last nine games, the Galaxy lead the Dodgers by only one goal, 10-9.

This is really journalism at its worst. This evening, ESPN's website flashed a headline, "Case Against Kobe". The article states that "sources close to the prosecution" (who, of course, are nameless) have revealed that prosecutors plan to introduce evidence that the women sustained injuries during the encounter that would indicate that the encounter wasn't consensual, and that Kobe Bryant made "inconsistent" statements to the police.

Well, duh !! I think we already knew that the woman in question had some physical injuries, and even an innocent person who spends more than 10 minutes being interrogated by the police is going to make some inconistent statements, particularly about sex. At the very least, I had already assumed that they would be able to show those two points; to win, one would anticipate that they had a couple of eyewitnesses inside the room, or a recording of some kind. Unless the physical evidence in question is a knife wound, neither point goes to the question of whether she was raped, or had a consensual encounter with a much larger man (which I will assume is the defense position).

If that's the best "evidence against Kobe" the prosecution's office could anonymously leak, they should pull up their tents and go home.

What to do, what to do. Alias is in reruns, 24 has disappeared, and The Shield and The Sopranos will be on whenever. It's the slow time of year for sports, and both of the local baseball teams are falling out of contention. Oh well, only six days til the next episode of Who Wants to Marry My Dad?

Up until now, I've successfully avoided Reality TV, in all of its manifestations. I saw the final episode of Joe Millionaire, and most of the last episode of Survivor 2, but that's it. It's not that I'm a snob or anything, but I'm just not into middle-brow culture. If something's not good enough to bear repeated viewing, the way I could when I had seven different HBO channels during the first season of Six Feet Under, I don't bother.

Who Wants to Marry My Dad? is something different, a reality show without a smidgen of reality to it. The basic premise is that the children of this affluent resident of Glendale, California, have to judge a group of women, hand-picked by the producers, who are candidates to be their future step-mom. Each week, they eliminate one woman, usually after a series of highly personal questions are asked while she is hooked up to a lie detector. At the end, presumably, one woman will be left, and she and the dad will get married and go on a honeymoon.

In short, it's a car wreck waiting to happen. One of the women last night confirmed under polygraphic examination that she had fallen in love with Dad, who was forced to admit to his children that he felt nothing for her. Perhaps to avoid having the poor lass do something extreme, the children decided to keep her, and dump another hapless contestant, who was made to disappear by 80's-era magicians Penn and Teller. Almost everything about the show is cheesy and cringe-inducing, from the slow-mo reaction shots of the kids as they watch the polygraph examinations, to the voyeuristic scenes of them watching Dad make out with one of the ladies on a TV monitor.

But that's not the real reason I watch. Christy Fichtner is. Ms. Fichtner, in case you don't know, was the 1986 Miss U.S.A. winner, a contest particularly famous for its runner-up, a certain Miss Ohio named Halle Berry. According to this site, she is the most beautiful first runner-up in Miss Universe history, and may arguably be the most gorgeous Miss U.S.A. winner ever. Divorced for over five years, with three sons, competing against assorted thirty- and forty-somethings in this idiotic contest, she dominates the same way Randy Johnson would against a high school team. Ms. Berry deserved to lose then, and she would lose again now.

As I understand, though, she is not the favorite to win. That would be in keeping with her shock loss in the 1986 Miss Universe pageant, when she went in heavily favored, only to lose to Miss Venezuela, a result that still rankles objective observers of beauty pageants in the same way that Roy Jones Jr.'s loss in the 1988 Summer Olympics does to boxing fans. In fact, as the controversy over Miss Universe 2003 indicates, boxing is the most appropriate sports analogy to the world of beauty pageants: regional biases abound, and knowing who the promoters are will give a pretty good indication of who is most likely to win.

Whether her attitude rubbed people the wrong way back then may be a subject of speculation (she would hardly be the first contestant to fly to and from the pageant in her family's private jet, and at least she didn't spook one of her rivals by telling her how "fat and ugly" she looked in a swimsuit), but she is definitely having problems getting her potential step-daughters, who have made ominous complaints that she doesn't love their dad, she's just wants to win, yadda yadda yadda (that was after she dove into the family pool in a very elegant bikini to start their first date), to warm to her.


Christy Fichtner

Any way, her potential step-sons seem to like her. She has made the final three, and with two episodes to go (assuming that there isn't a "best-of" episode before the finale), America will hold its collective breath to see if she can finally win one. After that, I think I'll kiss off reality TV for good.

UPDATE: She made the Finals !!

California is not the only state where the Republicans are trying to get a Mulligan. Charles Kuffner's blog has been providing encyclopedic coverage of the Texas redistricting scam, and the rebellious Democrats in the minority who have now sought asylum in the free state of New Mexico. If for nothing else, Tom DeLay should be thanked for having revitalized the Texas Democratic Party.

Michael "Terrorism Trumps Everything" Totten has changed his address, so please adjust...I might be joining him soon (not on his obsession with the Middle East, but on his move to Moveable Type), so if someone can tell me whether you can post photos within your posts there, it would be greatly appreciated.

Enterprising investment bankers might be keen on this: the Pentagon is establishing a "commodities market", where savvy investors can bet on when the next big terrorist event is going to take place, including whether/when King Abdullah of Jordan or Yasser Arafat gets capped...sort of like a Dead Pool for Young Republicans. Interesting, this program is under the supervision of one John Poindexter, a figure of some notoriety from the Reagan Administration.

And as you might expect, some bleeding heart Senate Democrats are up in arms about this, trying to thwart the next stage of capitalism from developing. [link via Talking Points Memo] Figures....

UPDATE: The bleeding hearts won...the Pentagon has decided that trading futures in suicide bombings wasn't such a good idea after all.

How is Dick Riordan supposed to beat this? If I decide not to run, I'm endorsing Georgy !!

Things to cross off my to-do list: attending a Manchester United soccer game. As sports go, soccer is especially fun to watch when it is well-played, and even though yesterday's game was just an "exhibition", it was clear from the start of the second half that this wasn't the M.L.S. The crowd of just under 60,000 was split down the middle; for all the talk about the Beatles-of-sports World Tour, Los Angeles is a hot bed for Mexican soccer teams, particularly Club America, to the chagrin of xenophobes like Jim Rome. If Chivas were to play its home games at the Coliseum, they would out-draw the Raiders.

Perhaps the clearest sign that the whole nation is now laughing at us is MoDo's column this morning. Dowd, who is always about ten seconds behind the cultural zeitgeist, pans the effort, portraying it as another example of how money (in this case, Darrell Issa's) has debased politics. [link via California Insider]

No mention of my candidacy, but she does allude to the Governor's wife, Sharon Davis, who, unlike her husband, is eligible to run in this election. If his Grayness were truly machiavellian, he would run his better half in that election, where she might actually win (unlike her husband, she wouldn't need to get a majority of the vote). If the people then support the recall, she would become governor, creating a situation not unlike Alabama in the late-60's, when Lurleen Wallace was elected to replace her husband, who was term-limited out of office, with the express intention that her husband would still run the state.

Voters of Orange County, Unite: Blogger Digby points out that the recall provision so beloved by the far right in this country actually originated in revolutionary France (!) in 1870, and was supported by none other than Karl Marx. As I was saying...SMYTHE FOR GOVERNOR

Slate reviews the dismal history of dictators' sons, including Oday and Qusay Hussein, Baby Doc Duvalier, and the particularly creepy "Nicu" Ceausescu, who purportedly spent his years in Romania raping women at will, including, allegedly, gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Interestingly, the daughters of dictators have turned out rather well when given the reigns of power, although readers of this site know that hasn't always been the case.

One son in particular who comes in for some rough scrutiny is Saadi Ghadafi, number three son of the Libyan strongman. Like Oday, Saadi runs his country's soccer federation, as well as large shares of Italian power Juventus, the European Champions Cup runner-up (Angelenos who complain about moronic owners like Donald Sterling should note that the team Juventus lost to, AC Milan, is owned by Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, who is literally a Fascist). Ghadafi is not just a team owner, though; he also starts for the Libyan national squad, and was recently signed to a two-year contract to play for Italian power Perugia in Serie A.

So far, his work ethic has failed to impress his new coach or teammates: blowing off practices, insisting on living without roommates on the road, roaming the streets of Italy with a "posse" that includes most of the dregs of the sports world, including Ben Johnson and Diego Maradona. In short, he is acting like the North African version of Allen Iverson. The owner of Perugia, Luciano Gaucci, who received attention when he cut the Korean player who had scored the goal to knock Italy out of the World Cup last year, insists that signing the spawn of Moammar is not a publicity stunt.

Jesse Taylor, the twisted avatar of Pandagon, is blogging up a storm today, for charity. He's participating in Blogathon 2003, in which he will be posting every 15 minutes for 24 hours. So far, he's already written yet another devastating Peggy Noonan parody. To contribute, sign up here. Go Blue !!!

Consider the possibility that the Bush Administration will dump Condi Rice on the voters of California in the upcoming election. They get rid of an embarassment who seems to have a hard time getting her story straight on UraniumGate, and the State GOP gets a candidate with impeccable D.C. credentials who has had no connection whatsoever with state government. The more clowns in the race, the better for me !!!

SMYTHE FOR GOVERNOR !!!
What was once merely a dream of the pipe variety is now a fledgling possibility. On October 7, an election to decide a recall of Gray Davis will be on the ballot, diverting millions of dollars from our booming economy into what is, in effect, a mulligan for the Republican Party. Whilst normally I would question whether such an expenditure is a worthwhile use of taxpayer money (particularly since the reason for this election is the governor's attempt to close the pending budget deficit with, gasp, a tax increase), I don't much like Davis, didn't vote for him last November, and will not mourn his passing from the political scene.

I now have less than three weeks to decide if I will enter the campaign to replace Gray Davis. Since the two ideal G.O.P. candidates were killed yesterday in a gun battle in Mosul, the most likely outcome of this election is that a human cyborg will be governor (that is to say, Davis will either win, or be replaced by Ahnolt). The only condition I have towards running is that I refuse to spend any of my own money, although my good friend in the Universal Studios legal department has supposedly already promised that she "will spend whatever it takes" to ensure my election. However, promises like that are cheap.

What I really need is a commitment from my supporters that will guaranty that my sacrifices over the next three months won't be in vain. To raise that money, I have gotten "jiggy" with the Internet, as the kids might say, and put a "Paypal" button on my website. No anonymous contributions, please (unless, of course, they're legal under California law; I really haven't read up on the subject). I will need 3,000 dollars American to even get my name on the ballot, and I figure I will need at least twice that to put on an adequate media campaign. So give generously; after all, whether you call it a campaign contribution or a bribe, it's all speech, and I will remember who "spoke" loudly on my behalf at this crucial time.

If this story is true, then the Eagle County D.A. has no choice but to drop the charges. Not just the fact that five witnesses said she was bragging about the incident, including trumpeting his size, but also the fact that someone who was supposedly a rape victim was at a teen party just a few days after the alleged attack. At least, that's what I was told back in law school: a prosecutor is obligated to dismiss charges once he determines that there is no likelihood of success.

And, of course, if the story is false, it's precisely why it's a good policy not to publicize the victim's name. [link via TalkLeft]

There are two kinds of people in this world, blondie: Perhaps the most interesting thing I have ever read about Jimmy Carter is the fact that his favorite film is "Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo".

Yesterday was the biggest day ever for my site, as far as unique visitors are concerned: approaching 2000, without a single new post (until now). The reason, interestingly enough, is that I am the only person to date listed by Google under this search category. Not bad, considering I've pretty much avoided the issue until now; a policy I intend to follow, at least until some of the evidence in that case becomes public, or the people of Colorado actually take the case to trial. But as the invaluable LA Observed notes, others have been less scrupulous, publishing the young girl's name, address, e-mail, phone number, pictures, etc.

Regardless of how you feel about these charges, or about the credibility of the alleged victim, there is something distinctly rank about that sort of thing. There is a good reason the public has frowned on outing women who have brought rape charges, even when it is entirely possible that the allegations are false: anything that might lead to the further humiliation of the victim will discourage other women from coming forward in the future. The act of rape is inherently one that humiliates the victim. It would be counter-productive to intensify that humiliation, particularly when the accused is a wealthy, popular public figure with access to the media.

More to the point, it is the flip side of the criminal ambulance-chasing practiced by Nancy Grace or Dominick Dunne. The courts, by and large, do a pretty effective job sorting out the innocent from the guilty, and where they fail, there are plenty of watchdogs who will point that out. If the woman involved is some nutso groupie with a penchant for basketball stars, or an over-emotional flake seeking attention with these charges, that truth will come out eventually. It does not help matters to attempt to intimidate her (and other women) into silence just because she points the finger at a beloved public figure.

Excellent take on the favorite newspaper for "people who are too lazy to watch television." I've always wondered if any of the bylines for the New York Post are actually legit; Jayson Blair is probably too scrupulous with the facts to get a job there now.

That eclectic multi-city pop festival known as the International Pop Overthrow plays today at Johnny Foxx's in West LA, with shows in the afternoon and evening. Included in today's festivities is reclusive Yooper folkist Annette Summersett, who is both "visually appealing" and a "strong singer-guitarist". Yippee !!!

Which reminds me, I have to get out to a Dodger game sometime soon. It's not that I expect to be entertained by some of the most dull, lifeless athletic performances outside of Serie A. As this article points out, going to Dodger Stadium is an event in itself, encapsulating everything that is sweet and wonderful (and a couple of the things that are crappy--arriving late and leaving early is an expression of our baseball savvy, but it still leaves a bad impression) about living in L.A. The classic steam/grilled Dodger Dog is one of the main reasons to go on living, no matter what bad cards (or Cubs) you're dealt.

Eric Alterman makes some honest but politically incorrect remarks about the causes of hatred in France, the mouthbreathers take violent exception, and then he gets nasty. BTW, what are the odds that some of them will have a logical explanation for this abomination. [link via MaxSpeak]

Well, the good news is, the Lakers figured out what they're going to do with Derek Fisher.

Noted journalist William Greider seems to get the wonderousness that is the b-sphere. He has started a blog, and today he weighs in with questions that would be asked of the President if our country really had a loyal opposition and independent media.

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.