The Bush-AWOL story has developed legs recently, and the President was thrown a number of softballs from Tim Russert this morning on that very topic. My position has been that there was nothing there; Bush was honorably discharged, and whether it happened because he actually completed his requirements or because someone in the chain of command decided to turn a blind eye to the antics of a VIP's son, was in the end just a biographical anecdote, not important in determining who should lead our country thirty years after the fact.

Kevin Drum, however, has been looking closely at a document that Bush supporters have claimed showed he put in the points to complete his service, and has come to an even more interesting conclusion: the President was transfered out of the Texas Air National Guard for failing to complete his physical, and into something called the "Air Reserve Force", which was supposedly a paper unit where soldiers who were being disciplined were sent as a possible prelude to being sent overseas. Since American troops were being withdrawn from Southeast Asia at the time, and considering that his father was a powerful figure in Washington, Bush was allowed to "serve" out his time in the Reserves. In other words, it would remove the AWOL allegation only to replace it with a charge that he shirked his duties.

If true, this is a devastating charge. Since the discovery of the aforementioned document, the supporters of the President have devised a history of his participation in the TANG over his last two years of service that now becomes completely inoperative. In other words, Bush Lied Again.

Moreover, Mr. Drum is not the first person to have deduced this; a casual search of Google brought me to this site, where the same conclusion was reached three years ago, and the document in question has been available for perusal by members of the news media since 2000. Another liberal blogger, Jesse Taylor, believes that there may be a more benign interpretation of these documents, relating instead to his request to attend Harvard Business School in 1973. In any event, now that the President has agreed to release his entire military file for inspection, we should be closer to getting definitive answers.

UPDATE: Calpundit continues to kick everyone's ass on this story. Here, he points out that the first set of drills Bush got credit for were in the last weekend of October, 1972, ten days before the election on which he was supposedly working. There were no drills scheduled in Alabama that weekend, so it means that if he did anything, it must have been in Texas. Although Mr. Drum doubts that Bush would have taken a weekend off on the eve of an election for which he was the political advisor to do Guardsman drills, it is possible: the Senate candidate Bush was working for, Winton Blount, was getting trounced by the Democratic incumbent, John Sparkman (who ended up winning by 30 points), and then-President Nixon, who was the principal political benefactor of Bush's dad, had already taken steps to mend fences (see page 10) with Sparkman. Our Wartime President may have simply decided to abandon ship.

Well, on this issue, Roger Simon is dead to rights. Lost in Translation, which I finally saw this afternoon, is one great picture. I would second his assertion that Sofia Coppola "could give nepotism a good name", were it not for the fact that her directing is so subtle and low-key that it's hard to believe she's the daughter of Francis Ford. The opening scene, with Bill Murray being driven through Tokyo at night, had all the awe and marvel that her father sought (and failed to achieve) in One From the Heart, but at much less expense. It was a pleasure seeing a movie devoid of film school tricks and self-referential bullshit, one which allowed the actors great leeway to develop their characters. Pay the twenty bucks and see it in a movie theatre, then buy the DVD !!

Less than three weeks 'til the Minotour starts...though it would be nice if they actually gave you the time the festivities begin each night. Hope to be there all three shows, contingent only on whether Layne, Welch, et al. comp my hotel expenses in San Diego and O.C.

"Meet the Press", by Samuel Beckett:

Russert: And we are in the Oval Office this morning with the President of the United States. Mr. President, welcome back to Meet The Press.

President Bush: Thank you, sir.

Russert: On Friday, you announced a committee, commission to look into intelligence failures regarding the Iraq war and our entire intelligence community. You have been reluctant to do that for some time. (despairing) Why?

President Bush: Well, first let me kind of step back and talk about intelligence in general, if I might. Intelligence is a vital part of fighting and winning the war against the terrorists. It is because the war against terrorists is a war against individuals who hide in caves in remote parts of the world, individuals who have these kind of shadowy networks, individuals who deal with rogue nations. So, we need a good intelligence system. (whimsically) We need really good intelligence.

So, the commission I set up is to obviously analyze what went right or what went wrong with the Iraqi intelligence. It was kind of lessons learned. But it's really set up to make sure the intelligence services provide as good a product as possible for future presidents as well. This is just a part of analyzing where we are on the war against terror.

(pause) There is a lot of investigations going on about the intelligence service, particularly in the Congress, and that's good as well. The Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks. (despairing) Again, I repeat to you, the capacity to have good intelligence means that a president can make good calls about fighting this war on terror.

Russert: Prime Minister Blair has set up a similar commission in Great Britain.

President Bush: (pause) Yeah.

Russert: His is going to report back in July. Ours is not going to be until March of 2005, five months after the presidential election.

President Bush: (pause) Yeah.

[snip]

Russert: There is another commission right now looking into September 11th.

President Bush: (pause) Yeah.

Russert: Will you testify before that commission?

President Bush: We have given extraordinary cooperation with Chairmen Kean and Hamilton. As you know, we made an agreement on what's called "Presidential Daily Briefs," and they could see the information the CIA provided me that is unique, by the way, to have provided what's called the PDB, because...

Russert: Presidential Daily Brief?

President Bush: (pause) Right.

[snip]

Russert: Let me turn to Iraq. And this is the whole idea of what you based your decision to go to war on.

President Bush: (pause) Sure, sure.

Russert: The night you took the country to war, March 17th, you said this: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

President Bush: (pause) Right.

Russert: That apparently is not the case.

President Bush: (pause) Correct.

[snip]

Russert: When allegations were made about John McCain or Wesley Clark on their military records, they opened up their entire files. Would you agree to do that?

President Bush: Yeah. (pause) Listen, these files, I mean, people have been looking for these files for a long period of time, trust me, and starting in the 1994 campaign for governor. And I can assure you in the year 2000, people were looking for those files as well. Probably you were. (pause) And, absolutely. I mean, I...

Russert: (despairing) But would you allow pay stubs, tax records, anything to show that you were serving during that period?

President Bush: Yeah. If we still have them, but I, you know, the records are kept in Colorado, as I understand, and they scoured the records. (exit)

Well, it's just a first draft....

It's back !! The bankruptcy "reform" act was recently attached to legislation concerning debt relief for farmers, and is, unbelievably, even worse than the legislation killed in committee last year. Among the new provisions: a "reform" that would permit investment bankers to be employed in bankruptcies involving companies for which they worked. Neat trick, that; you sell securities on behalf of a company that tanks, then you get to decide whether holders of those securities get paid by the bankruptcy court. Ch-ching !!!

What Judith Miller did was ten times worse than anything Andrew Gilligan has been accused of. At least Gilligan's story was accurate; his problem was that his source didn't say what he said he did. Miller, either knowingly or recklessly, quoted sources of questionable veracity, and put out false and misleading information about Iraq's WMD capability to the public. To date, she has not offered to resign [link via Atrios].

"The big fight right now between John Kerry and George W. Bush is over their military service. And Bush is on the attack - he's accusing John Kerry of ducking time in the Texas Air National Guard once a month by hiding in the jungles of Vietnam.''
--Jay Leno

Bush's Nuts 'n Sluts Defense: It is absolutely shocking that this judge will be the co-chair of the President's Committee investigating pre-war intelligence. Someone who theorized that Anita Hill was a "lesbian acting out" fantasies over her former boss when she testified at the Clarence Thomas hearings will no doubt be a vigorous and neutral arbiter when it comes to Dick Cheney. Any power exerted by Laurence Silberman in this context will almost certainly be used to whitewash the Oval Office.

You have to admit this is a novel attack on John Kerry: claiming that he was a "war profiteer" because he risked his life in Vietnam even though he questioned the war at the time, and (even worse) attended an Ivy League school where many of his compatriots opposed the war. A traitor to his class, indeed.

Thank God that after 9-11, our nation was blessed with conscientious men of principle like Perle, Wolfowitz, DeLay, Lott, Bush, and Cheney, who had refused to similarly profit from the Vietnam War, instead courageously manning the trenchs, tunnels and swamps of college. Because of the sacrifice those fratboys made, their less-privileged brethren were given the opportunity to reap the fruits of battle, and if they were (in the infamous words of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page) "lucky duckies", to "profit" by having their names posthumously etched on a black wall in D.C.

In the end, though, it's an issue of character, and Karl Rove will surely have the last laugh. John Kerry selfishly put the interests of his country ahead of his own skepticism about the cause back in 1966, and now he wants to be President? If there's one thing we know in the blogosphere, it is that true courage and patriotism is to be found not on the battlefield, fighting for your country and risking your life to save your countrymen, but must instead be sought behind a computer terminal, playing junior orwell in the war against the islamofascists and their idiotarian, fifth-columnist allies.

So far, the most accurate polls in the primary season are coming from much-derided Zogby, according to Daily Kos.

Finally, the President comes clean on why we went to war with Saddam....

The Washington Post tackles the Bush-AWOL flap. This is a pretty significant article, not for what it reports (it's pretty much just an exegesis of past articles from other newspapers on the subject), but for the fact that it was even printed. As one blogger noted, the Post is pretty much our national version of Pravda, a newspaper that publishes the party line of the Ins (especially on its editorial page) pretty much verbatim. Writing that there is no documentary evidence that Bush completed his service shows that the President is starting to lose his Beltway support, and could be in for much tougher media coverage than he received back in 2000.

For what it's worth, I don't remember Mondale ever leading Reagan in the polls taken in 1984, or, for that matter, Dole leading Clinton in 1996. So for Kerry to lead at this stage isn't entirely meaningless [link via CalPundit].

Matt Welch reports on how you can be a daddy, and owe child support, without ever having met the mom. It's all because of a scam of convenience, in which the state has a vested interest (thanks, in no small part, to the 1995 Welfare Reform Act) in enforcing thoroughly bogus default judgments against men who have the same name as a deadbeat dad. Whoever said that the law had anything to do with justice?

Those of you who have Jeff Jarvis on your blogroll may be interested in this little gem, where he ridicules the clinical depression of another blogger. As someone who has battled that disease, my anger at such wanton cruelty towards another should be obvious. I mean, can you imagine the flack I would get if I were to express my disagreement with the political views of Andrew Sullivan by making an AIDS joke? Is this what the blogosphere is coming to?

As a follow-up to Friday's post about our "Type-A" President, George Bush is now calling for the establishment of a commission to look into the "intelligence failings" that led to the fiasco in Iraq. Frankly, this should have been done months ago, after the CIA concluded that there were no WMD's in Iraq, but better late than never. By implicitly conceding that he made a mistake, he is in better position to take the issue off the table when he goes before the voters, and certainly is a more honorable course of action than having your shills debate whether or not you ever said Saddam was an "imminent" threat.

He is still trying to have his cake and eat it too, by limiting the focus of the commission, as well as mandating that it not issue a report until after the November election. But "investigations" like the one conducted by Lord Hutton are a rarity here; there is an expectation in Great Britain that an official inquiry will be used to defend the government, as the Hutton Commission did, while in America, the expectation is usually that any comparable inquiry, such as the Tower Commission, will try to uncover official malfeasance. And as Matthew Yglesias writes, any investigation into intelligence breakdowns will necessarily have to deal with the pressure the Administration brought to bear on the CIA before the war to exaggerate WMD claims. Bush's earlier attempt to stack the inquiry looking into 9-11 by nominating Henry Kissinger to head it failed disastrously, and any similar move here will discredit the commission before it starts.

Prof. Johnson has a modest proposal on how to solve one state's budget shortfall.

True Patriots reject Bush: If the election were to be held today, John Kerry would defeat George Bush, 43-40%. That is, among people pulling for New England tomorrow, according to this poll. Fans of the NFC champion Carolina Panthers favor the President, 49-33% [link via NY Times "blog"].

Watching his press conference this morning, and the manner in which he cut off a questioner who was asking a follow-up to another reporter's question about the Kay testimony before Congress, it occurred to me why feelings about George Bush are so strong in this country. He is the first true "asshole" to be President since Richard Nixon.

I don't mean that necessarily in a negative sense. Many creative artists and talented athletes are assholes; the fact that Picasso was a jerk doesn't make "Guernica" any less powerful, no more than the fact that Gary Sheffield disses reporters makes him any less valuable to his team. In politics, though, that personality type usually has some difficulty succeeding. Having a sense of humility is typically viewed as an important quality to have in a leader, and if there's one thing we know about the President, he is pathologically incapable of ever admitting he was wrong about something.

The call for an independent commission to investigate the mistakes made leading to war against Iraq is one case in point. In Great Britain, Tony Blair was able to use the Hutton Commission to deflect the fact that his government presented incompetent and misleading intelligence to justify war by shifting the onus to the BBC's reporting of same. The question became not whether the intelligence was "sexed up", it was whether Blair knew that the intelligence was sexed up, as the Beeb reported; an incredible bit of political jujitsu, it led to the resignation of several high-ranking directors at the BBC, and allowed Blair to appoint successors more willing to be the mouthpiece of the government (although not without some political fallout: the Hutton Report is being treated with derision by much of Great Britain, as a clumsy whitewash of government actions).

Focusing on whether the client had the specific intent to deceive is precisely what clever defense attorneys use in white collar criminal cases, but it also entails an assumption, on the part of the defense, that the client made a mistake. If the client believes himself to be infallible, that defense won't fly. A President who won't read newspapers, who insults Congressmen from his own party who dare to vote their conscience, who freezes out reporters who attempt to ask difficult questions, and gives demeaning nicknames to those he perceives to be beneath him, is obviously someone who is not going to admit that he blew it, even on a minor point.

And that's problematic. People are willing to accept that our political leaders make mistakes (ie., Clinton during the Lewinsky Affair), and that intelligence from other countries may be spotty. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, so his downfall, even with the questionable rationale which we chose to go to war, is to be celebrated. But by pretending that nothing went wrong, Bush insults a large portion of the American people, those who disagree with him on other issues, and are not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt politically, but who are also patriotic citizens who are willing to support him, as President, when the chips are down. In the end, it will prove his downfall, because, when all is said and done, people tend to root against assholes.

Anyone want to lay odds that this document recently "retrieved" from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, is yet another forgery? [link via EllisBlog] Besides the inevitable reference to George Galloway, the bullshit detector of anyone with an IQ over single digits should have been triggered with the listing of a payout to something called the "October 8 Movement" in Brazil. Apparently, Saddam's minions couldn't come up with the name of an actual Brazilian, so they just sent the multi-million dollar bribe to a "movement".

Humanitarianism, the last refuge of suckers (or is it "Francophobia, the socialism of chickenhawks").

This can be filed under the category, "Limits of Technology", or perhaps, "Why Some Stereotypes Make Sense". This morning I had a trial in Lancaster, California, a city some fifty miles north of Los Angeles. Rather than just opening up the Thomas Guide and driving to the general location of the courthouse, I decided to use the LA Superior Court's website to give me directions. Bad move--the courthouse was erected in October of last year, and the website the court links to for that purpose, MapQuest, can't give an accurate location, since the access street was built at the same time as the courthouse. So it compensates, giving me directions to a street with the same name, but five miles to the north. I realized something was amiss when the directions I was following led me down to two unpaved roads in the middle of nowhere. When I finally called the court to get directions, the operator had it figured out: "you used MapQuest, didn't you?"

Although tonight's victory in New Hampshire doesn't exactly wrap up the nomination for John Kerry, it definitely makes life a lot easier for the next few weeks. Gephardt's withdrawal last week suddenly puts Missouri in play; a larger state than South Carolina, a Kerry victory there (and possibly in Arizona) will overshadow anything Edwards or Clark do next Tuesday. His fundraising has picked up dramatically since his win in Iowa, and his larger-than-expected win this evening will increase his momentum. No matter what Dean says about getting off the deck, New Hampshire was a state he desperately needed to win, and he failed. With the Southern regional primary not until mid-March, Clark and Edwards need to win something besides South Carolina next week, if only to show they have appeal above the Mason-Dixon Line, or their campaigns will be over in a matter of days. With any sort of luck, Kerry could have this all but clinched before California and New York vote on March 2, and not have to even worry about his appeal in the South until November.

With 7% of the vote counted, Kerry has an early 12-point lead...but the exit polls indicate a close race with Dean.

UPDATE: Now with 19% counted, it's up to 14-points...Dean is going to have get a lot closer to claim "Comeback Kid" status. Third place is a coin flip; hard to say that it matters (unless it's not Lieberman).

These are early exit poll figures, but they show Kerry with a narrow lead over Dean in the New Hampshire Primary. Clark, Edwards, and Lieberman trail badly.

I guess the Academy is waiting to honor Kill Bill: Vol. 2 next year. As my sister predicted at the time she received her one and only screener this year, the Art Directors honored Girl With a Pearl Earring with a nomination; if the producers of Gigli had sent them a screener, that too would have been nominated.

According to a poll taken throughout western Europe by the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, 35.7% of those polled said that "Jews should stop 'playing the victim' for the Holocaust," 40.5% said that "Jews in their country had "a particular relationship with money'," and that 46% believed that "Jews in their countries had a 'mentality and lifestyle' different than other citizens." Interestingly, the poll showed that anti-Semitism was greater in countries like Italy, Austria, Spain and Germany than it is in France, the country where the focus (particularly from the U.S.) has been more intense. A poll the previous week indicated that as many as one in five Brits did not feel a Jew could serve as Prime Minister. For those who were comforted to believe that European anti-Semitism was confined to the far left and to Arab immigrants, these results should be a sobering antidote.

LA's number two free weekly alternative, LA CityBeat (there is also a version for the Valley, but it's the same paper with a couple of news items pasted in about Glendale), has a pair of interesting articles on the local music scene this week, about the sad downfall of late-sixties pop genius Emmit Rhodes (try getting "Live" or "Falling Sugar" out of your head once you've heard them), and about a band called The Country Teasers playing a gig at The Smell. My baby brother will be delighted to know that the club he owns gets this write-up: "The Smell is Dante’s reverb chamber, rectangular in shape and lined with dense brick and concrete so relentlessly reflective that the sound swirls and bounces like a fire hose in a parking garage.".

Some of you may have listened to NPR's two-hour report on blogs last night, so you will know what I'm talking about, but the rest of you may be getting bits and pieces of it second- or third-hand for the next week, so I will try to summarize it for you. The first hour and forty minutes was taken up by assorted media Big Feet, including liberal Josh Marshall and conservative Jeff Jarvis, feeding us a dry encapsulation of the potential of the new medium (as you might expect, Jarvis brought up the New York Times' refusal to give front page treatment to an anti-Saddam demonstration in the streets of Baghdad last month that drew several thousand; it's becoming a tired rant, akin to Snitchens' tirades about the brain-addled murderer Clinton executed in 1992).

The last twenty minutes featured the long-awaited confrontation between Andrew Sullivan and "Atrios". Neither came across with any distinction. Sullivan, apparently nursing scars from insults, real and perceived, and being unwilling to actually respond on his blog (and thereby link) to anyone to the left of Prof. Reynolds, attacked the anonymity of "Atrios", as if the Philadelphia gym teacher was the first to come up with the idea of publishing under a pseudonym. Besides the fact that Sully himself linked to a conservative blogger, "Tacitus", earlier that day without denouncing his "lack of transparency", anonymous screeds have made a rich contribution to Anglo-American political thought; the Federalist Papers, for example, could be considered a late-eighteenth century proto-blog written by several anonymous writers.

"Atrios", however, illustrated another weakness of the blogosphere: a lack of seriousness about language. When Sully criticized Eschaton for being unwilling to attack his own side, "Atrios" called him a liar. As I mentioned back on January 6, accusing someone of lying ought to be a serious accusation, but bloggers use it instead as a shorthand way of saying that the other guy is wrong about an issue. What has become a perfectly banal insult over the internet resonates quite differently when you actually hear it said over a national radio program.

What's worse, though, was when Atrios was actually called on that statement, he couldn't give an example. Of course, it would have been nice if Sullivan actually had visited Eschaton before making his statement: the very post that topped the blog during the radio program reported on dirty tricks one candidate was using against Howard Dean in New Hampshire, hardly the actions of someone who has any hesitation about going after his own side.

And Atrios has nothing to apologize for publishing a more partisan website than Sullivan's; after all, Sully's crowd is in power, controls most of the political, cultural and business institutions in our society, while the insurgent's role that Atrios has chosen to play necessarily must focus its attacks on the opposition. Sully himself has a side he won't attack: witness his unwillingness to repudiate Matt Drudge's deliberate dowdification of General Clark's Congressional testimony a few weeks back. But still, you can hardly claim the other guy is deliberately misstating what's on your blog when you don't really know either.

Spent the afternoon viewing Mystic River, an absolutely amazing film. Why do I think Pauline Kael will be remembered as much for her boneheaded denunciations of Clint Eastwood as for anything else she might have written? Oh, I forgot, she will also be remembered for comparing Last Tango in Butter Paris with "The Rites of Spring".

Real-life philosopher (but definitely not a straussian) David Johnson has kicked off his blog with a bang, taking on the Sinclair Broadcasting empire, the nation's most prolific owner of television stations.

The man who uncovered Saddam's "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-activities" has stepped down, perhaps out of embarrassment that his good name will forever by entwined with the aforementioned Bushism. Sayeth Mr. Kay: "I don't think they existed. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties."

Sure fire cure for "road rage": slip Fought Down into your CD player, and play track No. 5.

Last night's debate was the first I've had the pleasure to watch from the comfort of my own living room. Like most of my more conservative brethren, the candidate I was most impressed with was Lieberman. He stuck to his guns, and made a valiant effort to justify his position on the war while still building an anti-Bush case on other issues. The candidate I'm currently leaning toward, Edwards, was unimpressive; as with Clinton and Reagan, I don't feel debates are the format best-suited to their strengths on the hustings, but with time, I hope that Edwards will be able to improve enough so that it won't hurt him, either.

Kerry is as dull as clay-court tennis, but is an acceptable face at the top of the ticket if it appears that Bush is going to win anyway. In that sense, he's the Democratic version of Bob Dole, or a modern version of Walter Mondale, a candidate that doesn't hurt the party down the ticket (btw, is there such a thing as a "French" look, or is that simply a rather subtle way of making reference to Kerry's religious background?). And I actually like the fact that he is so disliked by insiders; it was one of Clinton's great strengths, the fact that the Beltway Establishment, from Sally Quinn to Mr. Samgrass, all hated him.

One way you can tell whether someone has their pulse on what moves Democratic primary voters was how they felt about Dean and Clark. Dean has already been written off following his mediocre performance in Iowa, and his Whitmanian yawp afterwards, but he's still the candidate with the most in the bank, and in the best situation organizationally [link via Atrios]. He can afford to lose a couple early primaries and keep going (unlike, say, Edwards, who is pretty much done unless he wins South Carolina in two weeks), racking up delegates and praying for a momentum shift, in much the same way Mondale got his ass kicked by Gary Hart for a couple of months in 1984 before turning the tide after Super Tuesday.

General Clark didn't do anything last night to either help or hurt himself, to the chagrin of his legion of haters in the blogosphere. The bizarre notion that he would be hurt by not repudiating Michael Moore's description of the President as a "deserter" is one that could only be held by Bush's more sycophantic admirers (and I say that as perhaps the only left-of-center, blindly-partisan, Bush-hating blogger who thinks the President has received a bum rap on that issue), akin to believing that Republican voters were turned off in the last decade by references to Bill Clinton as a "draft dodger" or "rapist". The typical Democratic primary voter does not listen to Rush Limbaugh, and is impressed, not discouraged, by the fact that Clark has a nuanced, non-ideological opinion about the war in Iraq.

In any event, the highlight of the evening had to have been the question asked of Rev. Al about who he would pick to be the next Federal Reserve chairman. It was clear that he was thinking about the issue for the first time as he was answering, and it may have been a reminder to him that his campaign is not supposed to be a serious one for the White House.

Daily Kos interrupts its usual review of inside political perspective to bring this update on George Bush's new best friend in the Middle East.

Why do I have the impression that "weapons of mass destruction-related-program activities" is about to become the "I didn't inhale" of 2004?

Like most polls, the first survey to come out since last night's Iowa caucus is showing a mixed bag for the President. The race is basically tied between Bush and "generic Democrat", which is what Edwards and Kerry are, for all intents and purposes. Bush is clearly favored on matters dealing with the "war on terrorism", but his handling of the economy (and other domestic issues) gets mediocre grades from the public.

I remain unconvinced that any Democrat will be able to defeat Bush if the principal issue before the voters is foreign affairs. If there is one hard and fast rule in elections, it is that the more hawkish position is generally going to be the more popular. As long as Bush can find an adversary to vilify, whether it be Iran, Syria, North Korea, or Monaco, a large segment of the public will back him, no questions asked. After September 11th, the appetite for any foreign adventure increased dramatically, and as the high percentage of people who still believe that Saddam was behind that attack and had ties to Al Qaeda attests, Red State voters aren't particularly discriminating.

So what to do, if you're a blindly partisan Democrat, who is as concerned with such mundane things as the maldistribution of income, budget deficits, gay rights, racial intolerance, and all those other things that tend to get clumped together under the label "domestic policy", and who wants to see his party capture at least one branch of government in the next election? As I said, we can't do much about foreign policy except try to be constructively critical, and perhaps shame the Administration into occasionally telling the truth. But on domestic issues, I have a modest proposal.

The Democrats need a slogan that encapsulates their domestic policy positions (also, they need some policy positions, but lets take care of the easy things first). They already have the backing of the public. What they need is to turn that support into actual votes, to make their positions the compelling reason people vote in the upcoming election. The "war on terrorism" is catchy, and allows Bush to sere into the psyche of the electorate his entire foreign policy (which the public largely supports) and his domestic policy (which the public doesn't), even though it is not technically a "war" under Article I of the Constitution, and even though his policies that directly deal with terrorism (eg., the by-now comical color-coded threat system) are a mixed bag. To counter that, we can't simply come up with our own "wars" (eg., a "war" on deficit spending), because to do so would sound derivative, and would smack of defensiveness, a no-no in game theory.

So I humbly suggest the term, "let's put the grown-ups back in charge". First, it reminds the public that the Democrats are generally the more responsible party when it comes to the public trough. Clinton raised taxes on the rich and ran a public surplus, and the economy averaged a quarter million new jobs a month; Bush cut taxes on the rich, ran a record deficit, and the economy has suffered a net job drop since he took over. One party knows how to manage a global economy, and the other believes that "Reagan showed that deficits don't matter", and relies on a superstitious belief in tax cuts as the panacea for everything.

Second, it tweaks the GOP, which used that slogan in 2000, and boasted during the early days of the Bush Administration that after eight years of bitter partisan division under Clinton, there was a new sheriff in town, one who was a "uniter, not a divider". Suddenly, the public doesn't find the petty "scandals" of the Clinton years to be so bad, not when the State Department has basically become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Halliburton, and when our foreign policy has been taken over by an ideological cult. When the President is so myopic that he doesn't know the difference between the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the potential for same, when his explanation for telling a whopper in the last State of the Union was that the ever-reliable MI-6 believed it to be true, when he refuses to even read newspapers, and when his judicial nominees tend to belong to the same bund as Ann Coulter, the fact that Clinton defined the word "is" to mean the third-person singular of "to be" isn't such a big deal anymore.

And lastly, it is a pointed criticism at the one area of Bush's handling of foreign policy that does concern the public, his inability to get along with others. Much has been made of French and German intransigence at our efforts to develop an international front against Saddam Hussein before the United Nations last year. His apologists, of course, blame Chirac for undercutting our efforts to build a coalition to deal with WMD's, never bothering to explain what exactly was wrong with that; since no WMD's were subsequently found, it's kinda hard to use Saddam's alleged violation of Security Council resolutions as a causus belli. At some point, a certain amount of humility is called for when the reasons we used to hector other countries into fighting along side us have been discredited. Instead, we have the type of international relations one would expect where you have a "leader" who behaves in the manner of a petulent child, unable to understand or acknowledge the possibility that he may be wrong about something.

But if any of you have a better idea for a slogan, fire away....

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The absence of any WMDs in any usable form in Iraq is, to my mind, staggering. I'm still passionately pro-war, but you cannot sugar-coat this intelligence debacle. The pre-emption doctrine is practically speaking dead."--Andrew Sullivan

Kerry has apparently won. With about 90% of the precincts reporting, he has a six percentage point lead over John Edwards, and is currently beating Howard Dean by about 20 points. CNN is reporting that Gephardt will drop out; it will be interesting to see what the Teamsters, who put much of their prestige on the line for him, will do now. Edwards surprising showing will be "the story", but he will have to contend with General Clark in New Hampshire, and I don't know if he has the money and organization to contend with the others after South Carolina. That Kerry was able to win after almost a year of inept campaigning is impressive; Dean's collapse in the last few days does not bode well, and those questions about his appeal to the electorate will be front and center (for an inside-the-caucus look at went wrong, check here). We might actually have an important primary in California coming up in six weeks, something that hasn't been true for a generation.

The caucuses have been open for 45 minutes, and the early "entrance polls" show a two-man race between Kerry and Edwards. Dean and Gephardt are trailing badly; Gephardt cannot possibly survive such a performance.

Those interested in inside dope on the Iowa Caucuses (for real-time results, here) can do one-stop shopping at the Howard Dean blog, where even anti-Dean sites are included. Also, Mickey Kaus usefully warns us to take any result tonight with a grain of salt.

Fisking with faint praise: Blogger Roger Simon, in defending a typically-discredited Matt Drudge scoop, states that the "...quotes Drudge uses are not that Dowdified in the end." (emphasis mine)

UPDATE: It appears that what Drudge actually did stretches journalistic ethics beyond what is allowable, even on the internet. The term used above, dowdified, was coined by bloggers after columnist Maureen Dowd was found to have excised, through the use of magic ellipses (...), a segment of a speech by the President that would have made him sound less foolish than usual if it had been quoted. What Drudge did was even worse: he removed a sentence from General Clark's testimony, used ellipses, then inserted a passage from later in the testimony, thereby changing the meaning of what he said. The kindest way to view this is that Drudge failed to perform due diligence before he quoted the above segment, which he probably got from a third party; if Drudge's actions were knowing and deliberate, he should be treated with the utmost contempt by anyone with a sense of ethics. The failure of conservative bloggers to take steps to repudiate this practice gives lie to the pretense that we are "fact-checking our asses".

Who said it?: "I'm really [expletive deleted] good at my job, and people who are interesting and good know that and that's all that matters." [First correct answer gets a night's portion of drinks paid for, compliments of me]

Just had my first listen to Fought Down, the latest Ken Layne & the Corvids album, which contains all-new material. I admit I hear less of a Velvet Underground-influence than I did before; I would now suggest that they are more of a hybrid combination of Merle Haggard, Exile on Main Street-era Stones, and the Chocolate Watch Band. Not a waste of money; see them live when they begin their West Coast swing in late-February.

I knew Lauren Reed was up to no good !!

Today my nephew gets baptized, the Angels sign Vlad Guerrero (wow!) and the second half of Prime Suspect 6 airs on CBC, which some U.S. satellites can pick up. Anyone with a dish and a VCR who lives in SoCal can become my best friend tonight.

Idiot Son Update: Sending a message to sports leagues and athletes the world over (are you listening, Bud Selig?), the governing authority for Italy's Serie A has suspended Saadi Ghadafi for three months for failing a drug test. Perhaps chastened by the fall of Saddam, Ghadafi admitted taking the banned substance norandrosterone, but claimed it was for treatment of a "back injury", no doubt incurred while sitting on the bench for every single game this season.

Our Shameless Governor: Less than 24 hours after claiming that the budget shortfall in Sacramento was a spending problem, not a taxing problem, and after having vowed not to raise taxes, Gov. Ziffel has proposed to boost public college fees for students up to 40% for the fall, and at the same time limit eligibility for student loans. Substantively, there is no difference between those "fees" and the car license "tax" he campaigned so actively against last fall; both effect only the users of the service involved, not the entire population. Well, there is one difference: the car "tax" disproportionately impacts drivers of more expensive cars (ie., the rich), while the people most likely to be hurt by the college fee increase are the poor and middle class.

As a life-long Dodger fan, I don't really have a dog in the fight over whether Pete Rose should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame; now that he's admitted to having bet on his own team, the entire issue of whether the Dowd Report was fair to him is moot. It is interesting that the nation's sportswriters, so many of whom were insisting that all Charlie Hustle needed to do was admit he gambled on the sport, have now turned against him after he did precisely that. In any event, Eric Alterman has the best take: "If only Pete Rose had claimed he bet on baseball games and then lied about it because he suspected other teams of harboring ties to Al Qaida and building weapons of mass destruction, then the Washington Post editors would have called him a patriot and supported him down the line, even without that lame apology."

The Idiotarian's Manifesto: One of the depressing things about the blogosphere is that you can receive just about any insult and not take it personally. In the real world, being called a "racist", an "anti-Semite", a "fifth columnist", an "objective pro-fascist", or a liar would be considered fighting words; there are even some terms that have no meaning outside the internet, like "idiotarian", "the Pissy Brigade", "media whore" and "fisking", that at one time were meant to be devastating takedowns of your adversary, but are now worn like battlefield scars, with a certain amount of pride and machismo. If you run a blog, and/or if you actively troll in another blogger's comments section, such slurs become par for the course.

Blogs seem to have a special connection to a very angry sort of person, not necessarily an extremist, but someone who has a certain comfort level at disparaging others from the safety of a computer monitor. Bouncing from site to site, it amazes me what sort of rhetoric passes for political insight (and by no means am I excusing myself). People who disagree with you aren't simply mistaken, they are selfish, despicable people who hate America. Be nasty enough, throw in enough shabby and low accusations against the other side, and your unique visitors will multiply geometrically this month !! Never mind that you convince no one of the righteousness of your cause.

The heated rhetoric is in direct contrast to what I know about other bloggers on a personal level. I have probably met, at least on a social level, close to fifty people who have their own blogs, and to date the only person who rubbed me the wrong way was a blogger whose politics I share and whose writing I admire. At some point, I begin to feel like a hypocrite; how many of the people I've called "dixiecrats", "disingenuous", or an "Uncle Tom Democrat" on this site am I going to meet that turn out to be really sweet, decent people? Isn't there someone out there that I can attack who also happens to be a complete a**hole?

Keeping in mind the fervent hope that Lenny Bruce once had, that if the word "n*****" became such a ubiquitous part of our daily conversation that it would cease to have any impact as a derogatory term, I think something is being lost. Some words shouldn't lose their impact. I've been called "anti-Semitic" or a "racist" a couple of times in my life, but before I started this site, I always took it as the type of slam that required some soul-searching on my part (I'm the type of person who subconsciously believes that any time I'm attacked, it must be justified, no matter how baseless). Now, it just means that I oppose Sharon, or that I disagree with Paul Wolfowitz. When I wear my civilian clothes, and especially in the context of my job as an attorney, being called a "liar" is tantamount to being challenged to a dual; it is really the only time I get angry. In the blogosphere, it's just shorthand for saying that I'm factually mistaken about a point.

Unfortunately, this has become a standard part of the political rhetoric in this country. Blogs are just another form of talk radio, for those who are shy and insecure. So I propose the following: never use a word to describe someone (or someone's opinion) that you could not easily repeat to his face. If you disagree with someone else's analysis of an issue, assume it's because he doesn't understand the issue with the same clarity you do, and respond accordingly, rather than assume he's deliberately presenting false arguments. And try to remember that what you read on this blog and elsewhere is just a microscopic part of the whole person who is authoring it. The internet is no substitute for therapy.

One of my booze buddies makes sure I always get the latest column from reactionary pundit Dennis Prager, but this one takes the cake. Humor is like nitroglycerin; it should be handled with care, and never by complete idiots. Also, it should at least be funny. Prager's schtick, of course, is to pen columns that accuse liberals, atheists and A-Rabs of being in league with Satan, sort of a poor man's Charles Krauthammer. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, he was among the pundits who argued that Joseph Lieberman wasn't a real Jew because he supported abortion rights for women questioned the sincerity of Al Gore's religious views, among other things.

In 2004, the candidate who has become the target of religious bigots is Howard Dean, who has come under attack for having married a Jewish woman, thereby permitting her to raise his children in that faith. Some have even gone so far as to question the sincerity of his religious beliefs, a dark moment in recent American politics that brings to mind the attacks against Al Smith and JFK over Roman Catholicism. The scary thing is, the sort of hatred that Howard Dean has engendered from the wingnut right is exactly the thing that has pulled him within the margin of error against George Bush.

UPDATE: I corrected the error about Prager and Lieberman, above, thanks to the resolute fact-checking of Booze Buddy (he also wanted me to announce that he, and he alone, predicted USC's national title before the season). And I'm the one who's always talking about the need for due dilligence amongst bloggers. Physician, heal thyself !!

Yesterday was a special day for me, having grown up an SC fan. Like most fans of college teams, the subject of my loyalties has nothing to do with the college I attended. I went to law school there, but had I gotten my J.D. in Westwood, I would still be a Bruin-hater. Most of the people who follow the Trojans have never set foot on the campus other than to walk through it en route to the Coliseum, and have had even less contact with the school. I liked the Trojans as a kid, even though no one in my family (save my dad, for one semester) ever attended the school, developed an even more passionate attachment as a teenager (around the time I discovered the, er, talent on the sidelines), and remained so after I went off to college in Berkeley. USC is not now the school to which I have the greatest allegiance (that would be dear alma mater CAL), or the school that I follow with most interest (Michigan, their oppenent yesterday, but that's a long story), but it's the team that I always come back to in the end.

Since 1978, there has been little in the way of good news for Trojan fans. The hoops team occasionally tantalizes its fans with a brief run at national prominence, but this is still a UCLA town, from January to the end of March. No team has won more track, swimming and baseball titles than USC, but scholarship limitations put an end to that dominance in the first two sports, and the baseball team, aside from the national title it won a few years back, is now known more for its post-season underachievement (how does a team with Mark McGuire and Randy Johnson not win a title?) than anything else.

The football team had hardly been better. Its recent history was marked by trips to the NCAA doghouse for recruiting and academic violations in the '80's, and by uninspired mediocrity during the '90's. USC lost eleven straight games at one point to their principal rival, Notre Dame, and eight straight to another, UCLA. After Pete Carroll was hired after the 2000 season, things hardly looked up; the Trojans started 2-5 in 2001, and didn't seem appreciably better than they were in the Paul Hackett era. In the thirty or so games since then, USC has looked bad only twice, against Utah in the 2001 Las Vegas Bowl, and against CAL in the first half this year. Most of the time, the games haven't even been competitive, and the Trojans typically look like a team playing an offense ten years ahead of everyone else.

For someone who had seen his team hit rock bottom only three years before, to suddenly mute his cheers at the game yesterday so as not to embarrass his host, a Michigan fan, and to actually feel sorry for the outclassed opponent is quite a switch. Even scarier, USC returns most of their stars, and will play a schedule that looks even easier than the one they played this season, when it cost them a spot in the BCS "championship", a game that is now anti-climactic. They will doubtlessly be the prohibitive favorite going into 2004.

But just as I can savor this new-found dominance, I must also remember that glory such as this is fleeting; after the Trojans won the title in '78 (the real title, too, since it shared the honor with a team it had beaten on the road earlier in the season, Alabama), its third title in six years, I couldn't help but think that was the permanent state of things, the way things naturally were. USC competing for the national title was a matter of birthright. It didn't turn out that way. The next year, an even better team suffered a tie midway through the season, and lost out when their rivals, coasting on a cupcake schedule, went perfect. The Trojans were on probation for much of the next five years, rallied briefly under Larry Smith, then collapsed. It can happen again.

But right now, by whatever right I have to use the pronoun, WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS !!

English journalism isn't simply tabloids and the fabricated stories that run in the Daily Telegraph. It's also hilariously highbrow sportswriting, as this take on the BCS controversy shows. The piece manages to discuss college football in a manner that no fan of the sport ever would (including a reference to a split national title in 1990 between Colorado and "The Georgia Institute of Technology"), while being completely oblivious to what pisses fans off about the BCS (the fact that computers are incapable of picking the correct teams for the national championship).

Speaking of which, I will be at the Rose Bowl tomorrow, so if anyone wishes to hook up, tailgate, etc., let me know sometime before 7:00 a.m. on the morrow. My source in local government tells me that the President is going to make his first campaign appearance of the year at the Game, so if you have any words of wisdom, I'll be glad to pass them on.

UPDATE: The official story is still that the President will be with family and friends tomorrow at his "ranch". More stuff on the games over at my college football blog, Condredge's Acolytes.

I haven't decided whom to support yet in 2004, but Howard Dean sure pisses off the right people, don't he? Dean is the principal example that truth-tellers tend to be a very unpopular sort, at least at first. He's not even close to being as liberal as McGovern was in 1972 (he's not even close to Gore in 2000), he's much closer to the center on most issues than the incumbent President, but he has incurred a level of irrational hatred not seen in American politics since, well, Bill Clinton. The statements that have gotten him into trouble recently (that even Osama is entitled to the presumption of innocence, that the capture of Hussein hasn't made America more safe from terrorism, etc.) are attacked not because they are false (I mean, we're still in an Orange terror alert, and now we're supposed to be paranoid of men with almanacs) but because, regrettably, they are true.

It would feel great to capture OBL alive, then whack him; after all, he has admitted to planning 9/11. But Dean, ironically for someone who is the first major Presidential frontrunner since Reagan to be neither an attorney nor a businessman, knows that false confessions are a dime a dozen in our legal system, and that a fair trial is the only way to establish an accurate historical record of the most grievous injury suffered by our nation in decades. And even supporters of the Iraqi adventure now concede that it had only an incidental relationship to the "war" on terrorism; the justifications we now hear have to do with what a bad actor Saddam Hussein was, which wasn't the argument we were using when trying to bully our allies into this war.

Increasingly, political correctness (or to use the term popular with chickenbloggers, "anti-idiotarianism") has become a weapon used by the right to marginalize dissenting voices. As it did when that same weapon was utilized against conservative student groups and newspapers, though, it has not silenced those voices but given them strength, a feeling that blunt, unpopular truths carry enormous power.

As I said, I don't know if I will vote for Dean in the California primary, which is only about ten weeks away. The anger he has used so effectively to rally the ideologues behind his banner will not help him in the general election (just as it didn't help Barry Goldwater in 1964), but it may well be what the Party needs in the long run. Since 1980, the Democrats have acted in much the same way the Los Angeles Dodgers have the last 25 years, not taking risks and attempting to muzzle anything that sounds remotely unpopular. As with the Dodgers, their occasional successes on the field obscure the fact that the world has changed; the Republicans control politics at every level, from the government to the judiciary to the media, and the old way of doing things doesn't work. In that sense, Tom DeLay is the Billy Beane of politics, someone who has an edge on the rest of us because he knows a new way of doing things that works, and who also knows that the other side hasn't caught on yet.

Clinton, G-- bless him, used a very effective strategy in uniting the base while picking off centrist, and even some right-leaning, voters, but it all but killed the Democrats down-ticket. Dean is popular with Democrats precisely because he understands that attempting to compromise with a foe that wants to fight an all-out war isn't moderation, it's appeasement. Win or lose come November, 2004, he may be the person to start the rebuilding process that has been delayed for too long.

For those of who enjoy the hathos of Andrew Sullivan's vanity site (does the Harvard Crimson follow an affirmative action program to employ idiots?), please take note that he is on "vacation" this week, and his blogging is being done instead by Daniel Drezner, a conservative who actually thinks before he posts.

Those of you who own the paperback version of Fast Food Nation might like to re-read the portion starting at page 271, before you become complacent about government "safeguards" concerning Mad Cow Disease.

The circumstances behind the execution-style slaying of former big league outfielder Ivan Calderon get stranger and stranger.

The Supreme Court's decision earlier this month to uphold the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law was one of the few bright spots for progressive politics this year, and as such drew a very hostile reaction from the Right. The gist of the decision was that it halted in its tracks the opinion that the expenditure of money was in and of itself protected "speech" under the First Amendment. The majority opinion was attacked by one pundit as being comparable to Plessy v. Ferguson in its violation of the "clear meaning" of the Constitution, an odious comparison when you realize that the Plessy decision legalized apartheid in much of the country, and ensured that the most-despised and least-powerful segments of our society stayed that way, whereas the Court's decision three weeks ago infringes on the "rights" of the most affluent and powerful groups in America.

That the expenditure of money is even thought to be protected under the First Amendment in the first place shows how ideas that would have been considered extreme thirty years ago now have acquired a mainstream legitimacy, thanks to the conservative dominance of the media. Casual readers of the Bill of Rights might find some difficulty with the notion that campaign contributions are part of what is considered "free speech". The First Amendment does not mention the spending of money, or even the words "money" or "spend"; it mainly deals with restrictions on the power of Congress to infringe on speech, religion, and the press. Laws against bribery were on the books at the time the Constitution was drafted, and do not appear to have been questioned or challenged by the Framers.

Back when I was in law school (1985-8), the high court's 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo was considered to be a turning point in the history of the judicial branch, away from the liberalism of the Warren Court and towards a jurisprudence that was friendlier to the wealthy and powerful. In that case, the court struck down provisions of the post-Watergate campaign reform act that restricted expenditures by political candidates themselves, while upholding contribution limits by third parties. In the intervening years, those same third parties were able to create entities that were, at least on paper, independent of actual campaigns, but could spend unlimited amounts to ensure the election of a candidate. The McCain-Feingold Act was drafted to specifically address this loophole, while people like George Will and Senator Mitch McConnell believe the Court didn't go far enough in Buckley.

The difference between campaign "contributions" and bribery is a subtle one. If I were to announce that I had given George Bush's reelection campaign a million dollars in exchange for his veto of any bankruptcy law that I happen to oppose, I would be prosecuted (at least in California; I doubt John Ashcroft would bother). Yet there is no question that my offer to the President has specific free speech implications, in much the same way that the manufacture of child pornography has; if we use the standard of George Will, I'm using wealth to openly propound an opinion on an issue of public policy, an activity clearly protected by the First Amendment.

In reality, though, what the Right views as "free speech" is really a claim to an entitlement, a property right, to control government. It is a cornerstone of conservative thought that government should not interfere with the individual's (or corporation's) right to do what it pleases with its property. Modern liberalism, on the other hand, believes that there is a governmental responsibility to draw some boundaries as to what people can do with their property. Restrictions (or even outright bans) on campaign spending should be no more considered a violation of free speech than the employment of children in factories at sub-minimum wages.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS !!

For those few who visit, I haven't been taking the holiday season off, I just haven't felt the need to post much the last couple of weeks. Quite often, bloggers will feel frustrated that they don't have something new to add to their site, something to maintain a healthy level of unique visitors. People who somehow think they're going to make a living out of this will often announce ahead of time that "blogging will be light" while they are on vacation, or during the holidays, or whenever. Since this site is my plaything, not my resume or headshot, it is liberating to know that I can pretty much speak out whenever I'm inspired, with no feeling of guilt when I go days on end without posting.

Like most of you, I'm just kicking back with my family today, preparing for the afternoon festivities and erecting the Festivus Pole (I know it's two days late, but it's hard for people to get vacation time off for that holiday). Then later, we all get together, have the traditional Airing of Grievances, and play "How to Host a Murder" to get into the holiday spirit.

Saw Return of the King last night, and admittedly, I thought the fourth ending was the best. Snark aside, Peter Jackson has set the bar so high on what I can expect when I pay 10 bucks to see a movie that any other film is almost certain to be a disappointment. Unlike 90% of what Hollywood releases into the nation's multiplexes, this was an experience that could not be captured on DVD.

Any discussion of the so-called liberal media should be prefaced by the admission that it's way more profitable to be a conservative. Last month, it was the revelation that the website Tech Central Station was funded by right wing lobbyists for the purpose of propagating favorable coverage of their issues over the internet. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Conrad Black publishing empire (Daily Telegraph, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Sun) comes the not-so-surprising revelation that many of the more "distinguished" pundits on the right were generously supported by his lordship, including George Will, Richard Perle, and William F. Buckley. As George Will said, when trying to justify why he didn't tell his readers about the truckload of money he got from the subject of one of his more positive columns, "My business is my business. Got it?"

UPDATE: Krugman adds his take. OUCH !!!

I think the significance of this has nothing to do with Khadafi being threatened by an assertive U.S. presence in the Mid-East as it does his willingness to make it seem like it did. The things he has promised to do are no different than what Saddam was ostensibly promising, and even if he fully "disarms", he will still have WMD "capability", or whatever his shills now call the rationale Bush is using to justify our adventure in Baghdad. The Libyan strongman has been trying to make peace with the west since 1990; his limited cooperation with the international court trying the Lockerbie killers and the intelligence provided on Al Qaeda after September 11 all pre-date the attack on Iraq. If Khadafi a) normalizes relations with Israel; b) personally apologizes for the murders he has backed in the past (the '72 Munich terrorists were financed and given asylum by the Colonel); c) pursues real democratic reforms, and d) informs the Libyan football federation that they no longer have to play his idiot son (see July 26 post), then I'll know something has changed.

One of the stories that obsessed the blogosphere for about five minutes but failed to generate any sort of traction in the real world was Cruz Bustamante's (remember him?) involvement with a group called "MeChA" back in the day. It turned out to be a non-issue because a) Bustamante ran such an inept campaign that he quit being relevant, and Ahnolt Ziffel's supporters probably didn't want to make the election about which candidate had stronger ties to fascist groups; b) the argument was promoted initially by white supremacist websites, who proferred a bogus translation of one of the slogans for the group, and made a number of other statements that simply didn't add up; and c) the people for whom the issue was relevant weren't going to vote for a Latino Democrat anyway. It's one of the problems with opposing affirmative action: if you feel that colleges admit too many black and Latino students in the first place, you probably aren't going to have much credibility telling said students what groups they get to join in college.

Anyways, since there probably will be a "next time" with this issue, Crooked Timber has an interview with a couple of actual, real-life members of MeChA that's worth reading.

Madonna endorses Wesley Clark: Some stories just speak for themselves. Next up, the all-important Gwynnie endorsement....

I have seen the future of rock and roll, and it's name is "The Corvids"...terrific concert at the Brown Derby in Los Feliz Friday night, marred only by an audio system that should be immediately scrapped; the ambience of the L.A. landmark was right out of The Last Waltz. Playing a style of music that combines Merle Haggard with the Velvet Underground, this is a group that really should be heard by a larger audience. Their CD comes out later in the month, a perfect holiday present you might think about giving yourself. Blessedly, you can listen to the music without seeing Howard Owens exhibit his interpretive dancing skills, honed no doubt at thousands of Dead shows.

As the self-proclaimed "Alterman of the Corvids", I ended up being invited to the after-party, where I got to hang out and gather material for the book I'm writing on the band. Beer, wine and scotch were plentiful, Matt Welch jammed until the wee hours with a singer who was a dead-ringer for Ray Davies, circa 1971, and a pretty middle-aged redhead, in the throes of an Ecstasy n' bourbon rampage, pointed at a moth and began screaming, "it's a bat, it's a bat !!", not desisting until we warned her that we would otherwise send a representative of the CTA to drive her home. Or so I was told; I passed out briefly fell into a somnolescent state of unconsciousness around 3 a.m., thereby marring an evening on which I had been on my best behavior, so I can't confirm Tony Pierce's story.

I feel pissy, oh so pissy...The capture of Saddam yesterday seems to have brought out the more Stalinist tendencies in the right half of the blogosphere. OK, let's go over this (see the posts for June 6 and March 19) one more time: Saddam was a bad man, and he deserves the righteous justice of his people, and it was wrong for George Bush, Tony Blair, et al., to lie about why we needed to attack a country that was not a threat to us. The Baathists practiced genocide, there are mass graves everywhere in Iraq were the innocent are buried, and the French, Germans, and Russians were in the right in refusing to back our oil grab in the United Nations. The immediate blip upward in Bush's approval ratings will dissipate the next time an American soldier is murdered, especially since the insurgents are going to include a fair number of Shiites now that Saddam is no longer a threat. I know what I have written above might be considered thought-crimes, but it's all true. So f*** yourself if you don't like my lack of blind enthusiasm for our maximum leader.

The fact that we captured Saddam alive is a testament to the professionalism of our military. While it won't bring hostilities to an end, it has enormous symbolic value; the fact that he can be put on trial will do much to provide a basis for legitimacy to whatever government takes power in Baghdad, much the same way the first Nuremberg trials paved the way for a fresh start to the post-war German Republic.

There's no business, like show business...something to think about the next time you hear of a charity event in Hollywood, from the Los Angeles Times:

Almost any night of the week around Los Angeles, one charity or another holds a glitzy fundraising benefit, backed by a Hollywood star.

But many celebrities appear at these events not solely out of the goodness of their hearts. They come to line their pockets.

Actor David Schwimmer, who has made many millions of dollars starring in NBC's "Friends," received a pair of Rolex watches worth $26,413 in advance of a 1997 charity gala that had among its intended beneficiaries the John Wayne Cancer Institute.

Singer Engelbert Humperdinck, as partial payment for a 1998 benefit appearance at the Friars Club, received two Cartier watches priced at $8,500 each.

Piano legend Ray Charles picked up $75,000 for a four-song appearance at a 2002 SHARE (Share Happily and Reap Endlessly) gala in Santa Monica, which was to benefit developmentally disabled children.

All three events were among more than a dozen organized in recent years by Aaron Tonken, a Los Angeles event promoter, who in November was charged by federal authorities with two counts of fraud related to charitable fundraising. Tonken's lawyer, Alan Rubin, said his client was expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Sources have said Tonken was negotiating a plea agreement.

Meanwhile, federal authorities and their counterparts in state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office are trying to figure out what happened to as much as $7 million in funds that were raised in connection with Tonken-organized events but never made it to designated charities. According to those familiar with the inquiry — and more than 2,000 pages of financial records and other documents obtained by The Times — it appears that little of the money was kept by Tonken himself.

Rather, it was spent on — and sometimes demanded by — those who needed it the least: the rich and famous, and their hangers-on.

(snip)

Another time, Tonken took to the air to make a special "rib run" to Canada for Roseanne Barr. The cost: more than $60,000.

It was May 2002, and the comedienne was hankering for fare from the Tunnel Bar-B-Que in Windsor, Canada. Tonken had just convinced Barr to be the emcee of the upcoming SHARE gala while helping to launch her private foundation. He also was setting up shop in a new role as her manager.

Eager to remain in the prickly star's good graces, Tonken whisked Barr and two of her associates onto a hastily chartered private jet for the 2,000-mile jaunt from Van Nuys to Canada. The flight cost $48,351, records show: $4,750 an hour for the plane, $1,350 for three flight attendants and a $1,009 in-flight catering tab that included $356 in Beluga caviar served with four mother-of-pearl spoons at $28 each. On top of that came limousines, an $11,500 shopping spree at a local mall and, of course, the barbecued ribs.

Barr's attorney declined to comment.

Tonken pled guilty yesterday to wire and mail fraud, and agreed to cooperate with federal investigators searching for where over $7 million dollars earmarked for charities went. David Schwimmer is denying that he ever received two Rolexes (Rolexi?) from Mr. Tonken.

The eloquent words of Nobel laureate Shirid Ebadi, today in Oslo:

In the past two years, some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of 11 September and the war on international terrorism as a pretext. ... Regulations restricting human rights and basic freedoms, special bodies and extraordinary courts which make fair adjudication difficult and at times impossible, have been justified and given legitimacy under the cloak of the war on terrorism.

Your assignment for today: compare and contrast the words of this courageous woman with those who view the "war on terrorism" as a cheap excuse to kill the A-rabs.

The perils of globalization hit home....

In what I assume is a joke, blogger Jeff Jarvis writes:

On the Internet, this Internet, we're not "loosely tethered, careless and free" -- in fact, we're making stronger relationships than many of us have in the world sometimes known as the real one. And we watch what we say because somebody's fact-checking our ass. And we take on the responsibilities that come with all that.

This guy needs to get out more. As a wise man noted last October 28, if someone believes that Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan spend a second perforning due dilligence on any of the garbage they link to, they pretty much deserve the ridicule they get behind their back.

I do get letters...an ornery "drinkin' buddy" of mine, who's somewhere to the right of Dennis Prager, writes:

So I'm sitting at the bar at what used to be known as "The Happiest Little Place On Earth" early yesterday evening when I turn around and spot the venerable Paul Tagliabue standing right behind me. Having grown up in Southern California and having never been bitten by the celebrity bug, I naturally felt no compulsion to acknowledge his prescience. After all this is the man that presides over the great-quarterbackless, "Playmakers"-trashing, McNabb-overrating, can't-untuck-your-jerseying, where-have-you-gone-Roger Staubaching N.F.L. What to do? Should I act like one of those autograph-seeking a******s commonly seen on "Celebrities Uncensored" or ignore the man altogether? I know it's the football press and present members that vote for the Pro Football Hall of Fame but I've got to figure he has some influence as to who gets in and Cliff Harris has been consistently ignored over the years. He must have the power to release full-game broadcasts of old N.F.L. games to the terribly disappointing "ESPN Classic". He can, I'm thinking, loosen the reins on a policy that fines a player if his socks aren't pulled all the way up. He is one of the people who desperately wants an N.F.L. team here in L.A. which would ruin my ability to view double headers on Sundays and perhaps force my beloved U.S.C. Trojans to play a full season at Dodger Stadium. Isn't that where Mike Marshall played and didn't he used to date one of the Go Go's? As I'm sitting at the bar all of this hits me and I realize how much this man has and can affect my sorry little life. So I did what most people would do in my situation. I said "Hey, Paul Tagliabue, how you doing?" shook his hand, turned around and continued to consume my Early Times and Seven-Up. Also, I took a really good dump this morning.

Mr. Cairns, I would expect nothing less from you.

Regarding the BCS mess, there is a story my late father used to tell me about Jesse Unruh, the California State Assembly leader during the Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan administrations, and the person who basically ran the state from 1958 to the day he died, in 1987. Unruh had some of his cronies over for a party to watch the 1964 Notre Dame-USC game. The Fighting Irish were undefeated in Ara Parseghian's first season as coach, ranked first in all the polls, and were generally thought to be the best football team in America, especially with Bart Starr injured in Green Bay. SC had finished tied for the conference title with Oregon State, but were clearly the class of the West Coast, and were expected to be selected for the Rose Bowl (the Trojans and Beavers hadn't played that season). Notre Dame was led by that season's Heisman Trophy winner, John Huarte, while the Trojans were carried by junior sensation Mike Garrett.

Notre Dame gets off to a 17-0 halftime lead at the Colliseum, dominating both sides of the line of scrimmage. If Notre Dame won, they would be crowned national champion, as the Irish did not play bowl games back then. However, in the second half, USC scores 20 unanswered points, the final coming on a touchdown pass from Craig Fertig to Rod Sherman with a 1:33 remaining, to upset the Irish. Along with many of his political associates, including my dad, Unruh had attended USC, and after beating the number one team in the country, he assumed that SC would be awarded the conference berth in the Rose Bowl.

It was not to be. When the announcement came that Oregon State had been selected to face Michigan on January 1, an explosion could be heard at the party, where there had apparently been a lot of drinking. Unruh, at the full height of his power after LBJ's landslide victory in the state, as well as after the humiliating defeat of his arch-enemy Pat Brown's hand-picked Senatorial candidate, Pierre Salinger, proclaimed that he would personally bring down the Pac-8 conference and the NCAA, and SC would secede from the rest of the college football after this outrage. Unfortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and it would be left to another generation to bring down that ridiculously self-important organization.

A federal court has just blocked the attempt by the major film studios to impose a "screener" ban on anti-trust grounds. In this case, the recipients of the DVD's and videotapes would have been film critics, whose votes in year-end awards ceremonies often presage Oscar nominations. The rationale behind the ban was to prevent film piracy, the thinking being that these DVD's go from the recipient to some video chop-shop in Taiwan, and then to the black market, or the internet.

I happen to oppose the ban for purely selfish reasons; my sister is an art director, and as a member of that guild gets screeners of certain films in the hope that when the Art Directors have their annual awards, her vote will cue Oscar voters in the right direction. When Jack Valenti initiated the ban, it impacted not just members of the Academy and film critics, but members of the various guilds as well, the overwhelming majority of which are not members of the Academy. Since she tends to hold the Oscars in contempt, and believes, with good reason, that the quality of movies has irreparably sunk since the 1940's, she has never tried to vote in those elections, and therefore does not view her screeners. However, she knows that I have no such scruples, so for the past few years she has brought down the latest batch of DVD's in time for Christmas. Today's ruling means I will have a more informed vote when I take part in the annual Sherry Bebitch-Jeffe Oscar-night pool.

My own interests aside, I can see why the studios might want to maintain such a ban for reasons having nothing to do with preserving their intellectual property rights. I've written before about how I loathe going to movies; what it comes down to is they are simply not a cost-efficient way for me to be entertained. For me to go to a movie, I either have to be on a date, or the movie itself has to be an event, something which I could not duplicate on my home computer or on TV (there is also a third scenario, but that has to do with having had too much to drink at the 3rd Street Promenade). In most instances, though, I have options that I didn't have twenty years ago, when TV shows like The Shield, The Sopranos, Alias, Prime Suspect et al. weren't routine, when digital or high-definition sets were merely a pipe dream, back before TiVo switched the power-relationship from the network to the viewer.

So for me, the only good reason to go to a movie is for me to see something that I can't get at home. After all, why go out to dinner when the home cooking is delicious. Since the traditional advantages film had over television are almost all gone, from superior acting to more challenging plots, I need the few things movies still have going for them, such as the wider screen, the more spectacular picture, and the communal experience of watching a self-contained work of art with a large group of people, to make me spend $20 on a ticket, parking and popcorn. So I will be in the second row up front when Return of the King is released, but I will wait until The Cooler comes out in DVD before I see that flick. Or at least til my sister gets a screener.

Understandably, an attitude like mine should concern the media conglomerates that run the studios, since I'm clearly not the only person who shares it. If film critics, if the industry pros who belong to the Academy don't feel the urgent need to see every great film when it gets released, or feel that their interest in films is enhanced by watching a screener from the comfort of their own home, how can they draw the masses to see a movie that's going to be available at Blockbuster in four months. More importantly, how do these studios justify the costs of producing a film to their shareholders, when the same benefits could accrue from shooting it for television, without the attendant risks that are involved in producing a film.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon, who is an honest-to-goodness member of the Academy, discusses the ruling on his blog. Do AMPAS members have any say in the BCS standings as well?

Self-proclaimed "Shrink to the Pundits" Charles Krauthammer doesn't like criticism of George Bush, so he attacks Howard Dean as psychotic. Get it--if you believe that people disagree with you because they are unhinged, and not because they simply share different values, or have an honest disagreement, you can treat them as if they were sub-human. Bob Somerby knows his track record, so he puts him in his place, catching the neo-con's version of Walter Duranty in a bit of dowdification to boot.

And, of course, the second oldest belongs to Robert Evans.

I have yet to receive confirmation, but this may well be the first time "St. Augustine" and "Paris Hilton" have ever been referenced in the same sentence.

Curt Schilling goes with the bear, in the eternal shark v. bear fight debate (natch).

Absolutely wicked parody of Mickey Kaus...although we disagree on much, I actually enjoy Kausfiles; it's one of the few places on the internet that I visit at least twice a day (he's not on my blogroll b/c he links to hatesites). I'm sure his schtick as a "liberal-who-bashes-other-liberals" is well-intentioned, but in order for it to be effective as criticism, he actually has to have credibility as a liberal. Every now and then, he has to fight for our side. In other words, there has to be a feeling that if we liberals don't change, we run the risk of alienating potential allies; instead, his rather predictable attacks on targets such as Hillary, John Kerry, Paul Krugman, et al., have less impact than they should, since those are precisely the sort of targets that should piss off someone on the other side. If we've already lost you, there's not much point trying to woo you back. Life's too short to be stalking one's ex'es.

Two different takes on the Skank Queen, from Tacitus and Tony Pierce ...btw, as much as I like his blog, ODub is all wet on this issue. Her sister is the cute one; Paris Hilton is as "gorgeous" as Jacko is handsome, which I believe is part of the joke. Every generation needs its LaToya.

Proof that white affirmative action exists, at the University of Tennessee Law School. Justifying treason because the victim got her picture taken for Vanity Fair is a new low, even for this guy....

I have begun to realize that supporters of the Bush Administration's policy on Iraq are a lot like the people who continue to believe in the innocence of OJ Simpson. They hang on to arguments such as "mass graves", WMD "programs", and "proven links" between Al Qaeda and Saddam the same way OJ-philes will argue that because there were racist cops in the LAPD, their hero was framed. After awhile, I just quit paying attention to them; it didn't seem to serve any purpose re-fighting old battles. [link via Hit&Run]

The attempt to re-redistrict Congressional seats in Colorado just got slapped down by that state's Supreme Court. A similar effort is being challenged in Texas, although the chances of success for the Democrats are less likely in a state where the judiciary is barely removed from that of a Third World country.