Back from his annual August hiatus, a blogger of some renown writes:

Every time I checked out the blogosphere or the cable news or the papers, I felt relieved to be absent with leave. The low point was obviously the Swift Boatvets, jumping like bait on the end of Karl Rove's line. For a president who never served in Vietnam to get his cronies to lambaste an opponent who actually put his life in danger was, well, breathtakingly bold. And you really have to hand it to Bush. He knows how to campaign hard, to deploy smears of opponents indirectly, to stoke fears of minorities to rally votes, and every other hardball tactic. I wish I could get all huffy about this, but it's always been Bush's campaign mojo: divide, smear and beam. Kerry should have seen it coming.

And later...

And then that left-wing maniac, Dick Cheney, refuses to give up his federalist principles, his love of family and freedom, or his basic humanity, by signing on to the president's anti-gay constitutional amendment. Good for the veep, and the entire Cheney family. Too bad his own president has put them in such an awful position. And the GOP platform dispenses with any nuance and comes out not just against marriage rights for gays, but any kind of legal protections for their relationships whatever. That, of course, is what the FMA is designed to do, whatever lies its sponsors tell. No wonder Zell Miller is now the keynoter for the Republicans. Here's a man who once proudly condemned LBJ for backing civil rights for African-Americans, while Bush's Republican grandfather stood up for decency. History has come full circle, hasn't it? The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they're called Repulicans.

Can't improve on that.

The Bronze Age: Having triumphantly snatched third place in the Olympic Basketball Tournament, Team U.S.A. now returns home on the Queen Mary 2, confidently poised to take on the world again two years from now in the World Championships. In the meantime, the reaction stateside has been following the pattern the late Elizabeth Kubler-Ross elucidated in On Death and Dying. Having already gone through denial and anger, sportswriters and fans alike have begun to enter the bargaining stage. Once we get past the notion that the gold medal is somehow our birthright, which we were prevented from winning by some amorphous hindrance (the selection process, the lack of a consistent perimeter game, poor officiating, etc.), we will have to face the depressing reality that the U.S. is no longer the best at the popular sport it invented, and which still plays such a huge role in our culture.

This will not be unprecedented. In the early-50's, England, which had refused to play in the first three World Cups because it thought the competition was beneath it, suffered a series of defeats in international play (in particular, a 1-0 loss to a semi-pro team from the U.S. in the 1950 World Cup, and a pair of routs against Hungary in 1953), and only a win in the 1966 World Cup, played at home, provides any evidence that it was ever a world power in its national sport. In the 1970's, Canada suffered a similar blow when it agreed to face the "amateurs" from the Soviet Union in ice hockey. Although it had greater initial success, winning the Summit Series in 1972 and the Canada Cup in 1976, those victories were much narrower than expected, and it was apparent even before the Soviets whipped an NHL All-Star team, 6-0, in 1979 that the center of gravity in the sport had shifted overseas.

In both of these cases, there were excuses made about top athletes not playing. England's top player in 1950, Stanley Matthews, didn't play against the Americans, and the team as a whole blamed the humidity in Brazil for their early exit from that tournament. Canadiens could explain away the close call in 1972 by noting that Bobby Orr was injured and could not play, and that Bobby Hull was excluded for having signed with a rival league. Of course, injuries are always a part of sports, and their rivals also had key players out. As with the Athens Olympians, the reason why those national programs fell wasn't due to bad luck or poor player selection; it was the fact that the rest of the world had caught up, and that other countries were playing a more innovative, more exciting team-oriented game. If the U.S. is going to return to the top again in men's basketball, it had better re-think the way the sport is played in this country at all levels, or we will be doomed to hoping for a bronze medal.

Phoenix Rises: It was delayed three weeks by the local affiliate's decision to air tributes to Broadway and the McGuire Sisters during its "Pledge Month", but PBS viewers in the greater Southern California Area were finally treated last night to the last episode of Season 2 of the British mystery, "Foyle's War", guest-starring the ne plus ultra of British character actresses, Phoebe Nicholls. Her small cult of rabidly obsessive fans were treated to a vintage performance, the trademark sneer and condescending tone being used to fine effect in playing the role of a wartime version of Jayson Blair, who pens "autobiographical" accounts of heroic feats in bombed-out London from the comfort of a country estate. When confronted by a police detective suspicious of her brazen mendacity, her deadpan response ("I think you're missing the point") was so perfectly delivered that you couldn't help but laugh. It's like watching Magic Johnson run the fast break, or Bill Clinton answering a question at a press conference: the pleasure of witnessing someone who is not only good at what they do, but who seems to be enjoying it as well.

Should Paul Hamm give back his gold medal, as the IOC and the governing body for his sport seem to want? That's a no-brainer: of course he should. The officials miscalculated the score of one of his opponents, costing that competitor a winning score in the all-around gymnastics title. This situation is similar to a football game where a "fifth down" is awarded, or a basketball game where a team is awarded free throws in spite of not being in the penalty. Giving the gold medal to the "rightful" winner is the sportsmanlike thing to do.

But before we set this precedent, there are some other cases we should look at. First, it would also be good sportsmanship for the '72 Soviet basketball team to give its gold medal back to the U.S. I would like to the see the IOC award a gold medal from that Olympics to Bob Seagren, who got screwed out of a win in the pole vault that Olympics because he was prevented from using a legal pole, on the shaky ground that it wasn't available to his Warsaw Pact rivals. Maybe we should make some provision for Rick Demont, an American swimmer who was stripped of his gold medal that year because the medication he used to prevent asthma attacks from killing him wasn't cleared in time.

Then, after we're done with the '72 team, maybe it would be a good idea to give some gold medal props to our women's swim team from 1976, a team that played by the rules, racking up silver and bronze medals, only to find out later that they were being bested by an East German program that used its swimmers as guinea pigs, in medical experiments seemingly created from the mind of Josef Mengele. Shirley Babashoff was probably the best swimmer of her generation, and it would be only fitting for her to be recognized as such by the IOC. And our Olympic boxers over the years have borne bad decisions with the patience of Job; certainly honoring Evander Holyfield and Roy Jones Jr. with Olympic gold at this stage would correct the historic record.

And once we've corrected those historical inequities, then we can talk to Paul Hamm about being a good sport.

As I mentioned below, the co-author of the book attacking John Kerry's war record, John O'Neill, is an attorney, who practices law out of Houston, Texas. It now seems that he may have gotten himself into a little bit of trouble with his storytelling, particularly in his efforts to discredit John Kerry's claim that as a Swift Boat captain, he could have ever received an assignment in Cambodia. By denying that he (O'Neill) had ever been inside Cambodia, a tale which subsequently became "no longer operative" after the release of one of the Nixon Tapes showed he had admitted in the Oval Office to doing just that, he may have run afoul of Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, Section 8.02(a), which states as follows:

A lawyer shall not make a statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge, adjudicatory official or public legal officer, or of a candidate for election or appointment to judicial or legal office.

Among the disciplinary measures that the State Bar in Texas can take against an attorney who violates Section 8.02(a) includes suspension and disbarment.

United States [B] 102, Spain 94: If you had told me before the Olympics that our motley collection of semi-pro and professional basketball players would have a chance to play for a medal on Friday, I would have thought you were nuts, but then again, that's why they play the games. Speaking of nuts, here's an interesting take from sportswriter Jason Whitlock, who accuses everyone who's rooting against Team U.S.A. of being racist. In my radical youth at Berkeley, I used to be convinced that everyone rooting against the Dodgers and (especially) the Lakers was racist, but eventually I was able to extract my head out of my rectum long enough to get past that.

The Butterfield Legacy: Jeez, did any "Swift Boat Vets" not see action in Cambodia? (about a third of the way down the page) [link via Eschaton]

UPDATE: O'Neill (who, natch, is an attorney) attempts to explain away his earlier lie, but gets nailed by, of all people, Alan Colmes. O, what a tangled web we weave....

Ken Layne Was Right: One of the great advantages of living three thousand miles from the Center of the Universe is that I don't get overly-influenced by the vagaries and trends of Beltway opinion-mongering. The fact that the people in my immediate circle are not obsessed with politics, and do not see every breaking story on Fox News or CNN as earthshattering, allows me to view the goings-on in politics with a greater sense of detachment. Thus, when the "Swift Boat" ads began airing in a handful of states, and the "digital Brownshirts" began parsing every detail of Kerry's stay in Southeast Asia for errors, I was able to step back, and take what seemed to be a contrarian view about this issue: the longer the focus was on Kerry's war record, the more it helped in the long run. After all, the average voter would hear the claims and counterclaims of the various participants, shrug, and say, "well, at least Kerry was in 'Nam back in the day."

Apparently, it doesn't appear to have been a particularly brutal three weeks for the Democratic nominee since those ads began airing. According to the latest Zogby polling figures in the battleground states, Kerry has gone from being ahead in 13 of the 16 states polled, to...being ahead in 14 of the 16 states, his best showing to date. If the junior Senator from Massachusetts has been hurt by the mostly-discredited attacks, it hasn't shown up yet in the polls, even anecdotally; Kerry continues to poll within the margin of error in several states not included by Zogby as "battlegrounds", such as Arizona, Virginia, and Colorado. And the fact that the whole world is starting to laugh at the Swifties (here and here) can't be making things any easier for Karl Rove.

Requiem for a Diva: Slate admirably defends the self-proclaimed "Queen of Gymastics", Russian silver-medalist Svetlana Khorkina.

Well, it now turns out that it wasn't really about the medals after all. As report after report after report after report, ad infinitum, have discredited the recovered memories of the "Swift Boat Veterans", the bloggers who had previously put their reputations on the line in backing their accounts are now starting to acknowledge that the truthfulness of the Vets wasn't the issue, nor whether the Bushies were giving them covert backing; it was whether Kerry was inside the Cambodian border on Christmas Eve, 1968. Not whether he was ever inside Cambodia, or whether he was inside Cambodia a few weeks later during the Tet Festival, but whether his memory of an event that was then 15 years in the distance (now 35 years) was completely accurate. Oh, and also that Kerry has been forced to address the issue. It's nice of them to narrow the critical issues down for the rest of us.

If the exposure of Trent Lott symbolizes the best of what blogging is capable of doing in shaping the national agenda, this story represents its nadir, an example of how the tactics of Joseph McCarthy and Josef Goebbels can be used to hype a partisan agenda, combining rumors, innuendo and out-and-out falsehoods in an effort to discredit a public figure. Only in the blogosphere, it seems, can a trivial mistake in the memory of a person can lead to one being called a term that in any other circumstance would be the most morally devastating thing you can say about someone: liar.

Unlike Atrios, I have been reticent about calling the "Swift Boat Vets" liars. Recalling events that took place thirty-five years ago can be difficult for anyone to remember, and any memory has to be considered in the context of its possessor's biography. In the case of the SBVs, who almost to a man violently disapproved of John Kerry's anti-war activities after he came home from Southeast Asia, to have seen him boast of his battlefield courage last month in Boston must have been particularly grating. Combine that with the fact that Kerry sometimes rubs people the wrong way in personal situations, and you have a recipe for anecdotes based more on wish than fact. It would not surprise me if each of the SBVs honestly believes that his account is truthful, but that is not the same thing as saying something is true, just as a false memory is not the same thing as a lie, no matter how seared it seems. So even though I don't believe them, I'm willing to give men who honorably served their country a break when it comes to that label.

For practicing lawyers, the tricks memories play on witnesses, especially after the passage of time, is a matter that comes up repeatedly in court. Around the time I first took the bar, a septuagenarian from Cleveland named John Demjanjuk was being tried for war crimes in Israel. Witness after witness took the stand, testifying to very vivid and horrifying memories that Demjanjuk in fact was the infamous, "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly sadistic prison guard at Treblinka. The problem, of course, was that Demjanjuk wasn't at that camp, although he was a guard elsewhere. He was a war criminal, just not the one that the witnesses had remembered. But if you believe Prof. Reynolds or Roger Simon, each of those Holocaust survivors who testified under oath that he was Ivan the Terrible was lying, and should have been prosecuted for perjury. Contemporaneous accounts and documentation are almost always more reliable, and tell a more accurate story, than the memories of witnesses years after the fact.

Thus, the fact that so many of the bloggers who hyped these accounts are attorneys, quite frankly, is an embarrassment to my profession. As officers of the court, we are charged with ensuring that the truth will out, within the context of an adversarial system. We don't swear an oath to tell the truth when we appear before the bench, since it is assumed that everything we say must be true. A lawyer who presents false evidence, or makes a reckless allegation in presenting his case, not only dimishes the regard that the society as a whole views our profession, he also runs the risk of being sanctioned or disbarred.

That is, I believe, the real reason the public acted with such outrage at Johnny Cochran and F.Lee Bailey after the OJ trial, and why people have been so utterly disdainful of the Kobe Bryant prosecution. It should be our job to present a case without passion or prejudice, not to unfairly malign or persecute to obtain an advantage in court, or to exaggerated the shortcomings of our rivals.

And those ethical considerations are not simply limited to what we say in court. A lawyer who slimes his adversaries, deceives his opponents, and misstates the truth in the course of representing a client deserves nothing but opprobrium from the public. When Clinton was impeached for lying about his affair with Ms. Lewinsky, I fought that tooth and nail; a President who can be removed from office for the most trivial mistake in his private life does violence to democracy. When he was disbarred after his Presidency, I sadly approved, even though the conduct itself did not arise from his representation of a client. My profession should no more tolerate those who lie to the public than the priesthood should tolerate pederasts.

And in my opinion, the lawyers who have blogged this story, and who have made the most extreme charges against Kerry, are, ethically speaking, somewhere beneath your run-of-the-mill ambulance chaser.

To state this position as categorically as possible, Amanda Beard is the most beautiful woman to win an individual gold medal in the Summer Olympics. Ever.

We will know on Election Day whether Kerry's "rope-a-dope" strategy of allowing the allegations of the "Swift Boat Vets" to simmer on right wing talk radio, blogs, and the Moonie/Murdoch Axis before answering the charges, as he did yesterday, was successful. My hunch was that he only responded after seeing evidence in the polls that the rumors were starting to hurt him with swing voters, and a forceful denunciation of the charges was going to be necessary, or else he would be perceived as being weak. What we can say is that none of their allegations concerning his battle wounds or acts of heroism has stood careful scrutiny, and that the position of the Bush campaign in not taking a stand on these ads is becoming increasingly untenable.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the Olympics, the Iraqi Olympic soccer team, has attacked the unauthorized use of their team in Bush campaign ads. Team captain Salih Sadir, who scored in yesterday's 2-1 loss to Morocco, told SI.com that "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign...[H]e can find another way to advertise himself." Another player, star midfielder Ahmed Manajid, was even more blunt, admitting that if he weren't playing in the Olympics, he would probably be taking up arms as an insurgent in his hometown of Fallujah.

United States [B] 77, Greece 71: After losing one key player to fouls, and having another hampered by a broken thumb, it was up to obscure journeymen Lamar Odom and Stephon Marbury to come up big with the clutch plays for the mainland squad in turning back a late rally by the host country. The win was doubly sweet for the unheralded Marbury, who plays domestically in the minor league "Eastern Conference" for New York. For American fans, though, it was a bittersweet day, as the "A" team from the commonwealth lost a close one to Lithuania earlier, 79-70.

Does anyone remember when the Olympics used to take place in front of something that resembled an actual crowd? Athens is starting to bring back memories of when I was in law school, when I used to study Contracts and Property at a location even more quiet than the Law Library at USC: the cavernous upper deck of the LA Sports Arena during an SC basketball game. Unlike, say, the venue where men's gymnastics is being held, the Trojans at least drew a couple thousand for their games.

In two weeks, what will probably be the last chance for George Bush to change the dynamic of the Presidential election will occur in New York City, the site of the Republican Convention. Since John Kerry clinched his party's nomination in March, there has been a steady, relentless trend in the national polls giving him between a two and seven point lead, a trend that hardened after his convention last month. Kerry not only leads Bush in every state captured by Al Gore in 2000, he continues to lead in almost every "purple" state that Bush narrowly carried last time, such as Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, Arkansas and Missouri. In fact, Kerry is practically tied with the President in a number of states that cannot reasonably be considered part of the Democratic base, including North Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado, Arizona and Virginia; unless the situation on the ground changes, Kerry may well capture over 400 electoral votes, something that has been accomplished by a Democrat only once in the last 60 years, as well as sweeping the Democrats into power in both houses of Congress.

Of course, the first Tuesday in November is an eternity away, and the polls can shift dramatically from now until the polls open, so Kerry supporters should feel far from complacent. Because of his unpopularity, Bush as an excellent chance to get what eluded Kerry, a significant post-convention bounce, and at least temporarily alter the dynamics of the race. Whether that bounce has any durability, though, may have been hurt by the President's sluggish performance on the campaign trail since Kerry was nominated. Instead of providing the electorate with a compelling reason to stay the course, Bush's campaign has been diverted rather foolishly by ephemera such as the attacks on Kerry's Vietnam service, and the pointless negativity of last week's speech by Dick Cheney on the subject of "sensitivity" in foreign policy, a charge that ended up becoming a public relations disaster when it turned out the President had used the exact same word. At a time when he should be building up his positives leading into a make-or-break convention, and holding off the attacks until September, Bush is only reaffirming why much of Christendom views him as being one of the biggest a-holes on the planet.

A case in point is the latest blogospheric obsession, the allegations raised by some of Bush's supporters that Kerry's war record was not all that it seemed. While this issue may resonate with the armchair warriors, envious of Kerry's willingness to sacrifice for his country even when he didn't approve of the policy, it simply isn't an important issue for people concerned about whether they will have a job next year, or if their sons and daughters are going to be sent to die on some ideologue's crusade. And even if every charge made by the "Swift Boat" vets was plausible (and as shown here and here, there is a good reason why the recovered memory of "witnesses" some 35 years after the fact tends to be less reliable than contemporareneous accounts of the same incidents), one is still left with the reality that John Kerry went to Vietnam, while most of his counterparts didn't. Focusing on Kerry's service, even in the most negative manner possible, still leads to a comparison with Bush's history during that period, and that is comparison that cannot help but benefit the Senator from Massachusetts; hence, the polls taken over the last two weeks have seen a strengthening of Kerry's lead, rather than any perceptible movement towards the President.

Even more pathetic has been the intense focus over whether Kerry ever set foot in Cambodia back in the day. For those of you who don't spend every waking moment on the internet, the controversy stems from a number of references Kerry made over the years to having assisted the CIA in drop-offs on the Mekong River. At one point 20 years ago, Kerry had claimed that he had done so on Christmas Eve, 1968, when apparently he was off by a month. When compared with some of the "misstatements" made by Presidents over the years, from Reagan claiming on several occasions to having helped liberate concentration camps when he was "in uniform" during WW2, to Clinton's initial denial that he had a sexual relationship with an intern, to some of Bush's more ignoble efforts (from "hitting the trifecta" to his recent boast that like Senator McCain, he had once been a bomber pilot), the allegations against Kerry are pretty trivial, even if it had been proven that he was never in Cambodia, and had always known he had never been there. The exaggerated boasts of a soldier, like a politician's use of hyperbole to make a point, are pretty much discounted by the public anyway, and not surprisingly, the issue seems destined to remain with the purview of the tinfoil hat brigade.

So the Republicans, frustrated that there issue hasn't developed any traction in the media outside of the broadsheets owned by Rupert Murdoch and Rev. Moon, counter that this is yet another example of that diabolical conspiracy known as the lib'rul media, which supposedly wants Kerry to win. Instapundit, among others, has compared the coverage of Kerry's adventures in Vietnam with the media's interest in Bush's shirking of duty in the Texas A.N.G., ignoring the fact that four years ago, the media showed almost no interest in that subject, and didn't this year until the head of the DNC made it an issue.

Back in 2000, it was Gore who was being hounded mercilessly, for claims that he never made (such as inventing the Internet), and for places he never lived at (such as a luxury hotel in D.C.). Quite often, those attacks came straight out of GOP press releases, and the "journalists" who covered the campaign for the major newspapers and networks pretty much published them verbatim. Since the only Republicans to comment on the Swiftboat Vets' allegations (Senators McCain, Warner and Hegel) have repudiated them, it is perhaps not surprising there has been a lack of interest in such warmed-over smears by reporters, many of whom seemed to have been shamed by how they covered the campaign four years ago.

Or maybe it's just that we're living in the post-9/11 world, and we all just want to take this election a little more seriously this time. The last-second articles in the LA Times last October on the Gropinator, which were far better documented, actually seemed to help Arnold with swing-voters, and these attacks have certainly not helped the Republicans take down Kerry. As I said, there is still some time to go before the election, and Kerry's campaign will have to pick up its game when it comes to responding to Republican attacks, but for the time being, it's looking good....

U.S.A [PR] 93, U.S.A. 74: The Americans sprinted out to a 22-point halftime lead, then held on when the NBA'ers made a furious second-half comeback to win their first game in the Olympics. Carlos Arroyo led the way with 24 points, whose team received the following praise from the defeated point guard, Allan Iverson: "They play the game the way it's supposed to be played...It's not about athletics. That's the game the way Karl Malone and John Stockton play it. It's good for kids to see how the game is supposed to be played." We will have to step up our game significantly by Tuesday, though, when we play Lithuania, while the mainlanders have to hope they don't get bullied off the court when they play the host team from Greece.

Another Bush Flip-flop: It appears we're not "turning the corner" after all.

The Politics of Hate: Well, this is a shock: the man behind the "Swift Boat" allegations has turned out to be a bigot who has spent a little too much time posting his anti-papist and anti-Muslim views on a white supremacist hate site. Jerry Corsi, co-author of the latest chickenblogger manifesto, Unfit for Command, was quoted making the following witicisms last year on freerepublic.com:

"'Islam is a peaceful religion -- just as long as the women are beaten, the boys buggered and the infidels are killed.' In another entry, he says: 'So this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the lawyers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that's probably about it.'...(I)n a March posting, Corsi discussed Kerry's faith, writing: 'After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judaism? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?'" (above quotes courtesy of the Associated Press)

Wink, wink.

The Bush campaign, which no doubt hoped that it could skate into the convention without having its own side constantly remind the public that John Kerry served in Vietnam, and certainly not wishing to be implicitly attacking the credibility of the decorations other veterans have earned over the years, reacted angrily to the absurd notion that they had anything to do with the controversial ads or their politically extreme auteur (btw, who knew that anyone in this country still used the word "buggered"?). Masochistically, the wingnuts have begun to obsess over whether Kerry actually entered Cambodia (as he has said several times, including a coy allusion written in his battlefield journal in 1968 [see bottom paragraph]) during his tour of duty, or was merely on the border; either way, it's a distinction that cannot fail to make Kerry's battlefield exploits seem more intriguing to swing voters. It seems Kerry has the same good political fortune in the enemies he has drawn that Clinton had back in '92. [links via Atrios (who has more on the partisan insights of Mr. Corsi) and Kevin Drum]

In what has to be considered a death knell for the prosecution, the accuser of Kobe Bryant has filed a civil action seeking mucho dinero. Since an obvious defense is always going to be that the alleged victim is trying to scam money from the NBA star, the filing of the civil action before trial all but concedes that point. In addition, the civil complaint publicly regurgitates, in graphic detail, the act in question, openly defying the gag order issued by the court. We can assume the prosecution will drop this in a matter of days.

As far as the civil case against Bryant, I have felt all along that this would be the more preferable arena for both sides. Because the sole issue of consequence from now on will be money, the Laker star can either settle or not settle, depending on how much he can afford to spend, without any further erosion of his public image or having to register as a sex offender (not to mention the threat of prison). His attorneys can also delve more freely into the plaintiff's past than they could in a criminal case (as, of course, can her attorney). On the other hand, the plaintiff can build a case against Bryant based on simple assault, without any of the baggage that a rape charge entails before a jury; the fact that she had sex with another man hours later, while material in defense of a charge that her injuries were caused by Bryant, is now less important, merely a factor that may or may not be weighed by a jury if it awards damages. And, of course, the burden of proof is a lot easier to sustain in civil court.

U.S. 76, Serbia-Montenegro 60: Do you believe in miracles !?! For the second straight game, our motley collection of the well-fed and the underachieving overcame a hostile crowd, and stunned defending World Champion (and 4 1/2 point favorite) S&M on its home court. Tim Duncan's 16 points led the way for the scrappy Americans. Team U.S.A. jumped out to a quick lead against the over-confident Serbs, who apparently thought all they had to do to overawe the competition was have Bodiroga and Radocevic show up. Fat chance. Bring on Turkey !!

Now that's what I call a "baby bounce": 32k new jobs !! I think the conventional wisdom has been that Bush will go into the election with a growing economy, albeit one with tepid growth. The employment figures over the last three months indicate that another recession/jobless "recovery" is on the horizon (if we're not already there), so that assumption will have to be revised. Expect to see more bogus ads of the "Swiftboat" variety from the Bush camp if the economy continues its Triple Salchow into the toilet.

Why Dennis Prager should not be allowed near children....

It was one year ago tonight that my sister added a new generation to my family. Happy Birthday, Charlie !!

I'm with the President on this issue....

U.S. 80, Germany 77: One day after getting blown-out by Italy, the lightly-regarded Americans came back to upset another former member of the Axis Powers on a last-second half-court shot by Allen Iverson. Relying on such elaborate trickery as "passing to the open player", shooting "high-percentage shots", and "moving without the ball", the over-confident Germans, who almost qualified for the Olympics, were unable to put the U.S. away, and finally succumbed to the scrappy Dream Teamers. Making the victory even sweeter is the fact that all but one of the players on Team U.S.A. play in our own domestic professional league, the "N.B.A.", which may finally earn the credibility it deserves to put it on a par with established leagues in Europe, Asia and South America. Iverson, in particular, was impressive behind the three-point arc, leading some to favorably compare him to Italian star Gianluca Basile.

Italy 95, U.S. 78: You had to figure that Giacomo Galanda would give Tim Duncan a hard time today. Olympic basketball is really the only time an American can feel comfortable rooting against the U.S.

Excellent (as always) Krugman column, on TV coverage of last week's convention, and how the success of Fox News has come to color the political coverage of other networks, including CNN. Kerry's so-called "Baby Bounce" fits in with this type of "journalism"; take an outlying poll (Gallup) that shows Kerry losing ground, ignore the half-dozen other surveys that show the reverse (including, more importantly, the state-by-state polls that show Kerry pulling out to a sizeable Electoral College lead), remove the election from its context as a sharply divided battle between two implacable adversaries (did anyone seriously believe Kerry was going to leave the convention with a twenty-point lead?), and you have what Eric Alterman has called a successful case of "working the ref" by the GOP. Media whores, indeed....

You ever read an obituary in which the most surprising aspect of the story was that the deceased had still been alive just a few days ago. Well, who knew that it took until last week for the last Tammany Hall puppetmaster, Carmine de Sapio, to join the Church Triumphant.

Anyone with questions why Paul DePodesta traded away his all-star catcher, top set-up man and starting right fielder for Brad Penny, Hee Seop Choi and a top minor league prospect in the middle of a pennant race would be well-advised to note the ages of the players traded and the players acquired, and, especially, the discrepancy in the on-base percentage between Choi and both Paul Lo Duca and Juan Encarnacion. Lo Duca was a fan and media favorite, whose solid defensive play and hustle had allowed DodgerNation to get over the loss of his more illustrious predecessor, but his play in the second half the last few seasons had left a lot to be desired, and his defensive numbers were declining precipitously.

Night of the Living Kerry:  That was a nice piece of oratory tonight.  Of course, the Big Guy had me at "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty."  This was a good round, maybe a critical round in the fight; let's see how strong a finisher he is.  Choosing to frame his speech around issues that Bush has been perceived to be strong, national security and social values, is a cagy maneuver, and his use of the time-honored GOP line about how the Federal Government should exercise the same discretion towards its budget as the average American family must have been a punch to the kidneys of Karl Rove.

I had heard awhile back that the Bushies were going to upstage Night of the Living Kerry by announcing the capture of Bin Laden (as it turns out, the Pakistanis did capture someone today), but this stunt reeks of desperation.

I have watched about an hour of live coverage from the Convention so far, mainly the speeches of Bill Clinton (one of the best he's given) and Barack Obama (terrific content, but I have a feeling that the buzz was over how well it went over to a live audience; on TV, his flat delivery made him seem more like a good motivational speaker than the second coming of WJB).  What can I say, it's been a slow news week...actual substantive contributions from the blogosphere can be found at WaMo and Reason, which have avoided the sort of treacly cheerleading and navelgazing that typify most of the other credentialed bloggers at the Fleet Center. 

Who said no news would happen at the Democratic Convention.  It turns out "Atrios" is a 32-year old econ prof at Bryn Mawr named Duncan Black.  TalkLeft has the candid photo...and he's definitely not Sidney Blumenthal.

Like most Angelenos, I tend to believe that the baseball season doesn't start until sometime after the Lakers' playoff run has ended, so it took me until the end of July to see my first game of the year at Chavez Ravine. Largest crowd ever for a regular season game at Dodger Stadium last night, and perhaps the loudest, most rambunctious group of fans I can remember since the early-80's, we saw the home team defeat the Padres, 3-2, on a walk-off home run in the ninth by Adrian Beltre. Most impressive was the fact that hardly any of the fans left early; being able to time our exits for the most apt point before the final out has always been a matter of pride for the locals, a symbolic act that placed the fan in control of his fate, not the team, but the fact that the Dodgers have perhaps the most dominating closer in the history of the game has reversed the equation. The whole point of going the last few seasons has been for the anticipation of seeing Mr. Game Over himself, Eric Gagne, so the natural order of things has been thrown askew; now, we have to stay til the ninth inning.

Another factor in the behaviour of the fans might well be the fact that we have access to two forms of rapid transit (the Red Line and the Gold Line) that have stops near the stadium. Both lines offer shuttles on Friday night that take you right to the Stadium, so the convenience of not having to fight the traffic (or pay for parking) now exists if you live in Pasadena, Hollywood, or the East Valley. Tickets have always been ridiculously cheap for games, so the fans tend to be less upscale than Lakers, and the crowd in the upper levels of the stadium (where I sat) is demographically similar to what you might get at a Magic Johnson theatre on a Saturday night. The ever-present transistor radio is now more likely to blare Jaime Jarrin than Vin Scully, an unqualified cultural blessing for those of us who eagerly yearn for the day when the Anglo minority can finally assimilate into the melting pot that is Southern California.

The decision tonight to permit the defense to introduce evidence that the accuser of Kobe Bryant had engaged in sexual activities with other men in the seventy-two hours prior to her medical exam, including a partner in the brief period after her encounter with the Laker franchise player, should bring this matter to a head in the next few days.  The judge's decision is the correct one, and further attempts by the prosecution to beat this dead horse have more in common with pre-1965 attitudes concerning miscegenation than any desire to seek justice.   

The controversy over Sandy Berger took another turn this morning after White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admitted that the White House counsel's office was informed of the pending criminal investigation into Berger just before it was leaked to the press on Monday.  With the investigation pretty much dead in the water (the FBI hasn't even bothered to interview the "target", and reportedly has no plans to do so), this should probably go from being a comedy of errors starring an absent-minded bureaucrat, to yet another example of the Bush White House leaking confidential and/or classified information to the media for base political ends.

The Arabian Candidate:  Another excellent Krugman column, on how Al Qaeda was able to get the Supreme Court to select their sleeper candidate for President four years ago.  And yes, if he hadn't been dead two years, I could see James Gregory playing W in the movie.

Any doubt that Kerry didn't receive a boost from the nomination of John Edwards should be cast aside by the results of this poll, which shows him now leading the President in...Arizona (!) What's next, a poll that shows him within single digits in Texas? [link via Daily Kos]

My annual three-week bout of semi-casual interest in cycling being nearly at an end, can someone tell me why the hell Jan Ullrich is considered to be a "rival" to Lance Armstrong. The two of them aren't the Ali-Frazier of cycling; more like the Ali-Quarry (or even Frazier-Ellis) of their sport. Oy, I gotta wait eight f****** weeks til football starts....

Simonizing Berger:  I'm not a mystery writer, but my instincts as an occasional reader of John Grisham novels (not to mention the pamphlets of Lyndon LaRouche) tell me that there may be several explanations for Sandy Berger's "absconding" copies of classified documents from the National Archives:

1. The documents in question detail the nefarious role that he and other Arabists within the State Department played in the Oil for Food Scandal;
2. He was attempting to cover up John Kerry's actions in fomenting anti-Semitic attacks in Paris;
3. His notes proved conclusively that a collaborative relationship existed before 9/11 between the four most evil men on the planet: Bill Clinton, Yassir Arafat, Osama bin Laden, and of course, Joseph Wilson;
4. It's the Mullahs, Stupid; and/or
5. He's  objectively pro-fascist, desperately trying to hide the green light he gave Saddam for the Mass Graves.

Or, as Uncle Ho used to say back when I was a radical at Berkeley, L'enfer, c'est les autres.

In what might well be an historic first, a sitting governor has used the phrase, "girly men" to attack his political opponents.  I guess that's what happens when you elect a man to that position who's more juiced than Barry Bonds.  At some point, Ahnolt Ziffel's shtick starts to wear thin; behind his Teutonic accent and mannerisms, he's little more than a Chamber-of-Commerce sockpuppet.  It's no wonder that State Senate leader John Burton called his bluff on this one.  With George Bush running at the top of the ticket this November, the Governor has very little influence to pressure recalcitrant members of the Democratic Caucus.
 
The source of the Governor's irritation is the unwillingness of the Democrats in the State Legislature to repeal a bill passed late in Gray Davis' tenure, which gave workers the right to sue their employers for workplace violations.  This is perhaps the biggest issue being pressed by the business lobby at the moment, and as one might expect, exaggerated claims about its impact abound on the Right (before it passed last year, the public was warned that it would allow workers to sue if the font size of an office posting was the wrong size, a myth that I took great pains to discredit).  It has held up passage of the budget two weeks past the legal deadline, and has provided yet another reminder to voters that the biggest problem in Sacramento isn't the term-limited, interchangeable hacks who hold office, but the system that makes responsible budgeting impossible.   Schwarzenegger has yet to show he's even remotely interested in doing anything other than playing the symbolic role of "Governor", so any chance of real reform will have to be put off til 2006, when presumably he goes back to groping extras on the Terminator 4 set.

Joseph Wilson Is Evil !! The silliest, most overblown attack on any blog this year (so far).

Farewell, Big Diesel.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Kausfiles questions the reasoning of those who have evidenced paranoia about the "K Street Project", the effort by the Republican leadership in Congress to coerce lobbyists and law firms to hire exclusively from their partisan ranks. No doubt, to be a Democratic staffer on the Hill, hoping for a plum job representing the haves after the obligatory tenure of public service, the last ten years must have been a very traumatic time. Hopefully, it will be a radicalizing experience.

Although I'm bothered by the thuggish, jackbootish tactics of Grover Norquist, et al., this hasn't been an issue at the top of my agenda, for the simple reason that it just signifies how I would expect fascists to act when they take power. Listen people, Tom DeLay is the House Majority Leader, the Vice President is incapable of having a civil conversation on the floor of the Senate, and the President is arguably the most unlikable jerk ever to hold high office. They are now hinting, appropos of nothing, that the November election might have to be suspended in the event of a terrorist "attack". They just took us to war under false pretenses, at a sacrifice of a thousand men and women, and their domestic platform is nothing more than millionaire tax cuts, queer bashing, and arsenic dumping. How else would you expect these people to act?

Of course, another reason I could care less about this issue is that K Street represents the largest impediment to a progressive agenda being enacted in this country. Such policies can only be pursued if the corporate lobby is brought to its knees first, something that won't happen if former liberal staffers are working on K Street in significant numbers. What Norquist and Santorum have inadvertantly done is begin the destruction of that bipartisan coalition in Washington, the result of which shall push the center of gravity further to the left than they could have ever envisioned.

Enablers and co-dependents....

If you're going to argue that the selection of John Edwards has failed to produce a bounce, it would be helpful to provide some actual numbers from the past as a point of comparison. Since no one else has....

Until 1976, Vice Presidents were usually picked by the nominee during the week of the convention, often after the candidate had been formally nominated. Since the nomination was typically not decided until the delegates had their say, it made sense not to jump the gun. In '76, however, Ronald Reagan, trailing Gerald Ford in the delegate race, threw a Hail Mary, nominating Senator Richard Schweiker to be his running mate several weeks beforehand, then attempted to use the convention floor to force Ford to do the same. He failed, in a precursor of the nomination battle that was to follow, but the practice of picking a Veep well before the convention soon caught on.

The next time it happened was in 1984, when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate a month before the convention. Selecting a woman was an unprecedented move, and such farsightedness in recognizing the existence of the "gender gap" has been fruitful for Democrats since then, but the selection caused barely a ripple in the polls. At the ensuing convention, Mondale did receive a nice bounce, but he lost anyway.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis waited until early-July to pick Lloyd Bentsen. That pick also produced a small bounce in the pre-convention polls, albeit a bounce in favor of George Bush (Dukakis picked up a much larger boost at the convention itself in late-July). When it came time for Bush to pick a nominee, his choice of Dan Quayle came in the middle of the Convention. It is safe to say that the selection of Quayle was one of the most disastrous political moves of the 20th Century, and in reaction, the American People ended up giving 41 one of the largest post-convention bounces in history.

After that, the Vice Presidential nominee was always picked well before the formal nomination process was completed, so pollsters can detect a bounce from the Veep selection as distinct from any bounce accruing from the convention itself. In each instance, the nomination of the Vice President had an almost neglible impact on the polls, while the convention itself produced a significant impact. Clinton opting for Al Gore in 1992 hardly nudged the polls at all; Gore's history-making selection of Joe Lieberman had even less of an impact. And if Dole and Bush (43) were aided by the nomination of party warhorses for the number two slot, it wasn't immediately apparent in the overnight polls.

This time, the consensus is that Kerry has picked up 2-3 points or so in the polls since he chose John Edwards (that is to say, he's gone from being tied to being about 5 points up). The White House spin machine has been quite aggressive in painting this as insignificant, and continue to act as if polls which include Ralph Nader as a "candidate" have any intellectual honesty whatsoever. In fact, a pre-convention bounce of five points, in a race in which Kerry had either trailed or been tied, is massively significant, and the state-by-state trends right now are quite favorable to the Democratic nominee. He continues to out-perform Gore in the so-called "Purple States" (states won by either Gore or Bush by <5%), and has caused a number of "Red States" to be thrown into doubt, including North Carolina, Virginia and Arizona. The cool, composed Edwards compares favorably on the stump with the vulgarian loose cannon from Wyoming, and he may have already changed the dynamic of this race.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what NBA Finals were the critics of the proposed Shaq-to-Miami trade watching last month? The Lakers were thoroughly out-classed and out-hustled by the younger, stronger Pistons, and came within a last-second Kobe three-bomb from having been swept in humiliating fashion. The question isn't whether this trade decimates the Lakers, and starts a rebuilding cycle; after the Finals, the Lakers had no choice but to rebuild. Old, slow teams don't get better with time, particularly one with as dysfunctional a lineup as the Lakers had last season. If they had done nothing but kept the nucleus together, they would have seen the Lakers grow further and further from being a championship team, unable to fend off younger rivals in San Antonio, Houston, and Minnesota, much less the budding dynasty being built in the Motor City.

Faced with the choice of either losing Kobe or Shaq, the front office wisely opted to trade the older player of declining skills and health.
Moreover, the trade makes sense even if Kobe signs with the Clippers next week, or, even more unlikely, is sent to jail for that joke rap in Colorado. Without Kobe, the Lakers can make an immediate play in the free agent market, and begin setting up for the inevitable run in 2007 at Yao Ming. Of course, with Kobe, the addition of Odom, Butler and Grant gives the Lakers more depth than they had last season, when it seemed like any injury to the Four Tenors put the team into a slump, and signals a return to the "Showtime" style demanded by the fans.

In any event, the team had two options: they could either start playing for the future, or they could have simply allowed the current team to atrophy over the next few seasons. The Lakers have always taken a certain pride in not hanging the banners of divisional and conference championship seasons in the rafters of the home arena; being an also-ran was something not to be celebrated by the franchise. Having that attitude always reassured the fans that simply making the playoffs, or even going to the championship, wasn't good enough. Hats off to Mitch Kupchak for no longer postponing the inevitable, and for realizing that the status quo was not going to bring any more titles to L.A.

Just in time for the upcoming Julie Delpy opus: a Countess Bathory action figure. [Link via Luke Thompson]

It's Rose Mary Woods' fault: Records that could have provided a more thorough explanation of what it was George Bush was doing in late-1972 when he had priorities other than serving as a member of the TANG were mysteriously "destroyed" in the mid-'90's during a microfiche salvaging expedition by the Defense Department. A sinister force, no doubt....

The New Republic reports that the Bushies have been pressuring the Pakistani government to produce Osama bin Laden, or some other high-profile terrorist, before the November election, with the preferable period being the first three days of the Democratic Convention later this month. [link via Kevin Drum]

A few months back I was e-mailed an invitation to apply for a credential to attend the 2004 Democratic Convention. Since I haven't actively participated in partisan politics in over a decade, I have to admit the offer didn't intrigue me; I mean, who the hell wants to spend four days in Boston during the summertime. The type of blogger who would get all moist over attending is probably already in the pocket of Terry McAuliffe, so I could hardly see how the party would benefit from my presence. And, convention or no, I'm not that hard up to get laid.

But I guess the real problem I have is the same one any serious journalist would have about attending: its lack of importance. At one time, delegates attending a party convention were prepared to advocate policy and enact a platform, even if they weren't choosing the next President and Vice President. The last time the outcome was in doubt going into the convention was 1980, and now, the festivities are little more than infomercials, ratifying decisions that were made many months earlier. Why go to something I'm not planning on watching in the first place?

Kerry picks Edwards: I don't know why exactly he so impresses the pundits; Kerry kicked his ass in the primaries, just as easily as he did Howard Dean and General Clarke. Even with him on the ticket, his home state comes into play only if there is a huge national wave in Kerry's favor; the only states Kerry really needs to focus on in Deliverance Country is Florida and Arkansas. He is also a Senator, like Kerry, so the ticket doesn't exactly play to an anti-insider message. And he made his fortune as an "ambulance chaser"; he was quite good at it, but I can just hear that meme being spread amongst the talk radio brownshirts.

He does bring something to the party, though. His optimism plays well against Cheney, just as Kerry's seriousness plays well against Bush. He's charismatic on the stump, a trait that no doubt led to some his multi-million dollar wins before North Carolina juries. Tort lawyers are perhaps the best defenders of the rights of the little guy out there, which is why the powerful hate them so. His lack of political experience will be a wash; Bush had even less experience in foreign policy last time, and I doubt the GOP really wants to spotlight that. It can be safely predicted that he will do a better job as a candidate than Joe Lieberman.

Maria Sharapova may well become the Tiger Woods of tennis, someone whose success catches the interest of casual sports fans and creates an alternative storyline (as in, who won? and how did Maria do?) to every tournament she plays in. Her dominating performance this morning in winning Wimbledon was reminiscent of one of Tiger's Majors: an efficient, methodical pasting of the best the sport had to offer that could only leave one in awe.

It is almost sad how quickly Anna Kornikova is going to be forgotten....

Eric Alterman raises an interesting point about Michael Moore: why are media critics more aggressive in fact-checking F9/11 than the various "misstatements" of the Bush Administration? BTW, for an interesting compendium of said falsehoods, check out this Congressional report on same.

I figured this sort of argument was inevitable: right wing moral relativism, in the form of a defense of Dick Cheney's dropping the f-bomb last week. As I wrote at the time, I was less outraged at the shocking fact that the Vice President swears than the fact that he was so unapologetic about it later. And when you have someone as sycophantic as Charles Krauthammer defending you, it's no wonder that the Bushies are so clueless when it comes to the way normal folks perceive them.

That Krauthammer is unable to distinguish between the angry use of the f-word by someone cut off on the 405, or a coach arguing a bad call, and its use by someone who is arguably the most powerful man in the country, who holds the positions of both Vice President and President of the Senate, on the hallowed floor of Congress, uttered within the context of a debate on a matter of public interest, is remarkable. Besides the fact that the odds are nil that the same justification would have been made if the recipient of the vulgarity had been Dick Cheney or Arik Sharon, it goes to show how one-sided the calls for civility in our public discourse have been. That it should not be surprising that this sort of conduct can be defended, in much the same way Southern slaveholders defended the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate by Preston Brooks more than a century ago. The breakdown in civility back then led to the Civil War; I only hope that there are still enough people of good will on both sides of the fence, who recognize that some sanctified arenas, such as a courtroom or the floor of Congress, should encourage polite, reasoned debate, and that f-bombs should be reserved for barroom quarrels between drunks.

Maria Sharapova: She's prettier, smarter, plays better tennis, and has more class than Anna K: What's not to love?

Idiot Son Update: Perugia club owner Luciano Gaucci denounced his team after it lost a home-and-home series with Fiorentina, relegating the team to the minor leagues (Italian Serie B). Promising that he would purge the players he deemed unworthy to play professional soccer at the highest level, he vowed that the only players who could be assured of employment next season were Italian superstar Fabrizio Ravanelli, and, of course, our old friend Saadi Ghaddafi. Apparently the one game he played this season must have made more of an impression on the boss than his frequent "injuries", carousing and positive drug tests.

Admittedly, I did not anticipate the impact Fahrenheit 9/11 would have on me after seeing it this morning. I've learned to take much of what Michael Moore says with a grain of salt, and his snarky humor usually undercuts his message. One didn't exit the theatre after Roger & Me wanting to overthrow capitalism. His newest film, however, stays with you long after you leave the cineplex. It must be experienced with a group of people to be understood, something that I can't recall saying about any recent film. There are two types of people in the world, Blondie: those who've seen the film, and those who haven't. Discussing the film with people who haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet, either because they hate Moore or hate his politics (or both), is like trying to have a discussion about sex with a priest; he may have some interesting thoughts on the subject, but he just hasn't been there.

The importance of seeing this film came back to me when re-reading the post below about Mr. Hitchens. When I first read his "review", I couldn't wholly comprehend the intensity of his hatred for Michael Moore, or fathom what could have been the source of his animus. Most of the piece consisted of nothing more than a string of clever insults about Moore, but almost nothing to justify them at a substantive level. Hitchens, however, had seen the film; at the time, I hadn't. After spending two hours in a packed Woodland Hills theatre Sunday morning, I got it. I understood.

This was, by no means, a perfect film. The first half hour is spent regurgitating standard lefty claims about Florida and the 2000 election, and drawing broad (and I believe unsupportable) claims about Bush's ties with the Saudis. And some of Moore's annoying personal tics make their unwelcome appearance in this film. Yes, politicians get pampered by make-up artists before they go on camera, and if we're before the unblinking eye long enough, all of us will reveal some pretty gross examples of our humanity. Let he who is without sin lick the first comb. And anyone who remembers John Ashcroft's defeat in his 2000 Senate bid knows that he handled an impossible situation with enormous class (unlike the Republicans after the Wellstone Memorial), and pretending that the voters were voting for a corpse in that election when it was clear that they were picking the very-much-alive widow of his opponent is not a high point. One can acknowledge the occasional acts of decency in our opponents and still disagree with the Patriot Act.

Where the film picks up steam, and becomes a powerful indictment of our nation's leadership, comes when Moore gets out of the way, and simply focuses on the actual reasoning used to justify attacking Iraq last year. For someone who, in good faith, supported the Bush Administration and their policies, viewing Fahrenheit 9/11 must be comparable to what it was like for some French career civil servant to see The Sorrow and the Pity thirty years ago, and then be forced to justify what he did in WWII. Even if one served the Vichy government with what started out being only the best of intentions, that famous documentary shoved the issue of collaboration right in your face. You either did some soulsearching, or you lashed out at the messenger.

Here, Hitchens lashes out. There can be no way anyone watching the last half-hour of F9/11 can not be moved by the patriotism of the least-privileged (whom Hitchens patronizingly refers to as "duskier than others"), or not be angered that their sacrifice was so arrogantly and mendaciously exploited by our government. Hitchens disingenuously asks whether the use of proxies, and the anti-draft riots, would have meant that Moore believes the Civil War should never have been fought, ignoring the fact that slaves, unlike WMD's, actually existed. He has nothing to say to the friends and family of the dead, other than que sera, sera. But as Hitchens admits at the end of his piece, "'fact-checking' is beside the point."

U.S. Transfers "Sovereignty" to New Iraqi Government: Thank God we don't have to worry about that anymore. No doubt, General Thieu Prime Minister Allawi will provide legitimacy. Maybe Senator Aiken was right.

Any possibility that Ralph Nader would be anything more than an asterisk in the November election was probably eliminated this afternoon, with the decision of the Green Party not to endorse his candidacy for President. Enthusiasm for his efforts seems pretty much limited to GOP financiers looking to hobble the Kerry campaign, he has yet to qualify for the ballot in a single state, and only the Reform Party, the quasi-independent movement started by Ross Perot but now coopted by Lenora Felani, offers any possibility that he could be a spoiler. Couldn't have happened to a nicer man.

I can't pretend I'm outraged at the fact that Dick Cheney dropped an F-Bomb on Senator Patrick Leahy the other day; people lose their cool from time to time, and a choice epithet was well within the vocabulary of Harry Truman, to name just one example. But his refusal to apologize for his public vulgarity only goes to show what a genuinely classless bunch this crowd really is. Big time.

Prof. Johnson uncovers classified secrets from the British Army at a Potomac bar this afternoon, to wit, that the war was about oil, that American tactics in Iraq have only exacerbated the problems there, and that David Beckham is a "wanker". And for that, he gets stuck with the tab?

One of the more noisome tendencies of the political blogosphere is the transformation of every disagreement into evidence of moral or psychological defects in your adversaries, so it should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens has become a popular writer among my more hawkish brethren. Like Westbrook Pegler, H.L. Mencken, and other controversialists, his focus is on the personal insult, the utter dehumanization of his ideological foes, rather than the reasoned brief of the advocate. Nowhere does this approach get played to greater effect than in his oft-cited review of Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Even the review’s title, “Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore”, promises much more than is ultimately justified by his criticism. Rather than critique the film, Hitchens is only interested in the ad hominem attack on his adversary, so he sidelines any attempt at a rational defense of the President’s post-9/11 policies in favor of making snide comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl. For a review that is ostensibly about the “lies” of the filmmaker, he introduces precious little evidence of deceit, and he provides nothing to suggest that Moore deliberately or recklessly falsified material within the film. To Hitchens, accusations of mendacity serve the same purpose as Charles Krauthammer’s frequent diagnoses of mental illness in his opponents: it takes the place of reasoned debate, since the hard work amassing facts to buttress your side of an argument is always going to be more time-consuming than being able to allege that your opponent is somehow beyond the pale.

Most of the review consists of nothing more than attacks on the character of Michael Moore and others in the anti-war camp. Moore is called a “silly and shady man”, and “one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture”, while his movie is slammed as “dishonest and demagogic”, “a piece of crap”, “an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing”, “a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness”, and “a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”

Biting, witty comments, no doubt, when presented as the opinion of the reviewer, but Hitchens provides no factual basis from the movie to support any of those calumnies, except to suggest that Moore had argued in a debate several years earlier that Osama Bin Laden should have been considered innocent until proven guilty, and that somehow means that Moore’s argument about not using enough manpower to finish the job in Afghanistan is discredited. He takes issue with Moore’s claim that Iraq had never attacked the U.S., but can only argue in rebuttal that Saddam gave sanctuary to Abu Nidal, and that American P.O.W.’s were mistreated during the first Gulf War, neither of which amounts to a causus belli this time around, and, in light of the revelations at Abu Ghraib, not exactly a well-timed argument. And as I noted a couple of days ago, the review culminates with a laughably ironic attack on Moore's use of Orwell, which only goes to show how insular Hitchens' world has now become.

At one point, he all but accuses Moore of doing the filmic equivalent of using ellipses to omit inconvenient passages from the works he’s citing, but one looks in vain for anything to back up that charge. He alleges that Moore does not “make the smallest effort to be objective”, nor “does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer”, all of which supposedly amounts to a betrayal of the craft on Moore’s part. But Hitchens earlier notes that he himself was the auteur of several documentaries, on subjects as varied as Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton, and anyone who remembers those works knows that Hitchens did not spend much time being fair to his targets. One would look in vain to find any part of his polemic against President Clinton that challenges the often-contradictory stories of Gennifer Flowers or Juanita Broaderick, or that mentions the fact that Kathleen Willey was thoroughly discredited in her testimony before the Starr Inquest (but you will find him disparaging Clinton's attempts to attack terrorism as "wag the dog" efforts to distract the public). And if the cop murdered by Rickey Ray Rector had a name and family, Hitchens isn't going to disclose that to the reader.

Good documentaries are often biased, subjective films, where the documentarian plays the same role as a prosecutor, ably marshalling the evidence in a one-sided manner to support his case. The viewer plays the role of a grand juror, examining the evidence to decide whether sufficient grounds exist for an indictment. Great films such as Heart and Minds, The Sorrow and the Pity, and, of course, Roger & Me, did not back away from taking a stand, nor, I assume, does Fahrenheit 9/11. As in the case of a prosecutor, calling a documentarian a “liar” is a crippling charge, since it is aimed at discrediting the entire case-in-chief by sowing seeds of distrust in the advocate; that is one of the reasons so many on the Right have made that charge against Michael Moore (and it should be noted, Moore is not afraid of making similar frivolous charges against his adversaries, as seen here). Claiming that the prosecutor has only presented an arguable, subjective case isn’t discrediting, since, as members of the jury, we already expect that to happen. If Bush’s allies want to dampen the box office this weekend, they will have to do better than that.

Sad to say, but the standards to qualify for being the William Hung or the Richard Hatch of the legal profession are higher than what the Bush Administration requires to be nominated for the Federal Court of Appeals. [link via TalkLeft, w/props to Molly for her tip]

Why doesn't a story like this ever get published in the papers? What liberal media, indeed....

As if this off-season hasn't already been a nightmare for Laker fans, comes word today that Gary Payton has agreed to a contract extension. I suppose that was an inevitable result of the team firing Phil Jackson last week; Payton was like a passing quarterback forced to run the wishbone last season, so once the Pistons' defense exposed the Triangle as the outdated, high maintenance offense that it is, someone was bound to feel that the Glove was thereby vindicated, and, as it turns out, that someone was Mitch Kupchak.

Department of Unintentional Irony (or why Mr. Samgrass would be well-advised not to write columns referring to African-American soldiers as "dusky" while he's hammered):

A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence.

--Christopher Hitchens, only a few lines after comparing Michael Moore to Leni Riefenstahl, reviewing "Fahrenheit 9-11".

Watching Clinton's interview on 60 Minutes last night made me realize how little has changed the last four years, at least in terms of political spin. With the Big Dog, it was trying to parse the meaning of the word "is" before the Starr Inquest, over the critical issue of whether he was involved with an intern. Now, it's a new crowd trying to salvage some measure of dignity before the country by claiming that, at the very least, Saddam had "connections", or "ties" to Al Qaeda, as opposed to the two parties actually collaborating together in the trenches before 9-11. Just as Prime Minister Blair was able to change the subject from his government's reckless use of false claims about Iraq's WMD's by attacking the BBC's use of the term, "sexing up", so too are Cheney and the Bushies by asserting that what matters most is not that the Iraqi government was working hand-in-glove with Bin Laden, but that they had at least a tangential relationship with Al Qaeda.

Somehow, I don't think the American people would have backed a war with Iraq if they had known that Hussein's people had spoken with OBL's on a couple occasions, but had not collaborated on terrorist attacks against the U.S.; in fact, by that standard, it could be argued that Al Qaeda had much stronger "connections" to the Bush Administration than it did to Saddam, since the President was friendly with the Bin Laden family, and the U.S. provided much of the funding received by the Mujhadeen in the '80's. Certainly, as far as real "ties" with Al Qaeda are concerned, there was a far greater circumstantial case to be made against the "friendly" governments of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but we didn't go to war with those countries.

The whole point of the war, according to the Bushies, was that Saddam was an imminent threat, and that he was an ally of the people who attacked us on September 11. The war was sold to the American People has a front in the larger war against terrorism. But now we're hearing that the war was really about something else, like changing the political dynamic of the Middle East, or "liberating" the Iraqi people, or, now, that Saddam, or one of his Ba'athist associates, had met on occasion with representatives of Bin Laden. If our spy services were doing their job, I would hope that we would have also met with representatives of Bin Laden on occasion, if only to gather intel or suborn a potential asset. I'm sure Jenkins' Foot or the assasination of the Archduke will factor in at some point with these people, but for now, the rationalization of hundreds of American(and thousands of Iraqi) deaths because of a few low-level meetings between Iraq and Al Qaeda seems like a cruel joke.

I think this is the jesuitical destinction Cheney was trying to make.

Let the recriminations start....

The next week is going to drive the wingnuts crazy. Next week's publication of Bill Clinton's memoirs, concurrent with the release of two much-hyped movies on recent times ("The Hunting of the President" and "Fahrenheit 9/11"), is going to create a Perfect Storm of Republican Circlef--kery. If there has been one thing that has motivated the Far Right the last three years, it has been its desire to undo everything that the American People loved about the Big Dog, to pretend the eight brutal years of peace and prosperity never happened. Al Gore "lost" the 2000 election, in large part because he believed that spin, and perceived an hostility to Clinton that the public didn't share. It is safe to say that the public has become rather resistant to those efforts, or at least that percentage of the public that isn't waiting for the Assumption to occur the day after the election. The best thing for Kerry to do the next week (come to think of it, this is always good advice) is to lay back, let the wind take his sails, and ride on Bubba's coattails.

The one mark on Clinton's record, of course, was his impeachment by the House Republicans. His lies under oath may not have technically met the legal standard for perjury, but they reflected a character flaw in the man, a belief that he could talk his way out of (and into) anything. His subsequent fine in the Paula Jones case, together with his disbarment in Arkansas, were appropriate punishments for his civil transgressions. Yet the public still backed him, creating a firewall that prevented the Senate from taking the charges seriously, and he easily beat back the coup attempt. That victory was the high mark of his Administration, as much a defining moment for the country as September 11: after that, we would judge public figures by what they could do, not what kind of person they were.

In the end, given a choice between Clinton and his critics on the right and left, they chose Clinton, not because he was a saint, but because they knew he was better than his adversaries. Clinton liked people, didn't pretend to possess any divine authority, and the people, at first grudgingly, but by the end enthusiastically (when he left office, he, not Reagan, had the highest approval ratings of any President), liked him back.

I have oil rigs !!

Detroit 100, Lakers 87: That was truly an asswhupping. Anyway, a hearty and sincere congrats to Elden Campbell, an underrated player who was a media whipping boy when he played for the Lakers, for finally getting an overdue ring, and a tip of the cap to my many pals and booze buddies from Michigan on their good fortune, as well as for their patience the last three years when our hockey and college football teams seemed to be dominating them in big games.

And here's a scary thought: in routing the Lakers, the Pistons had to carry a piece of dead weight on their bench named Darko Milicic, the "Human Victory Cigar", whom they drafted with the second pick in last year's NBA Draft. En route to the championship, the only point he scored in the playoffs was in the first round, against Milwaukee. The player chosen right after Milicic, by the Denver Nuggets, was Carmelo Anthony, who scored almost as many points in a single game (41) as Milicic did the entire season (48). Think Larry Brown could have found a way for Anthony to fit into his team?

Sometime after midnight Eastern time tomorrow, the city of Detroit will begin celebrating a well-deserved NBA championship (and last night's game was the coup de grace; it was easily the best Laker performance of the Finals, with Shaq being unstoppable for most of the game, and Payton finally starting to show signs of his rumored All-Star form, and it still wasn't enough). Whether the ensuing party in the Motor City will vindicate Jimmy Kimmel's humorous (if cliched) comments remains to be seen, but the controversy that followed from his remarks at halftime of Game 2 reveals a remarkable double standard, and points out one of the aspects of life in Los Angeles that I absolutely cherish: our ability to take a joke, even if it's about the Lakers.

Kimmel, as you may have heard by now, went on the ABC halftime show and paid tribute to Detroit, in effect remarking that should the Pistons win the title, their fans would be well-advised not to pattern their celebration after the annual "Hell Night" (as they did after the Tigers' World Series win in 1984), since the city wasn't worth it. Ouch. As Kimmel himself later noted, Laker fans have quite a margin on the rest of the country when it comes to turning over cars following championships this century. In addition, Kimmel is a comedian, and the whole point of his late-night show is to make people laugh, sometimes uncomfortably.

Of course, the thick-skinned people of Detroit had a fit, with the local ABC affiliate protesting, the network itself pulling his show off the air that night, and angry denunciations filled the local papers. The sports pages, which only a week earlier had noted the sudden bandwagoning for the Pistons taking place in "HockeyTown, U.S.A.", took offense.

What makes this controversy so silly is that what Kimmel said is comparatively banal when juxtaposed with the standard insults made about Los Angeles, its residents and its fans. Over the years, local residents have come to accept such a national outpouring of hate with a degree of sang froid. In fact, most Angelenos take pride in certain parts of the stereotype, such as our studied desire to leave games early, which we view as a testament to our knowledge of when a game is truly "over", as well as to the high standards we demand from our entertainment. Other parts of the stereotype are much more troublesome, such as the conflation of our local culture with that of "Hollywood"; the loaded terms that are used to describe us in East Coast newspapers would not have been out-of-place in the Volkischer Beobachter seventy years ago, with barely a wink and a nudge necessary. Of course, actors and rappers make up a small but noticeable percentage of fans, but why Jack Nicholson or Dyan Cannon are not considered to be "real" sports fans, while veeps of automobile companies and corporate lawyers in Detroit are, is a mystery few out here can fathom.

Perhaps the one part of the Laker fan stereotype that most amuses and bemuses me is the notion that somehow we are all "fair weather fans". Whether Angelenos would continue to support the Lakers should the team put together a string of losing seasons is a potentiality not yet tested under laboratory conditions, but we do know from the attendance of both the Dodgers, Angels and Kings that local fans are pretty loyal, win or lose. I mean, how many years do the Dodgers have to draw three million paying customers without making the playoffs before we conclude that maybe someone out here does pay allegiance to the home team? And the only way to explain why the Raiders remain so popular locally, even after Al Davis deserted us after the Northridge Earthquake, is the notion (one which I don't happen to share) that our loyalty is not something to be given lightly, or given up lightly.

And, as I said before, we take the insults in stride, and why not. Earthquakes, traffic jams, ridiculous housing prices, and the occasional urban unpleasantness aside, we live in Paradise, and we know it. The Lakers are one of the few unifying factors in this area, perhaps the only thing that cuts across racial, ethnic, sexual, class and occupational boundaries, but they are Los Angeles. Anyone who is a sports fan in these parts will concur: the Dodgers, Angels, Kings, Clippers and Ducks all have their local followings, but it's the Lakers that define what being an Angeleno is. The other teams you follow because you come from these parts, but the Lakers are the team you root for in order to become part of our community; in much the same way an immigrant learns the English language as the first step towards becoming an American, someone who moves to Los Angeles pays allegiance to the Lakers. And regardless of what happens tomorrow, I ain't leaving.

Ralph Wiley, a prolific writer and fixture on ESPN and Sports Illustrated, died suddenly today at 52. In one of his last columns, he became one of the only writers in America to predict the pending Detriot upset in the NBA Finals; ironically, he died at home watching the player intros to last night's decisive Game 4.

Detroit 88, Lakers 80: Unless we see a collapse unlike any before in the history of the NBA, the Pistons will be the next NBA champions. The Lakers actually played a pretty tough game tonight, particularly Payton, who finally showed up in four games into the series, but a combination of some questionable fourth quarter calls (incl. a phantom foul on GP at the six minute mark, with the Pistons up by six) and some cold outside shooting doomed the Lakers to an insurmountable deficit.