The L.A. Times, on why the reaction to Chris Rock proved to be divisive in ways AMPAS probably didn't imagine:

So the faces were a little different, but most of the rules remained unchanged. There were stars and then there were big stars and then there was everyone else. The pre-awards parties at the Kodak Theatre were divided into levels — the higher the status, the lower the floor. Same with the seats. Same with the humor.

"Who is Jude Law?" Rock demanded a few minutes into an opening bit that drew roars from the cheap seats high in the back of the theater and raised more than a few hackles in the front rows. "Why is he in every movie I've seen for the past four years? He's in everything! Even movies he's not in, you look at the credits, he made cupcakes or something!" Hollywood likes to be kidded (Robin Williams is beloved, and where was Jack with his famous shades) but only in a kinder, gentler way.

Later, Sean Penn took the stage to tartly remind that Law is "one of our finest actors." Penn spoke for a different constituency, the insiders for whom the Oscars aren't a mere TV show (the way they are, say, for the folks at the Magic Johnson Theatres, whose raves about the movie "White Chicks" were beamed in to varied amusement) but a celebration of a serious art form.

Still later, at the after-parties, the buzz was all about whether Rock, the "outsider" host who had been hired on the promise that he might do something worth watching, such as being offensive, had merely managed to offend the wrong people.

"I thought what he said about Jude Law was unacceptable," muttered one producer after the ceremony, as he awaited his Governors Ball plate of slow-braised Kobe beef short ribs.

"You know what? Lighten the ... up! That little speech Sean Penn came up with, that's the reason people hate liberals," opined another producer, Nelson George, sitting across the room with Sean Combs (né "P. Diddy").

In my view, one of the reasons that ratings for industry shows like the Oscars have dwindled in recent years is that the self-congratulatory bullshit best symbolized by Sean Penn this year is unacceptable to a younger generation. Someone like Jude Law or Kate Beckinsale or Colin Farrell gets hyped to the stratosphere for appearing in big budget movies that no one sees or cares about, the quality of live-action movies is such that it makes absolutely no sense to go to the cineplex anymore when the same experience can be achieved for a quarter of the price on your home entertainment system, and all the really good movies tend either to be quirky independent films with B-level or no-name casts (ie., Sideways, or Lost in Translation), PIXAR cartoons, or movies directed by Clint Eastwood. So when Chris Rock cracks wise about how Jude Law somehow got to play "Alfie" in half of the movies relased last year, while Sean Penn pompously asserts that he's one of "our" greatest actors, guess who the audience at home is going to support?

Another triumph for Bush's "pro-democracy" agenda: Word out of Colorado is that the civil lawsuit against Kobe Bryant has been settled.

Perhaps the best shot at a knock-out of a GOP incumbent in the 2006 Senate elections may be in Rhode Island, where Lincoln Chafee faces a tough battle overcoming the overwhelming partisan edge the Democrats have in a state that John Kerry won by over 20% last year. So perhaps I'm being just a little paranoid when I see that the wife of a Republican actor and major campaign donor is rustling up opposition within the Democratic Party to the frontrunner in that race, James Langevin. Nice try, Karl.

Quote of the Day: "I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of s---."
--Halle Berry, in accepting her "Razzie" Award for Catwoman Saturday night.

Humorless Twit Watch: There is probably an interesting reason that Sean Penn came to the defense of Jude Law tonight, but not Tobey Maguire or Colin Farrell....

An interesting fact about the likely Best Picture winner (assuming it's The Aviator or Million Dollar Baby) at tonight's Oscar ceremony: it will be the first film set in Los Angeles to earn that award. It's hard to believe that with all the classic films set in the city, from Sunset Blvd. to Chinatown to The Graduate to L.A. Confidential, not once has the Academy recognized a film set in the film capitol for its top honor.

The consistently excellent (and frequent Smythe's World commenter) Prof. David Johnson has finally been getting some long overdue props from the Big Feet in the liberal blogosphere, over his "Cousin Oliver" post, so it might be appropriate to note that other posts of his are worth reading too. His take on the wasteful and morally obtuse spectacle of flyovers at big sporting events has the precision and elegance of a Matt Leinart touchdown pass.

Well, here's an interesting theory on Gannongate...we probably shouldn't be jumping ahead of ourselves on this one. Right now, the one unanswered question that keeps this scandal going is who approved Guckert's "Day Pass". While the media is still covering this story as part of the Bush Administration's efforts to create a state media, the real story is much simpler: a gay prostitute obtained entry to the White House by pretending to be a journalist. So who was/were his client(s)? Was there blackmail involved? Did he obtain inside dope (such as the stories he "broke" on the Daschle-Thune race, or on the Rathergate forgeries) from his clients? Everything else is just inside baseball for the media.

I cannot let this day go by without wishing a happy 40th birthday to a very special person, my sister Jennifer. Hope you're having fun in Paris.

Rev. Gene Scott dead: Beloved by stoners, parodied by Robin Williams, immortalized by Werner Herzog, this televangelist was a ubiquitous presence on local TV for over three decades. No hypocrite he: denunciations of abortion and conspiratorial ravings about gay cartoon characters were not his style. His sermons went off on historical tangents that would have been the envy of Umberto Eco, and perhaps his most distinctive habit was to replay, over and over, the same hymn when he was dissastified with the amount of money he was raising. "I want to know, I want to know if Jesus welcomes me there...."

Paul Krugman has another timely column, this time on the likelihood that the Bush Administration will gin up some new "terrorist threat" to take the focus off its floundering domestic programs (in this case, the D.O.A. efforts to gut Social Security):

The ultimate demonstration of Mr. Bush's true priorities was his attempt to appoint Bernard Kerik as homeland security director. Either the administration didn't bother to do even the most basic background checks, or it regarded protecting the nation from terrorists as a matter of so little importance that it didn't matter who was in charge.

My point is that Mr. Bush's critics are falling into an unnecessary trap if they focus only on domestic policies, and allow Mr. Bush to keep his undeserved reputation as someone who keeps Americans safe. National security policy should not be a refuge to which Mr. Bush can flee when his domestic agenda falls apart.

Bush's "undeserved reputation" referred to above is especially nagging. The public gives him credit for preventing another major terrorist attack on American soil in the 3-plus years since 9/11, but it wasn't as if there was anything comparable to that in the 3-plus years before 9/11. For the WTC to fall, it took years of planning, a cadre of dozens of highly motivated wackos, and an incredible string of luck, facilitated by an Administration staffed with Peter Principal rejects and white "recipients" of affirmative action, euphemistically called "neoconservatives", that were too filled with their own arrogant self-importance to pay attention to the signs in front of them.

In short, even if we had done nothing after 9/11, it is still unlikely we would have had to face a similar attack in the last three years, just as we did not face a similar attack in the six-plus years after Oklahoma City. Krugman's point, that the Administration continues to overlook obvious areas where terrorists could attack in favor of ideological boogeymen overseas, does lead to the frightening conclusion that our luck may soon run out.

Clara Alice Robinson v. Valley Presbyterian Hospital: On Friday night, Clara Robinson, a 90-year old woman, great-grandmother of six, grandmother of eight, mother of two, and widow of James C. Robinson, fell at her home in Van Nuys, fracturing her right knee cap. When the excruciating pain from her injury made sleep impossible, two of her grandchildren (Cat Ruderman and Steven Smith) called the paramedics at three in the morning. As the closest hospital to her home, Sherman Oaks Medical Center, was full, the paramedics decided to take her two miles away to Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys. After several hours of being unattended, a doctor finally examined her, and x-rays subsequently confirmed that her knee was shattered. She was fitted with a full leg cast to her right leg, and released from the hospital Sunday night.

When I first found out that my grandmother's knee was busted, I experienced a hollow, numb feeling of dread. Even more than my parents, she is the one person from whom I always felt gave me unconditional love. For someone who is in her tenth decade, she continues to possess an alert mind and an impish disposition; she reads constantly, her TV viewing habits are impeccable (with the exception of an occasional "Matlock" episode), and her sense of humor is mordant and wry. She has suffered numerous falls in the past few years, including two broken legs and a heart attack, so any injury inflicted on her invariably sucks the wind out of my lungs.

When she told me Friday morning that she was in an incredible amount of pain, I knew this injury was especially serious. Her habit in the past has been to apologize for causing such a bother, and that she would be alright if we just got her into bed. Her tibia might be sticking out of her leg, but she would be loath to admit she needed help. So when I heard about her condition, I knew it meant trouble.

After the ambulance picked up my grandmother, I followed her to Valley Presbyterian. She was taken to the Emergency Room, where she was placed in a cot. I got there a little before 4:00 a.m., and they still had not examined her, or done anything other than attach some gadgets to her to monitor her heartbeat. Other than the Tylenol I had given her earlier, there had been no efforts taken to alleviate her pain, nor did they inquire with either myself or her as to past medical conditions, such as her pacemaker. At about 4:30 a.m., I finally dragooned a nurse, handed him my grandmother's last complete medical exam, and went home to bed. I'm still ashamed that I didn't stay longer, or cold-cock the nearest doctor.

The next morning, she was finally examined, her fractured knee confirmed, and I awaited the worst. The obvious solution, full surgery to repair the knee, was problematic, due to her age and weakened heart condition. The doctors decided the best option, or perhaps the cheapest option, was to put her leg in a cast. She obviously would not be on her feet again for a long time, but it promised to be the least invasive approach to her injury.

Yesterday, the hospital contacted us to announce my grandmother was checking out that day. Since she had seemed in poor condition when I visited her Saturday, I was surprised, to say the least. Needless to say, her house is not normally equipped with full nursing care and a wheelchair, so my family made inquiries as to whether it would be necessary for her to leave that day. The hospital answered in the affirmative: if she wasn't out by midnight, Medicare would no longer pay for her stay at the hospital. The other option offered by Medicare was for her to be placed in a convalescent home, which we immediately rejected. The hospital would, however, arrange for a wheelchair to be delivered to her residence (they refused to let us borrow one of the theirs), and we could pick her up once we got it.

We were supposed to receive the chair before six o'clock. From 5 to 8 p.m., we received several phone calls from the hospital, reminding us that Mrs. Robinson was technically not admitted there anymore, and wondering when we were going to pick her up. Each time, we told them that we were still waiting for her wheelchair, without which we would be unable to get her from the car taking her from the hospital into her house. Still, the wheelchair was not forthcoming. Finally, at about 8:30 p.m., I decided that just waiting around at the house with my aunt and uncle wasn't going to cut it, and that since my grandma perhaps could use some company, I would go down to the hospital.

Those of you who live outside Southern California might know that over the last few days, we have experienced a rainstorm of near-Biblical proportions. Last night was truly the worst of it. Beginning at 8 p.m., and continuing into the wee hours of the morning, the East Valley experienced, on average, two inches of rainfall per hour. Every half mile or so, where the streets intersected, there would be a foot-deep lake (or worse), and the intensity of the showers narrowed visibility to almost nothing. And it was cold, by SoCal standards. It was the sort of weather that might kill an old person just for being exposed to it.

For the next ninety minutes or so, I sat with my grandmother in her room, intermittantly watching "Desperate Housewives" and calling my uncle (her son-in-law) to find out the status of the wheelchair. Every so often, one of the nurses would stop by, asking, in as polite a way as possible under the circumstances, if we were ready to leave. Still, the wheelchair had not been delivered yet, so I asked someone who looked like she might be in charge if the hospital could find out what was going on. A few minutes later, she informed me that the wheelchair would definitely be delivered to our home, "tonight or tomorrow morning". I asked if, due to the late hour, the indefiniteness of the wheelchair's status, and the terrible conditions outside, we could prevail upon the hospital to "readmit" my grandmother for one more night. And again, after consulting with higher-ups at the hospital, she came back a few minutes later, repeating the mantra we had heard all day: No.

Finally, at about ten-thirty in the evening, my uncle calls to tell me that the people delivering the wheelchair were on the way, and that I might as well start the process of bringing her home. She was wheeled down to the outpatient section, and one of the nurses assisted me in the arduous process of putting a ninety-year old woman in a full leg cast into the front seat of a Mitsubishi Eclipse. The Eclipse is a nice, relatively spacious sports car, but it's not the optimal mode of transportation in this situation. For the first time in my life, I'd wished I owned an SUV.

It took about ten minutes to drive/float the two miles from hospital to home. When I got there, I discovered that the wheelchair still hadn't arrived. So my grandmother waited, in the front seat of my car, for about five minutes, while my uncle and I, not wanting to leave her alone, stood ankle-deep in water, waiting for the wheelchair. When it was finally delivered, it took another ten minutes to maneuver my grandmother out of the car, taking great pains not to twist her leg or put any undue pressure on her cast, before we were finally able to put her in the chair and wheel her to the house. It took four of us: my uncle and I, and the two caregivers who had delivered the chair, to complete the task in a driving rainstorm. It was like a scene out of King Lear.

I'm certain that many of the people reading this have had similar, or possibly even worse, encounters with hospitals (and mind you, this was a hospital, not an H.M.O.) The thing that struck me the most was how dehumanizing the entire experience was. The hospital treated my grandmother not as someone who was sick and needed care, but as a thing, a commodity, for whom it provided the absolute minimal service possible before they shipped her on her merry way. The hospital itself was immaculate, its facilities state-of-the-art, its medical practitioners top-notch, and its nurses unfailingly polite and dedicated, but all to a point. Once the patient's needs began to conflict with the bottom line, she was no longer a significant factor, so they got rid of her.

Hunter Thompson Dead: I first read him in the summer after I graduated from high school. His portrayals of Hubert Humphrey, Sonny Barger, Al Davis, and, especially, Richard Nixon resonate, even today; Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, 1972 is as readable today as it was the day it was published. It's hard to imagine an America without him.

Kudos and major props to my homie Ronald Schmidt (also, the Godfather of my nephew) for his book, This is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles, which just received a very favorable review from the LA Times. The book, which is sort of a non-fiction version of City of Quartz, focuses on the attempt by a number of civic leaders to shape the way Angelenos came to see themselves. In spite of that rather dry description, it's actually a rather entertaining read, especially for Jack Webb fans.

With friends like these: What Kevin Drum said. Whatever validity there may be to Prof. Estrich's argument that the LA Times does not seek out the voices of women for the Op-Ed page, making a snide remark about an illness suffered by your adversary is cruel and offensive. No wonder Dukakis lost.

Actually, I don't even accept the sincerity of her underlying argument. Estrich's column isn't exactly a must-read; her attacks on Arriana Huffington's candidacy (for being a poor mom), and her puffery of Ahnolt Ziffel during the 2003 recall (especially after the Times published accurate accounts of his serial gropery), were hardly endearing to progressives or feminists. That she criticized the Times for publishing a piece by a conservative writer (Charlotte Allen) on the grounds that she possessed thin literary credentials, is hardly an argument that a blogger is going take seriously. Should the Times (and other papers) seek out feminist voices and female writers (of any political persuasion)? Absofreakinglutely. Should Kinsley succumb to a protection racket, backed by a prominent law professor, to hire her pals and cronies? Well, if he does, I think I may have just discovered a way to use this website to wet my beak....

Connecting the dots: The first story laying out the intimate connections between Karl Rove, GOPUSA/Talon News, and Jeff Gannon. Note in particular Gannon's work on a pet project of Rove's, the Thune-Daschle Senate race.

Great Daily Show last night, focusing, at long last, on the blogosphere. "Ted Hitler" gets it !! [link via Americablog]

Oddly, the MoDo column on Gannongate is more insightful, and pulls fewer punches, than the article by Mr. Grassy Knoll himself, Sid Blumenthal. Money quote:

Does the Bush team love everything military so much that even a military-stud Web site is a recommendation?

Or maybe Gannon/Guckert's willingness to shill free for the White House, even on gay issues, was endearing. One of his stories mocked John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" with the headline "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

With the Bushies, if you're their friend, anything goes. If you're their critic, nothing goes. They're waging a jihad against journalists - buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers.

Frank Rich is also worth reading on the subject. All three understand why this story is perhaps a tad more important than the off-the-cuff remarks of a cable news executive: an Administration that has created a propaganda outfit, complete with its own version of state TV (FoxNews), and with pundits and bloggers willing to parrot the official line at a very affordable price, finally gets burned.

It turns out that "Talon News" didn't even exist when "Jeff Gannon" asked his first question at a White House press briefing. In other words, the news service seems to have been created to provide Mr. Guckert a front to gain access into the White House, rather than serve any legitimate journalistic purpose. For whose benefit?

A beautiful example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, from the Washington Monthly, on the issue of "tort reform":

The news coverage may be creating some unexpected consequences: Some academic researchers suspect that all the hype about the litigation crisis might actually be making Americans more litigious by giving them the erroneous impression that compensation is available through the courts for most injuries. As McCann says, "Tort reformers may have produced more frivolous claims while making legitimate claims harder to bring."

It seems WaPost media critic Howard Kurtz has done a 180 on Gannongate. I guess there's nothing like having your principal source lie to you to concentrate the mind.

Another perspective on Gannongate:

The only thing that almost surprised me about the "Jeff Gannon" story was that the White House ran the operation. But, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The White House has taken over the work formerly done by the intelligence agencies. While there has never been a time when the intelligence agencies and the White House and Congress all got along and worked together like good children, in the past there was at least a stated goal of using intelligence to make decisions. That's over. Decisions are now made and brazenly thrown out in public, and the intelligence flunkies better come up with the supporting evidence fast, unless they're ready for immediate retirement (at best). The current happy working environment requires the "intelligence data" to completely support predetermined White House policy, while intelligence data that doesn't meet current Bush Administration policy (Bin Laden agents preparing for a massive hijacking & air attack campaign within the United States in the fall of 2001, for example, or inept Arab flight-school students demanding to fly passenger jets when they can't manage to pilot a Cessna) is tossed aside, totally ignored, while those who bring in the inconvenient intel are removed and destroyed.

And the White House has a fantastic new weapon unknown to any American intelligence agency save for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI: There is no oversight. Nobody can get in the way. Better still, it doesn't matter if you get caught. There's no penalty for lies, obstruction, killing 1,500 Americans in Iraq, handing out billions of taxpayer dollars to your friends' companies, inventing fake New York terrorist plots to scare the hell out of voters right before the election, the widespread torturing of foreign suspects, engineering the transformation of Iraq from a beaten secular rogue state to an emboldened Islamic rogue state, the failure to prosecute a single U.S. "terrorist," or even blowing the cover of your own spies and double-agents to tip the polls for a week. Nothing is punishable. So why not plant a weirdo in the press-briefing room and call on him to make fun of whatever limp opposition remains? Send your opponents scrambling to keep up with whatever falsehoods you're currently peddling, and your people can keep on with the hard work: Sending another $100 billion straight to your donors who run the defense industry and untold billions to the boys running the "homeland security" business.

--Ken Layne

Frank Rich, on the Right's latest vendetta against a pinko Hollywood pervert:

Just when it seemed that Hollywood had turned a post-election page in the culture wars, the commissars of the right cooked up a new, if highly unlikely, grievance against "Holly-weird," as they so wittily call it. This was no easy task.

They couldn't credibly complain that "The Passion of the Christ" was snubbed by the movie industry's "elite" (translation: Jews), since it nailed three nominations, including one for makeup (translation: really big noses). That showing bested not only "Fahrenheit 9/11" but "Shrek 2," the year's top moneymaker. Nor could they resume hostilities against their perennial bogeymen Ben Affleck, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg. All are nonplayers in this year's awards.

So what do you do? Imagine SpongeBob tendencies in the carefully sanitized J.M. Barrie of "Finding Neverland"? Attack a recently deceased American legend, Ray Charles, for demanding that his mistress get an abortion in "Ray"? No, only a counterintuitive route could work. Hence, the campaign against Clint Eastwood, a former Republican officeholder (mayor of Carmel in the late 1980s), Nixon appointee to the National Council of the Arts and action hero whose breakthrough role in the Vietnam era was as a vigilante cop, Dirty Harry, whom Pauline Kael famously called "fascist." There hasn't been a Hollywood subversive this preposterous since the then 10-year-old Shirley Temple's name surfaced at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938.

[link via TalkLeft]

The fallback position of the Beltway press on the "Gannon" story has been that it was somehow inappropriate to "go after" his personal life (ie., his homosexuality), as if it were somehow not germane to the discussion of how a non-credentialed "reporter" using a fake name was able to gain access inside the White House. AmericaBlog, which has done some of the most aggressive reporting on the subject, has a detailed post up about some of the more unsavory aspects of Mr. Guckert's "personal life", and why it is relevant to the scandal. It's very explicit, so you've been warned....

Friday night, I attended a party at a loft next to MacArthur Park in downtown L.A. hosted by Mark Brown of Buzznet. For those of you who are new to the internets, Buzznet is front and center of the emerging "photoblog" trend, and those of you who are intrigued by the potential of sites such as this one, who own a digital camera, and who also have the same desire for self-publicity should check out that site. Also, Mr. Brown is a terrific host, whose willingness to put up with the chainsmoking of myself and a documentary crew from French television is proof he has the patience of Job.

One of the discussions I had was about one of the most remarkeable posts in the history of political blogs, one I briefly alluded to last week: this Michael Totten piece, about an afterparty attended by himself, Christopher Hitchens, and several Iraqis following a televised panel they did on the elections two weeks ago. Totten is one of the more conservative links on my blogroll, which may be an indication of how far left I've traveled. He's what used to be known as a "Jackson Democrat" (after Scoop Jackson), a hawk on foreign policy with liberal views on other issues, but unlike other bloggers who pay lip service to those principles, he walks the walk. He's a fine writer and photographer, especially concerning his frequent traveling, and the aforementioned post is one reason why he's such a terrific blogger.

Totten completely exposes himself in that post. Having said and done any number of idiotic things myself, I know how hard it can be to put myself on the line, to write something that may make me look like a fool (at least intentionally). The temptation to edit out the embarassing details is strong. Totten, on the other hand, does not come off looking all that good; for example, his recounting of the patronizing manner in which he and Mr. Hitchens announced there would be certain limitations to this "self-government" thing the Iraqis were seizing at the polls that day, and his genuine discomfort with the angry reaction his guests had at their presumption, has already been much commented on. The relentless manner of his kissing up to Hitchens, as well as his description of the way in which the odious Mr. Hitchens loses himself to the bottle, are discomforting to the reader.

But Totten is too smart not to know this, yet he still (I hope accurately) gives his readers a warts-and-all version of what happened that night. He gives a rationale for his opinions that the reader can agree or disagree with, but he doesn't hide behind a curtain of false dignity. It makes for fascinating reading, and at the end, you can't help feeling a grudging respect for the man.

A good blog should always inform the reader that it is fronted by a real, flawed human being, and Totten's post does that, in the tradition of Andrew Sullivan's infamous post about his backed-up toilet. Any blogger who does not allow his audience to see his inner assclown will remain mired in mediocrity, which is why Michael Totten has, and deserves, a large audience.

Schine Revisited: The Guckert Scandal breaks into the mainstream, here, here, here, and here. The story is important because of its connection to other White House efforts to create its own propaganda machine, separate from traditional media outlets. In this case, a pseudo-reporter was permitted to infiltrate the White House Press Corps and ask planted questions at daily briefings, and, in one case, even at a Presidential press conference.

But lets face it, the real reason this story has bite is the inference that it connects to what an earlier generation would have inelegantly called a "daisy chain". As soon as "Jeff Gannon", the reporter in question, became tied to internet sites plugging gay pornography and prostitution, the focus shifted from just another story about a fake website/blog shilling for the Bush Administration. With the revelation that classified information about the identity of a CIA agent was leaked to this clown, the story expanded geometrically.

One obvious avenue for investigation, by either the mainstream media or the blogosphere, is who in the administration greased Guckert's path, ie., who was his "Roy Cohn"? This guy was treated as a "reporter" for three years by the White House, even though they knew he was representing a website that was little more than a propaganda front for Karl Rove. So who looked the other way?

The Judds Say Farewell: Wasn't Andrew Sullivan supposed to be retiring or something?

To no one's surprise, the major obstacle to reapportionment reform in California is coming from...Tom DeLay, and the GOP rump in the state Congressional delegation. What DeLay and the crackerocracy fear isn't that the Republicans lose a seat or two in California in 2006; it's that the move to reform the drawing of legislative districts sweeps the country.

Ward Churchill Update: Academic fraud of a more traditional sort: the genocide that never was. I don't know of a civil libertarian defense to this sort of thing.

The Cole-Goldberg "debate" is becoming increasingly one-sided, as you might expect in a battle between someone who is paid to think for a living (the Professor) and someone who is paid not to think (the Pundit). Goldberg is being made to look foolish, in part because he's sparring with someone who actually knows something about the subject, rather than someone who can write well and has a lot of opinions, but also due to the Elephant in the Room in the debate over the "War" on Terrorism: the Chickenhawk issue. The question to Goldberg was simple: can someone who is of age (or who has children of age) and who backs a discretionary war, ostensibly because it is in our national interest, have his views taken seriously if he (or his children) does not volunteer to fight in said war?

Obviously, this is a different issue than the standard "chickenhawk" debate, which concerns the disproportionate number of non-veterans in the Bush Administration. There may have been any number of reasons why someone didn't choose to fight in Vietnam, but few of them are germane four decades later. The issue at stake here is whether someone younger than, lets say, thirty-five (or with a son in that agegroup), has any moral or intellectual credibility to ask other people to make sacrifices for him, if he is not also willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

It is, as "Armed Liberal" points out, a question designed to end debate. As well it should, for the issue is one of simple hypocrisy. No one should feel so privileged in a time of war to cheerlead from the sidelines, especially when one is healthy enough to play. If you believe it is important enough for your nation to be fighting this war, why aren't you out there?

There's something morally repugnant about bloggers who have devoted more attention to the politically incorrect remarks of a college professor at Colorado or a news president at a cable network than about the death of a quarter of a million people in Asia less than two months ago.

"Angel," he said. Can I call you Angel?" Mr. Samgrass drinks Michael Totten under the table....

Cause I ain't got no dog-proof ass: Jonah Goldberg, on why he does not fight for freedom:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.

The glory of Liston lives on!![link via Juan Cole]

Prediction: Pats 31, Eagles 13. Those of you who would like, shall we say, to make it a little more interesting, can participate in this little contest being sponsored by Atrios.

Obviously, the question of whether Prof. Ward Churchill should be fired due to his vicious, hateful writings about the 9/11 dead concerns academic freedom, not necessarily the First Amendment or freedom of speech. He's not being threatened with jail for his remarks, nor is the government attempting to bar him from exercising his right to vocalize his opinion. A college professor should be granted more leeway in being allowed to say what he wants without having to worry about the axe falling whenever he makes a politically incorrect statement.

But, really, I can't believe that a university should be powerless to act just because a professor has tenure. Putting aside the allegation that Churchill lied about his ethnic background (he claims to be part-Indian, an assertion that has been debunked by the tribe he claims membership in), it's hard to see why a state university, funded by the taxpayers, should have no recourse when one of their employees goes off the deep end. If a tenured professor in geology were to begin teaching his students that the earth was flat, or a paleontology professor were to advocate creationism in the classroom, or a history professor decides that his students should learn about how the Elders of Zion are plotting to eat Christian babies, the schools that are paying them clearly are not getting what they bargained for when they granted tenure in the first place.

The regents at Boulder should examine why Churchill is being paid a salary to teach at their university in the first place (it's certainly not because he has overwhelming qualifications; considering the thousands of PhD recipients who can't land teaching jobs in this country, the fact that Churchill never went beyond a Masters degree is especially grating), and act accordingly. Celebrating the slaughter of other human beings no more belongs in a school than a teacher advocating the rape of women, or the extermination of gays. That is not a matter of free speech, or of defending leftist politics: it is a matter of decency.

But rather than firing the professor, Colorado should set appropriate guidelines as to what it considers acceptable classroom conduct. The university should demand that Churchill apologize for his three-year old statements, and thereafter vigorously regulate the courses he teaches. If he refuses, he should be introduced to the rigorous virtues of the private sector. If they are unwilling to do that, the university might as well announce that it fully backs Prof. Churchill, and that his views about how the janitors and secretaries in the Twin Towers are "little Eichmanns" are shared by the college, and are consistent with what it regards as its educational mission. Poisoning the minds of students should never be considered part of "academic freedom". [link via Marc Cooper]

The man who lost the most important boxing match in history, Max Schmeling, has passed away. He was seven months short of 100.

I'm not sure what to make of this study, which indicates that more than half of all personal bankruptcies were triggered by excessive medical costs, even though most of those debtors were covered by health insurance. There tend to be a multitude of reasons why people file, most notably mortgage defaults and exorbinant credit card debt, but high medical bills are invariably a part of the problem as well.

Practicing in Los Angeles, a region that has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to bankruptcy law, my perspective may not be applicable nationwide, but I can think of an obvious explanation as to why this study came to this conclusion. There is still a great deal of embarassment when it comes to the filing of bankruptcy. Psychologically, it is perceived as an admission of failure, an acknowledgement that you can't make good on your own promises. Thus, a good many people will try to postpone the inevitable, to be done only in extremis.

Of all the reasons to give in to the temptation of having a deus ex machina, in the form of the Bankruptcy Court, wipe your slate clean, a medical debt is probably the most appealing. We can't be blamed for getting sick, in the same way that we can feel blame for losing their job or running up too much credit card debt. High medical costs are as much a given in our society as having to pay through the teeth for housing or a sports car, but it's just easier to make believe that the medical debt was an arbitrary event, as opposed to the other big ticket items we couldn't afford but purchased anyway.

While the President of Jesusland addresses the Crackerocracy in D.C. tonight, I will be honoring my status as a Californian, first and foremost, with a visit to the L.A. Press Club salon, where tonight the topic of discussion will be "21st Century Sports Journalism". Panelists include blogger Jon Weisman, sportswriter J.A. Adande, sportstalk host Steve Mason, and the moderator will be the venerable Matt Welch (pictured, twixt Sonny and Phoebe, above). First drinks start at six, the gabfest at seven.

Who loves the LA Times? Not apparently, Mickey Kaus, who writes that the greater SoCal area would be better off if it were to just disappear tomorrow. Quoth Kaus: "New journalistic organizations would form and expand to fill the void. Some of them would be good. All would be free to actually be lively and irreverent, without the dead weight of the Times bureaucracy and its historic faux-East-Coast confusion of stiff journalism with serious journalism."

In all likelihood, though, the Times' monopoly, should it ever be slain, would simply get replaced by a new monopoly, one that would inherit, in form if not in substance, the same "dead weight" bureaucracy and journalistic philosophy of its predecessor. People who wonder why Los Angeles is the way it is should always remember that the "city" of Los Angeles is only a portion of the vast mega-community of "Los Angeles", which expands as far south as San Clemente, as far north as Bakersfield, and as far east as the borders with Nevada and Arizona.

Even within Los Angeles County, there are numerous cities on the outskirts, not quite suburbs, that are quite distinct from the city of Los Angeles, cities such as Long Beach, Santa Monica, Inglewood, Compton, Pomona, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, etc., that have their own school districts and elect their own city officials, but which are still every much as part of the community of "Los Angeles" as Downtown or the Valley. Many of these satellite communities, in fact, have newspapers of their own, but none has been able to branch out and appeal beyond their locality. It's almost a cliche to note that this region is the Promised Land for immigrants from Central America and East Asia, and these groups have newspapers servicing their communities as well. The genius of the Times has been to create a touchstone, one of the few that exist locally besides the Lakers and the smog, that unites the vast community beyond the city borders.

Because of that, a local newspaper that appeals to the entire region is a necessity; the market demands it. Financially speaking, though, to have two (or more) newspapers attempting to appeal to that same broad base would be prohibitive. And it's been tried. As recently as sixteen years ago, Los Angeles was serviced by another paper, the Herald Examiner, a great newspaper published by the Hearst family. It had an awesome sports section, was gossipy and fun to read, and I still have the last edition from when it ceased publication in 1989, after years of drowning in ink as red as the blood of the Black Dahlia. There were other newspapers too, long ago, as much beloved as the HerEx (which was itself the child of a long-ago merger of two tabloids), but, in the end, none could compete with the Chandlers.

So we're pretty much stuck with the Times. Don't like its liberal politics? Too bad, you're in a Blue State, they come with the territory. Too stodgy for you? Not enough gossip? This isn't New York City, pal, and besides, what gossip column can compete with Court TV? Not enough coverage of local issues and events? Well, that's what the Press Telegram and the Daily News are for. Would LA be better off if the Times no longer existed? Maybe, but then it wouldn't be LA.

Listen, children, to a story, that was written long ago....

ESPN is reporting that Rudy Tomjanovich will step down as Lakers' head coach after tonight's game with Portland.

Jayson Blair, the Sequel: After reading this story, it becomes clear that the real scoop isn't that Iraqi kleptocrat Ahmad Chalabi is being considered for a position in the new Iraqi government, but that the New York Times has another writer who just makes shit up. Can't blame Howell Raines for this one, though....

A combination of a slow day in sports and an opportune buzz led me to see Sideways at the local AMC. Paul Giamatti was robbed; in fact, it can be argued that the principal reason it could even have been a plausible Best Film nominee was the fact that he was the star, only one year after his memorable (and also unrewarded) performance in American Splendor. Anyone who has ever taken the 101 north of Santa Barbara will appreciate the humor in this film even more.

Egads--DTP started his own blog!! I used to think he was really "Booze Buddy" from The Happiest Place on Earth, since he seemed to know a great deal about my life as a Functioning Alcoholic, until I heard he actually a had a professional degree in something. I guess he just paid very careful attention to my writing. Anyways, he's funny, if a bit off the edge politically.

Nguyen Van Chalabi: Some historical perspective on yesterday's election in Iraq.

Fact-checking, my ass !! Apparently, the Blog of the Year doesn't have much interest in correcting its mistakes. One of the common criticisms against opinion blogs is that there is no one "monitoring the monitors", but that's only half-true. There are bloggers monitoring Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Daily Kos, et al.; the problem is that most of their readers seldom visit those blogs on account of a pre-existing disagreement in ideology. For the most part, conservatives limit themselves to the sites on the blogroll of Instapundit, while liberals are content picking from the blogroll of Atrios (from whom, natch, I obtained the above link); crossover is limited, so if a popular blog steps in it, its readers may never find out (if you want to know about the intellectual curiosity of a blogger, always check the blogroll). If a blogger doesn't see fit to correct himself, there's little anyone else can do to threaten his reputation.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum eloquently expands on the above point, but also points out that many of the more conservative boosters of the blogosphere lack, shall we say, the self-correcting mechanism that many readers of more liberal blogs take for granted: a comments section.

Can we go home now?

The early bird...I was going to comment on the Alterman-Jarvis melee over Iraqi bloggers, but this post (on Hit & Run) probably encapsulates what I wanted to say anyways, so screw it. The important thing to note is that a CIA plant in the blogosphere would probably be writing in Arabic (or Farsi), would target its audience beyond the small neocon cocoon in the U.S., and would definitely not publicly meet with President Bush.

Balls: Little Roy. Excitable Andrew....off the rails again...an enemy of the state...in the throes of AIDS-related dementia. The poor guy gets no love from either half of the political divide, but his pugnaciousness is to be respected. I guess the good thing about not possessing an indoor voice is that you not only communicate what you think, but what you feel. Sullivan may piss off everyone else in the process, but people do talk about him.

Never Mind: It's been only a week, and already President Bush is taking steps to disavow the clear language of his Inauguration speech.

Why all bloggers need an "indoor voice":

If I had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, I would have been so ashamed of myself I would have spent the rest of my life cleaning out toilets for Third World orphanages or some such. But then I can't imagine having joined anything as wretched as the Klan, so maybe I would have ended up a self-righteous bloviator in the US Sentate. Virtually my entire adult life Robert Byrd has been in the US Senate and virtually every time I hear him speak my skin crawls, thinking of what he did. When I hear the press praise him as a great statesman, I want to throw up. Some things are just unforgiveable to me, like being a Klansman or a Concentration Camp Guard.

--Roger L. Simon

Granted, the KKK is pretty icky, and it is certainly a black mark on his biography that the senator joined the organization in the '40's, and an even blacker mark that he remained a vociferous opponent of civil rights (and an adversary of Martin Luther King) well into the 1960's. He will clearly have to answer to his Maker for those transgressions. But, please...comparing him with Ivan of Treblinka is just a bit hysterical, don't you think?

If everyone was forever judged by the political miscalculations they made in their youth, we would have a polity made up entirely of the boring and predictable, all alums of the College Democrats and the Young Republicans. To give just a couple of examples, Hugo Black was a member of the KKK before he became one of the most passionate supporters of civil rights on the Supreme Court. Harry Truman tried to join the Klan, but ultimately backed out when the group's anti-Catholicism proved too uncomfortable for a would-be machine politician from Kansas City. The neoconservative movement was largely founded by people who had belonged to one branch or another of the Communist Party in the late-30's. Numerous political figures today belonged to some offshoot or another of the SDS or SNCC in the late-60's, groups that ultimately evolved into terrorist organizations. Even more to Simon's point, Martin Niemoller and Claus von Stauffenberg were, at one time, members in good standing of the German National Socialist Party. People change.

The point isn't that we should forget the actions Senator Byrd took in the 1940's, it is that he should be judged the same way we would insist that we be judged: by his mature political conduct. So long as there isn't any evidence that Byrd took part in a lynching, or ever burned a cross in anger, he shouldn't be defined by what he did sixty years ago.

One of the best reasons to read the LA Times (well, that and T.J.), Michael Hiltzik, is preparing the definitive book on the fake Social Security crisis. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's columns are biting, and always fun to read. [via LA Observed]

From my mouth to God's ear: Boxer's tour de force last week has started the bandwagon moving. Boxer has always had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, but she was relatively quiet her first two terms, and usually overshadowed by Dianne Feinstein. Her landslide victory in November liberated her; her margin of victory (2.4 million votes) was almost as large as Bush's was in the whole country (3 million), so if anyone won't be intimidated by Republican triumphalism, or talk of a "Bush Mandate" it's the Fighting Senator from California.

Nope, I haven't seen any of the five nominated films this year. In fact, I haven't seen any of the nominated performances yet, and only one of the films nominated for writing (The Incredibles). It's too damn expensive to take myself to a matinee; I can only imagine what those of you with children and significant others have to do. Live-action movies are becoming more and more akin to radio drama in the early-50's, an archaism running on fumes, and the last time I checked, my TV works just fine.

The reaction of the blogosphere has been far more telling. So far, the big story seems to be not that Martin Scorcese will finally get his gold watch this year, or the unjust(?) snubbing of Paul Giamatti, or the long-unanticipated rematch between Hillary Swank and Annette Bening, but that Fahrenheit 9/11 didn't become the first documentary ever to be nominated for Best Film. Apparently, bloggers of the starboard persuasion live in an alternative universe, where controversial documentaries are given rubber-stamp nominations by the Academy as a matter of course. Those of you who have long memories might note that Hoop Dreams, The Thin Blue Line, and, of course, Roger and Me weren't even nominated for Best Documentary in the years they came out.

As much as they hate to admit, the fact that they could even contemplate the possibility that Michael Moore might go where Peter Davis, Barbara Kopple, and Maysles brothers couldn't is a testament to what a powerful film 9/11 was; after all, when was the last time the failure of a documentary to merit an Oscar nomination for best film was even noticed? AMPAS represents the geriatric wing of Hollywood, its membership disproportionately from the business end of moviemaking, and it is no surprise that more controversial fare gets shunned (remember Citizen Kane? Double Indemnity? High Noon?).

Moore fans, of course, have no right to complain: the animated film The Incredibles was the best thing shown in theatres last year, and it didn't get a best film nod either. But the obsession conservatives have with Mr. Moore is starting to get rather creepy.

Even if his participation in these ads didn't violate a half a dozen ethics rules, one would have hoped that simple class and decorum would have dissuaded Senator Coleman. And he represents a Blue State !!

My prodigious, beer-engorged gut tells me that Bush's Second Inaugural Address will be used by Democrats in the near-future the same way Kennedy's Address has been used, to great political effect, by Republicans.

Quote of the Week:

they introduced him as the honorable president of the united states. and with that lie begins the second term of a much needed abortion.

--Tony Pierce

Winning Hearts and Minds: I suppose there are more tasteful ways the government can spend our tax dollars...[Update: FEMA has now dropped the "Tsunami" game].

Liberals in Los Angeles need not feel isolated and beleaguered anymore. It took a year, but AirAmerica is finally going to cross the Blue Curtain, thanks to Clear Channel.

The "Barbara Boxer for President" bandwagon starts now...has there ever been any pick for Secretary of State that was so little respected, both inside and outside her own party, as Condi Rice? I guess you'd have to go back to William Jennings Bryan in 1913 to find someone so completely out of his depth, but at least the Boy Orator was picked to run the State Department during peacetime (he had also been right about our imperialist adventure in the Phillipines a decade earlier, the foreign policy debacle most analogous to the current situation).

I've been nominated for something called the "Koufax Award", in the category of Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. There's no money in it, and I doubt winning will help me get laid, so check out the site hosting the Sandys, randomly browse through the sites of the other nominees, and vote for one of them.

O.K., so a prominent blogger forms a political consulting partnership with another blogger, gets an account from a major Presidential candidate, and promptly discloses it, in all its gory detail, on the pages of his website. Over the next few months, a disclaimer is attached to the side of his blog, alerting people that he is working for one of the candidates he's writing about (the other blogger announces his employment, and promptly goes on hiatus for six months to work on the campaign). His employment is discussed, not only in anecdotal fashion on his website, but also in numerous profiles of the blogger in the mainstream media. In addition, the web savvy of the candidate in question is also a featured item in those stories; his understanding of new media, and, in particular, the blogosphere, becomes the definition of his candidacy.

And now, almost two years later, someone decides that it's a scandal, an "Abu Ghraib" of web punditry. This week's report on the Killian Forgeries, CBS' reactive pose when initially confronted with the evidence, and the lack of due dilligence the network performed when it received the documents, has predictably been used as a cover to attack the tenets of "objective" journalism as practiced by CBS News, as opposed to the doctrinaire agitprop produced by FoxNews and most of the blogosphere. But if anything reveals the emptiness of the traditional media, it's this story, which was published in the news section (that is, the section of the paper not edited by Julius Striecher) of the Wall Street Journal: an attempt to provide a false ideological counterpoint to the Armstrong Williams story.

That I have to devote any time to this flaming-piece-of-crap of a story makes me feel diminished, which is a poor condition to be in on a beautiful morning in Berkeley (I'm visiting my sister and nephew). What Mr. Zuniga and Mr. Armstrong did wasn't unethical, and doesn't diminish my enjoyment of their blogs (full disclosure: neither has ever included me in their blogroll, or taken note or issue with anything I've posted here). It does seem ironic that a number of bloggers who've made the most noise about this violation of "blogger ethics" are also practicing lawyers, none of whom seemed too concerned about the ethics of our own profession when it came to intentionally or recklessly disseminating the false stories of the "Swift Boat Vets". In any event, it is not morally equivalent to accepting money from the taxpayers to shill for a government policy, and not disclosing it.

Right-wing pundit Jill Stewart endorses Ahnold Ziffel's reapportionment initiative, a noble cause indeed, but for the wrong reason. Like so many opponents of gerrymandering, she supports giving the power to redraw districts to retired judges, who, as political appointees of the governor, are as much political animals as the legislators they are replacing. While using retired judges solves, at least theoretically, the problem of partisan gerrymandering (whereby one party redraws the lines to create as many potential districts for their own party as possible), it does nothing to insure against the problem of gerrymandering to protect incumbents, which is what the California State legislature did in 2001. And the current political dynamic in California, in which the Democrats have an overwhelming edge in both houses in Sacramento as well as with the state delegation in Washington, was inherited from the redistricting plan drawn up by a special panel in 1991, which Ms. Stewart views as a Golden Age. Quoth Stewart:

In 1991, Gov. Pete Wilson challenged the latest absurd gerrymander drawn up by Democrats in the state legislature. The courts were asked to step in. Eventually, the California Supreme Court sided with Wilson and temporarily took the power away from the slimy California legislature. The court ordered an independent panel of special masters to create geographically and racially accurate voting districts. In several resulting mixed districts, Democrats and Republicans were forced to compete head-on.

This temporary outbreak of democracy inspired some non-hacks to run between 1992 and 2000. Californians, largely unaware of why they suddenly had choices, elected a wave of moderate to conservative Republicans and Latino Democrats.

But mostly, after 1994, they elected Democrats. The partisan split in the state legislature following the 2000 election, the last election held under the lines drawn by the "special masters", gave the Democrats a 50-30 edge in the State Assembly, and a 26-14 lead in the Senate; under the lines drawn up by the legislature, the split after the 2002 and 2004 elections was 48-32 and 26-14. The current dominance by the Democratic Party in Sacramento is not something imposed on the people by "slimy" politicians, it's something that, apparently, the people want.

I'm sure it wasn't his intention, but winning the "Von Hoffman Award" seems to be only slightly less prestigious than the Nobel Peace Prize. [link via TMW]

My first internet feud...when will they realize that the Idiotarian Savant takes no prisoners?

Karma's a little girl: One person who may receive a measure of comfort from this week's firing of Tucker Carlson by CNN is Valerie Lakey, the sixteen-year old girl mockingly referred to as a "Jacuzzi Case" by the former Crossfire pundit. Of course, he had good reason to do so; she had been represented in her lawsuit by John Edwards, and her case invited ridicule from the smart set inside the Beltway.

When she was five, a suction tube in a child's wading pool malfunctioned, trapping the little girl. By the time she was freed, her intestines had been sucked out of her body, leaving her permanently disabled. While she will spend the rest of her life being intravenously fed and having to use colostomy bags, Mr. Carlson will have the onerous duty of bouncing from gabfest to gabfest, no doubt receiving his talking points from the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation, or maybe even a stipend from the taxpayers, a la Armstrong Williams.

An interesting junction between the Tsunami and the War on Terror: one of the few places to receive advance warning was the tiny island of Diego Garcia, which happens to house one of the many concentration camps the U.S. government has set up to imprison, without trial or due process, captured "Islamofascists".

Back from the South Pacific. The last day, spent on the island of Tahiti, was pretty much devoted to waiting to disembark for the airport. It being Sunday, the businesses in and around Papeete were closed, and as I mentioned earlier, a cruise really isn't the optimum way to visit an island destination. Actually, the ship is almost always the best part of the vacation; it serves as a luxury hotel, where you don't have to worry about exchange rates, transportation, or being over-charged on the local wares.

Roger ("I Support Gay Marriage") Simon, who spent the better part of two months last summer hyping the varied accounts of the discredited "Swift Boat Vets", and whose obsession with the "Oil for Food Scandal" has been the source of much laughter and merriment at SoCal blogger meetings, opines:

While I respect George W. Bush's evangelical Christianity, I wonder about his giving CBS a chance to be "born again" in the wake of Rathergate. If I had promulgated forged documents on this little blog and then, to this day (months later), had not fully acknowledged what I had done, I would not deserve the attention of anyone. In fact, I'd probably have been too ashamed to continue blogging. Yet CBS (Channel Two almost anywhere) still holds one of the most coveted positions in American television broadcasting.[emphasis mine]

Well, thank Leinart he didn't take his own advice.

Happy New Year (if I might make that wish without the Red State Thought Police whining about the obvious dissing of Christmas that entails) from Bora Bora, which may well be what the ancients envisioned when they thought of Paradise. The highlight of the trip so far: the feeding of the land crabs !!

There's something about 120,000 dead that concentrates the mind. I noted just a few days ago that this was likely going to be a story that would have little effect in the West, particularly America, back when the death toll was less than ten percent of what it now is. The President, comfortably ensconced at his villa for the holidays, didn't even think it was important enough to make a public statement until three days had passed. Not even he could stay silent for that long, and our nation's long tradition of stinginess when it comes to the less fortunate, whether it be in our own country or in the Third World, and public pressure to do something will even force Tom Delay and the Red State Crackerocracy to spend a non-trivial amount.

I think it's safe to say that this is going to be THE STORY for awhile; all others, including the "war on terrorism", will have to take a back seat. If it takes a disproportionate focus on the dead and missing among Western tourists in Thailand to get Americans concerned about the miasma of plagues that afflict the Third World, if we need stories about movie producers searching for missing grandchildren, or supermodels hanging on to trees for eight hours, so be it. Our interest in the lives of people outside our continent and Europe tends to focus on how much they are like us (or unlike us), what the late Edward Said called Orientalism. Understanding that it is entirely possible that more Americans may well have died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami than died on 9/11 may be the first step towards understanding that the First Principle of human existence is not Freedom, Liberty, or Democracy, but to simply live.

Our objective should always be how we can create a global community where the simple act of living is not threatened by hunger, eradicable diseases, filthy water, inadequate medical care, and plain ignorance and superstition. How people choose who governs them (if at all) is a secondary, or even tertiary, matter. It reminds me of the controversial moment in Fahrenheit 9/11, the one that pissed off so many Michael Moore's critics on the Right: the scene where the kid is flying a kite before our invasion. Moore was criticized for implying that Iraq was some sort of idyllic society under Saddam, when in fact he was pointing out that even in one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the history of humankind, a normality could exist where children could play in the streets and vendors could sell their wares, without bombs falling and insurgents battling Marines for control of the cities. It wasn't perfect, and it would have been intolerable for almost every American, but in many ways, it beat the alternative we imposed on them.

It was clear when Bush attacked Iraq that the concerns of the Iraqi people were of no concern to him, or else he wouldn't have picked an arbitrary fight with a nation not threatening us and killed tens of thousands of its civilians. Even now, the upcoming elections in that country seem likely to simply substitute the despotism of a strongman with the oligarchy of an elite, without improving the daily lives of its people in any material way. The basic wants of Iraqis, though, are no different than our own, or those of the people of Sri Lanka: to be able to be reasonably assured that we can survive another day.

The horror in the Indian Ocean this past week should remind us that everybody, Americans and Thais, Africans and Indonesians, are interconnected, and that no matter what unimportant differences in our politics, religions, and cultures we might have, our common humanity binds us. When any part of our world suffers, it should impact us as well.

I'm beginning to think that a cruise ship is the wrong way to visit a tropical paradise. The whole point, I think, of going to a place like the Marquesas is to enjoy the beauty and splendid isolation, and to do that requires spending a few days there. Just stopping for a few hours, when the most an honest tourist can do is walk around the pier and (maybe) buy a few odds and ends, just doesn't cut it.

About a year ago, I commented on another site that many more people would die of starvation and diseases that were eradicated years ago in the U.S. than would die of terrorism. The author of that site responded by claiming that people like myself were of the "nothing to see here, just keep moving past the World Trade Center" wing of the Democratic Party. It is remarkable that, at least on a superficial level, our country can change so dramatically (and for the worse) over the death three years ago of 3,000 people, but an event that has killed at least four times as many people will cause barely a ripple. No wonder the rest of the world feels so little amity towards our cause, whatever that may be.

Merry Christmas: A very surreal cruise, so far. After a nine-hour flight, we decamped in Papeete, exhausted and a bit staggered to go from an air conditioned airplane to the tropical humidity of Tahiti. There's usually a ceremonial bit at the beginning, where a band plays "Margaritaville" and we wave farewell, but since the ship didn't sail until 4:00 a.m., that just wasn't practical. Not much life so far.

The first stop was the island of Moorea, which is quite beautiful if you are into that sort of thing, but since I don't snorkel or sunbathe, I made only a perfunctory walk off the pier, realized there wasn't a resort within walking distance, and returned to the ship. Also, this is French Polynesia, so good luck watching the NFL.

The Tahitian Princess is a relatively small cruise ship. The cruiseline purchased the beast from the Renaissance cruiseline after that company went under in the aftermath of 9/11, and have pretty much left the ship intact; even the on-board dining rooms have the same names they did. Still, as anybody who has cruised before will tell you, the larger the ship, the less enjoyable the cruise. On a ship this size, you get to know a lot more people in a shorter time, and all the amenities that one comes to expect are delivered, but in a smaller, more accessible space.

We sail for a couple of days, which, of course, means two days of the social event of any cruise, Bingo. So once again, Merry Christmas to believer and infidel alike.

Gone to South Pacific for long overdue vacation. Will be blogging even more sporadically than normal. Bush lied.

Ten Votes: How would you like to have been the 2004 GOTV director for the Washington Republican Party today?

Not even Nat Hentoff, who is usually willing to roll over when it comes to the Senate asserting its "advise and consent" function with judicial nominees, can stomach the Bush Administration's architect of torture, Alberto Gonzalez.

The terrorists won:

F.B.I. memorandums portray abuse of prisoners by American military personnel in Iraq that included detainees' being beaten and choked and having lit cigarettes placed in their ears, according to newly released government documents.

The documents, released Monday in connection with a lawsuit accusing the government of being complicit in torture, also include accounts by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who said they had seen detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, being chained in uncomfortable positions for up to 24 hours and left to urinate and defecate on themselves. An agent wrote that in one case a detainee who was nearly unconscious had pulled out much of his hair during the night.

(snip)

Another message sent to F.B.I. officials including Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau's top lawyer, recounted witnessing detainees chained in interrogation rooms at Guantánamo, where about 550 prisoners are being held in a detention camp on the edge of a naval base.

The agent, whose name was deleted from the document, wrote on July 29, 2004: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more."

The agent said that on another occasion, the air-conditioning had been turned up so high that a chained detainee was shivering. The agent said the military police had explained what was happening by saying that interrogators from the previous day had ordered the treatment and "that the detainee was not to be moved."

The agent also wrote: "On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

N.Y. Times, 12-21-2004

In all the talk about the President's propasal to abolish Social Security in favor of private accounts, the elephant in the room, the issue the media seems to be avoiding, is Iraq. Bush is asking the American people to take an enormous risk in abandoning a program that has worked successfully for almost seventy years, because there is a possibility, in a worst-case-scenario, that it might have trouble making full payments to retirees forty (or fifty, depending on who's doing the estimate) years from now. Most of us aren't policy wonks on the issue, so we pretty much have to make assumptions as to who is giving us reliable information about the problem. Even if you don't believe the President lied about Iraq's possession of WMD's, you have to admit his statements leading into war were reckless, and for the most part, untrue, and he didn't go out of his way to avail himself of differing viewpoints. And it's also safe to say that his handling of the economy has not been reassuring; if anything, he won reelection in spite of his economic policies, not because of them.

So what, if anything, has changed since March, 2003 that would give us any reason to trust him now?

Were he alive today, Josef Goebbels would have a blog, linked to approvingly (and even feted) by Instapundit, Roger Simon and Hugh Hewitt for his scathing attacks on liberals, Democrats, Hollywood, and, of course, the "MSM". His anti-Semitism would be explained away, or perhaps tidied up a bit, in the same way that the fundamentalist base of the Republican Party is excused for its politically incorrect view that non-believers in Jesus will spend eternity in hell. Come to think of it, as long as the former Minister of Propaganda can find it in his heart to support Israel, and to transfer his invective from Jews to A-rabs, he might find himself profiled in Time Magazine as its "Blogger of the Year".


Which brings me to the news that Powerline, the website that was instrumental in publicizing the discredited tale of the "Swift Boat Vets", has been named "Blog of the Year" by Time Magazine (Red State president George Bush was named "Man" of the year by the weekly). Considering how 2004 will be seen as the year in which the early promise of the blogosphere to produce "journalism of the individual" was perverted into a medium of lies, gossip and parroted talking points for whatever ideological agenda you follow, the award is well-deserved. Even the story profiled in the magazine, the exposure of the fake TANG documents used on 60 Minutes II, was fitting: a trivial scandal ginned up by the Internet (Bush's non-service in the National Guard in the waning days of the Vietnam War), reported on breathlessly by the leading TV news mag, only to have the producers suckered by obviously forged documents that dealt with a relatively minor point (and one that, to this day, Bush has not denied). The very thing that gives blogs credibility, that they originate outside of the mainstream of media commerce, from the individual, writing alone at his computer, is what makes them such an indispensible tool for the powerful.

Birth of a Nation: To no one's surprise, California was one of the Bluest of Blue States in the last election, a point that was confirmed by the official election tally released this week. In spite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Golden State remains one of the ripest of targets for potential terrorists, Kerry defeated Bush by just under 10%, or 1,235,000 votes. Although the margin narrowed for the third straight Presidential election, Bush's pick-up in the vote total only amounted to 1.8%, or less than 58,000 votes from his 2000 performance. In fact, outside of the five counties abutting Los Angeles County, where Bush picked up close to a quarter million votes on his Democratic rival, Kerry dramatically improved on Gore's performance last time. Critically, Bush failed to provide much competition, or make up significant ground, in Los Angeles County, which provided Kerry his third largest margin in the country (behind only Cook County, Illinois, and the District of Columbia).

Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact of 2004: NaziPundit hams it up with Nuke LaLoosh.

With only a couple of states waiting to be certified, the final score is...Bush 50.73%, Kerry 48.26%. Just under 2 1/2%, or three million votes on the dot. Argh.

Bush Lied?: Howard Owens has returned to the blogosphere, at a new address.

C'mon, if the CIA was behind a pro-occupation blog in Iraq, do you honestly suppose they would use sub-literate morons as their front?

UPDATE: One of the "sub-literate morons" responds, in kind. The battle is joined !!

I'm with Atrios on this one. What, exactly, is supposed to be the outrage? I would assume that the whole point of his using a pseudonym was so that he could maintain some segregation between his comings and goings and those of "Atrios"; once Duncan Black began to take more of an open role with the other blog, he "outed" himself. I don't see that as being ethically comparable to a blogger secretly being on the payroll of a political campaign, although even that isn't really a big deal, either.

When I first started this site back in April of '02, one of the reasons blogging was so attractive to me was my frustration with the lazy, sloppy, predictable thinking of so many of the people who got paid for pontificating about politics. Case in point: this article, which has received much publicity in the blogosphere, calling for the Democrats to "purge" certain elements, including Michael Moore and Move-On, from the party. The "Moore Wing", the argument goes, cost the Democrats this election by creating the appearance that the party was soft-on-terror, giving Bush the 3+% boost in the electorate necessary for him to prevail. Using the creation of the A.D.A. in 1947 as the inspiration, the Democratic Party should boot out the offending elements, just as Truman, Humphrey, et al. did the same sixty years ago to the Wallacites.

Several things are wrong with that prescription, even if we put aside the merits of the writer's position on fighting terrorism. One, the so-called Michael Moore/Move-On Wing of the party doesn't exist, since neither is part of the party in the first place. Moore, for example, famously supported Ralph Nader four years ago, and as far as I can tell, didn't go out of his way to campaign for Democrats down the ticket this time; if he went out and made speeches for Brad Carson or Tony Knowles during the campaign, the public record is pretty silent. Moore has a following today because he makes entertaining, provocative movies that lots and lots of people watch, and for all the talk about the mistakes and questionable assertions he sometimes throws into his documentaries, he is still, compared with much of the media and blogosphere, an honest voice. When he loses that, the party won't need to "purge" him, since he will no longer have a following to worry about.

Even if we are to assume, as the writer does, that the exit polls indicated that Bush's improvement over his performance in 2000 resulted from the perception that he was "tougher" on the terrorists than Kerry, that Kerry would have won back that segment with a more "serious" view towards the problem, and that Michael Moore and Move-On don't take the problem seriously (and anyone who has seen F9/11 knows that's not the case), you still run into the problem that the "wing" of the party you are trying to purge is at least as large as the aforementioned segment of the voters that voted for Bush last month, ie., 3+ percent. So we can call that a draw.

The most telling thing about the article is that it's clear the writer would have come to the same conclusion if John Kerry had done marginally better in Ohio. Clearly, the writer isn't attempting to formulate an objective analysis of what happened November 2, but trying instead to use the results to justify his desire to marginalize those who disagree with him. To put it another way, if Kerry was busy right now selecting his Cabinet, does anyone believe that the writer would have advocated rewarding the Moore Wing of the party for the victory they had just provided the Democrats? Of course not; he would be calling it a test of Kerry's leadership for him to defy his base, and exclude from counsel those, like Michael Moore and Move-On, who opposed the invasion of Iraq (and, as this writer notes, a stance for which history has already vindicated them).

Secondly, the writer may not be old enough or historically aware enough to understand this, but asking the Democrats to emulate what its governing wing did in 1947 is not exactly the most propitious historical precedent to follow. First, a history lesson: in 1944, the party bosses, realizing the FDR was ailing and that he had no obvious heir other than the Vice President, maneuvered the then-Number Two, Henry Wallace, off the ticket in favor of Harry Truman. Wallace, however, still a powerful figure within the party, remained in the Cabinet after Roosevelt's reelection that fall.

When FDR died in April, 1945, followed shortly thereafter by the Allied victory in Europe, Truman became President, and a split developed as to how to deal with the fact that our erstwhile friend, the Soviet Union, had effectively seized all of Eastern Europe in the aftermath. Wallace supported a more accomodationist position, spoke out against the Truman Doctrine, and was cashiered in 1946. The Democrats took a shellacking in the mid-term elections, fell out of power in Congress for the first time in a generation, and, divided between two different factions that claimed to be the inheritors of FDR's mantle, looked around for a way to regroup.

Hence, in 1948, the faction supporting Henry Wallace formed the Progressive Party to challenge Harry Truman, while another group, claiming to be liberal anti-communists, founded the Americans for Democratic Action (A.D.A.), and tried to dump Harry Truman from the ticket and replace him with Dwight Eisenhower. When that went nowhere, and Truman's renomination was assured, they tried a different tack: co-opt the Progressives on another issue on which they had broken with the national Democratic Party, civil rights. The Democrats had begun to make inroads in the North with the growing black vote during the Roosevelt Administration, in no small part due to Henry Wallace, but after FDR's death the party's position was tenuous, what with a large regional bloc devoted to the principles of apartheid. So a series of small but significant steps were taken, culminating in the passage of a pro-civil rights plank at the 1948 Convention.

The Democrats, of course, won in 1948, thanks to a worse-than-expected performance by Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, which was due in large part to Truman's historical breakthrough in capturing a significant chunk of the black vote. Here, though, the story starts to get rather grim. The decade following that election saw not the rise of A.D.A.-style liberalism, but of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, as well as names long-forgotten to history, like Karl Mundt, Carl Curtis, William Knowland, and Strom Thurmond. Eisenhower was elected, as a Republican, for two terms, and the Republican Party controlled the Presidency, pretty much unabated, until 1992. The breakthough with black voters, so important in the 1948 victory, and so vital in giving the Democratic Party its greatest accomplishments in changing the face of America, would have its own political consequences down the road.

In fact, it's hard to see that period as being anything other than an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic Party, at least in its role as electoral mechanism for candidates. After 1954, the Democrats were resigned to controlling Congress, with its unwieldy and ultimately unworkeable coalition of Southern Dixiecrats and Northern liberals, until even that began to break down in 1980. When a Democrat won the Presidency, it was due either to running a novelty candidate (JFK, Jimmy Carter) or to a freakish historical event (assasination of JFK boosting LBJ, or Nixon's resignation and subsequent pardon leading to Carter's victory). And whether it was Tailgunner Joe denouncing the Truman Administration as a Communist front, or Bush the Elder using a veto of a bill requiring students to pledge allegiance to the flag as an excuse to challenge his patriotism, the Democrats were consistently, and successfully, portrayed as the "weaker" of the two parties when it came time to defend America. As far as capturing swing voters is concerned, making the party inhospitable to Henry Wallace failed miserably.

So clearly, the long-term fortunes of the Democratic Party are not necessarily served best by "purging" anyone. Nor should they be, since the whole notion of a political party in America purging someone for a politically-incorrect position is a noxious one, to say the least. It should be noted, in fact, that Henry Wallace wasn't "purged" by anyone; he left the Democratic Party, after it became clear that his position on issues pertaining to the Soviet Union would no longer advance his fortunes. If anything, one of the reasons we "fought" the Cold War in the first place was to repudiate the notion that some Central Committee or Party Directorate could have a monopoly on the truth. American political parties allow for grass roots participation and influence over their direction in ways unimagined in totalitarian states.

American political parties are often frustratingly cumbersome, but one of the ways in which they have made this country great is by being inclusive. In the end, that inclusiveness is empowering, since it puts the individual in a much better position in our democracy than members of more traditional political parties have.

This actually happened: Sitting in my neighborhood sports bar, nursing a buzz and trying to get over the fact that my alma mater got screwed by the BCS, I happened to notice my favorite bartendress was carrying a heavy table from one room into another, at the request of one of the patrons. I asked if she "needed a hand", and when she said yes, I politely applauded (sorry, it's an old Bob Newhart joke). Anyways, the patron she was doing that for turns around, laughing, and it's none other than...Flavor Flav. He turned around, wearing the trademark clock around his neck, complimented me on my bon mot, and gave me a soul handshake before sitting down and holding court with his friends (no Brigitte Nelson, though). The blessings of living in a celebrity haven....