YBK [Part 12]: Bankruptcy filings were up 14% last month from the comparable total in June, 2004. Even more troubling, the number of filing last month increased from the previous month, which is almost unheard of; the summer months traditionally see a lull in personal filings. Yikes.

The Cancer of Hate: It seems to be metastasizing. Oriana Fallaci pens her Mein Kampf.

Defamer points out that while love letters purportedly written by Jennifer "Overrated" Aniston are going for over $100,000 on E-Bay, fake love letters not written by the former "Friends" star are going for over $12.

YBK [Part 11]: Houston, we have a problem...bankruptcy filings were up 12% nationwide for the months of April, May and June of this year. Also, the housing market is beginning to flatline in "bubble states", with national figures now being kept high only through increased sales in the Midwest and of multiple-unit housing, both of which had heretofore seen a much lower rate in their expansion of value. Consumers will also soon receive the unpleasant surprise of having their monthly credit card payments double.

[Previous YBK posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.]

I think I've mentioned this a few times before, but right now we are living through a unique period in the history of the Democratic Party. For the first time ever, the party is really competitive only in its pursuit of one branch of government: the Presidency. Our nominee has captured a plurality of the vote in 3 of the last 4 elections, and the one time we didn't, we lost to an incumbent President in the middle of a war with an improving economy, by 2.4% of the vote. In the last two elections, the Democratic nominee lost the election by one state.

Down ticket, the Republicans have a mathematical advantage in Congressional races that is disproportionate to their actual vote totals, so even though the Democrats and Republicans are roughly even nationwide, the GOP will still win a larger share of seats even if the vote is divided 50-50. By having only a tiny edge in the party preference, the Republicans gain a significant lead in Congress. And, of course, the federal courts have a partisan slant in favor of the Republicans that will probably continue through the lifetime of most of the people reading this blog.

That's why it is hard to take the DLC seriously when they hold one of their annual corporate junkets, and take turns knifing every liberal in the back. It's not just a counter-productive strategy; obviously, the minority party can never hope to gain its footing if significant players on the political scene insist on violating what should be the Democrats' Eleventh Commandment. More to the point, the DLC brings nothing to the table. Nothing.

Gore and Kerry may have run to the left in their losing efforts the last two elections, but at least they came close enough to get screwed by the other guys. The Deaniacs and Move On may have questionable appeal south of the Mason-Dixon line, but at they find a way to win elections everywhere else. But the "centrist" hacks the DLC consistently put up for the down-ticket races have gotten their asses handed to them the past decade. As blogger Steve Gilliard, in discussing Hillary Clinton's pandering to the DLC, points out:

Her enemies will ALWAYS paint her as a liberal, regardless of her real stands. Her name is a byword for liberalism and corruption among the right. They will fight her to their last breath. The DLC wants to use the same failed playbook it has always used, run down the middle of the road and lose to the GOP.

At the same time, all this does is alienate liberal supporters who are perplexed by her insane and pointless manuvering. Video games, abortion, all these issues do not help her. They just make her look weak and vaciliating.

John Kerry ran to the left and lost by 110K votes. He didn't hide from being a liberal and he came close enough to winning that Bush was sweating out election day. So what lesson does Clinton take from that: run to the middle. Despite every poll, every focus group that wants a strong, active Democratic party, the Democratic Loser Council wants to stay in the middle.

She keeps this up, she'll be watching John Kerry or John Edwards take the oath of office in 2009.

Why does the DLC not get it? Why does the DLC think that they can recreate 1992 when they can't even hold on to Senate seats. All their bright shining boys like Brad Carson got waxed by hard core GOP nutters. Why does she think Vichy can do anything more than appease and lose?

In other words, getting advice from the DLC on winning elections is kind of like listening to Colin Montgomerie give advice on how to win PGA tournaments. As someone who agrees with the DLC on issues like welfare reform, the death penalty, and free trade, and who has a decidedly agnostic position on abortion, it irritates me no end when this influential group wastes so much of its time running down allies who will work their asses off to get Democrats elected, including Hillary Clinton should she win the nomination in '08. Why don't they try to win something, somewhere in 2006 first?

Twelve Hours: Depending on the type of shredder used, the White House may have been able to shred up to 10,000 pages of Plame-related evidence on the night of September 29, 2003. And that's just with one shredder !

Some of you may have noticed some new additions to my blogroll, as well as other bloggers who are now missing. The explanation is, I've discovered the joys of syndication, and I can now track many more sites than I could before. The blogroll has always been mainly a tool of convenience for me: the sites listed on the right are the sites I read every day, and what has resulted is simply a lazy man's way of assembling different links without having to go through the trouble of saving them on my computer. Thanks to RSS/Atom feeds, I don't need to do that anymore, so I can prune the blogroll accordingly.

In the past, my standard for blogrolling was threefold: it had to be a site I visited everyday; it had to be published by someone accountable (ie., no pseudonyms, unless I have actually met the proprietor); or, in the alternative, it had to be someone who linked to me first. That's it; no political test, no e-mails suggesting a "link swap", or anything like that.

Recently, something has begun to bother me about a number of sites that I link to. The use of substitute bloggers, to maintain a site while the real author goes on vacation, gets operated on, or deals with events in the real world, has started to become more prevalent with the Big Feet in the blogosphere. Rather than losing that all-important ranking in the Blogger Ecosystem, or see any diminishment in the number of page visits that advertisers demand, the guys at the top of the mountain have started foisting assorted friends, flunkies and knob polishers in their stead.

I happen to believe that practice pertrates a fraud on the public. And obviously, I'm not talking about group blogs, such as the Kos universe or Hit&Run, or sites like the ones run by Drum, Marshall or Alterman (whose site is more of an on-line daily newsletter than a blog), where other writers appear as a routine policy. I'm referring, instead, to blogs such as the one you're reading, only bigger, sites that present themselves to the world as the individual expression of the person (or persons) writing them.

There is simply no substitute for the original. Bringing in a replacement while you go to the Bahamas shows utter contempt for your audience, who, after all, have made it a point to visit your blog because they want to hear your voice, not some understudy's. It is also degrading to the understudy, because it puts him in the position of an underling, existing only to maintain your traffic levels, not to develop his own audience or communicate his views.

So as to this noisome practice, I draw a line in the sand. Henceforth, my blogroll will omit any reference to blogs, even blogs that link to me, during any period that a substitute blogger is employed in place of the real thing. I regret the inevitable massive loss in traffic to those sites, but someone has to say no to this scam if this emerging medium is going to maintain any ethical standards.

This is precisely the sort of thing that will make people like me suspicious of John Roberts. Not a "dues-paying member" of the Federalist Society, just a Grand Kleagle....

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that actress Mira Sorvino has purchased a home in the Venice section of Los Angeles. The Times, which won seven Pulitzer Prizes the past two years, also published the exclusive that Ian Ziering (TV's "Steve Sanders", from Beverly Hills 90210) has put his home in Vail, Colorado up for sale.

As a habit, I never read Nicholas Kristof columns, largely because his topics don't interest me, as well as the fact that his writing style is maybe the blandest possessed by any Times Columnist since Flora Lewis. But tomorrow's column, about the "shame" of liberals in ignoring North Korea's horrendous human rights record, certainly grabbed my attention. And here I was, thinking that my willful refusal to denounce Maximum Leader Kim jong-il would remain undetected...or could it simply be that progressives can do next to nothing for the North Koreans, insofar as we're not the ones in power at the moment. For an example of what a column should be, without the strawmen and desperate attempts to overcome writer's block, read Frank Rich's contribution tomorrow, on PlameGate.

Winston Churchill has been treated kindly by history, deservedly so, for his leadership of Great Britain during World War II (even if it essentially meant giving inspiring speeches to his countrymen while waiting for Hitler to do something really stupid, like attack the Soviet Union or declare war on us), but it also helpful to remember that even great men can have scummy qualities as well. Here's a passage by Churchill, in his own words, that is replete with the sort of racism that would make David Duke blush. No wonder post-colonial Africa is such a mess.

...but they grind exceedingly fine: According to the Guardian, the PlameGate investigation is now examining the issue of who forged the Niger Documents that were at the center of the controversy concerning Joe Wilson. This has been such a hot potato that the Senate committee charged with investigating the intelligence failures that led us into the debacle in Iraq refused to pursue the matter. Special prosecutor Fitzgerald's inquiry is currently focusing on whether elements within the U.S. Government collaborated with Iraqi exiles to spin the bogus documents, then presumably leaking Mrs. Wilson's identity to cover their tracks. [link via Digby]

Although I respect their passion on this issue, these bloggers are in danger of jumping the tracks over the use of what has become a rather banal piece of political jargon. Although the term "strict constructionist" has been warped in past use as code for judical conservatism, it actually refers to a judicial philosophy that is separate and distinct from "originalism". A contructionist looks to the "plain meaning" of the text, with the framer's intent becoming important only if the text is capable of several meanings; for the most part, the "clear meaning" will be the "framer's intent". An originalist is only concerned with the framer's intent; if the drafter(s) of the text meant something different than what the text appears to be saying, then you go with what the drafters wanted, and ignore the plain meaning of the statute today.

The example we were always given in law school concerned civil rights cases. An originalist ignored the literal meaning of the words in the 14th Amendment, for example, and attempted to assay what its drafters thought back in the late-1860's when they drafted those words, in order to give them meaning. Since many of the drafters were comfortable with Jim Crow laws in the North at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified, the "separate but equal" doctrine could survive constitutional muster when reconciling the clear language of the 14th Amendment with the actual beliefs of its drafters. A "strict constructionist", on the other hand, emphasized both the clear language of the amendment and the impact "separate but equal" laws would have on African-Americans, and saw a contradiction. The majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson was an originalist one, while Justice Harlan's dissent was based on a strict interpretation of the actual language of the 13th and 14th Amendments.

In all honesty, I'm a bit creeped out by any judicial candidate discussing (or being asked about) his "philosophy", unless that philosophy is essentially that he will be fair, unbiased and without prejudice. Although the example listed above is a clear case of a strict interpretation of the Constitution leading to a better, more humane result than an originalist reading, there are cases (such as the meaning of "freedom of speech") where the views of the Framers are more expansive than those who take the strict constructionist view, ie., that the right only extends to the barring of legislation infringing on vocal expressions. Depending on your ideology, one man's activist judge is another's strict constructionist. Possessing a "philosophy" should be a disqualifying demerit for any judicial nominee, and one of the few hopeful signs so far about Roberts is that he doesn't appear to be wed to any.

How is it possible to defame a child molestor?

'60's YD'er Makes Good: Perhaps the most effective Congressman in California history, Henry Waxman, has started a diary over at the Daily Kos site. My dad would be so proud....

There have been some bizarre analogies involving events in Europe sixty years ago with the events of today, but this has got to be the strangest: critics of the Iraqi Adventure are just like...Jews being marched to the ovens ?!?

Small Bombings in London; Not Any Dead. Sorry, I couldn't resist....

Ann Coulter, plagiarist? You make the call...apparently, according to resident ilsagrapher Scoobie Davis, this has been the recurring M.O. throughout her career. This incident several years ago is an even more egregious example, since the work she ripped off was turned into a bestselling book.

24,865: Those are the number of violence-related civilian casualties in Iraq in the twenty-four months after hostilities started in March, 2003, according to this study. [link via The Poor Man]

This blogger seems to think that Bush has not flip-flopped on the issue of whether he will cashier anyone who leaked the identity of our secret agents to reporters out of sheer spite, and, in fact, makes a compelling case that Bush has been an oily sleezebag on this issue from the start(although it's unclear whether the original promise to "take care of" anyone who violated the law really amounts to the same thing as "fire"). I sometimes wonder whether the hard right really knows they aren't doing the President any favors by defending the likes of Karl Rove.

Terrific NY Times piece, on the type of person who becomes a paparazzo:

He sits at nightfall in his home office in the San Fernando Valley, a dimly lighted room except for the glow emanating from his computer, his flat-screen television, and a half-dozen other state-of-the-art gadgets. He is showing off a little: not just his high-tech toys, but the quality of his information.

"That's the thing that's valuable," Mr. Griffin says, explaining how his cash payoffs to tipsters can come to $100,000 a year. "The best ones are the ones who do it for pure greed. Because nothing else colors their judgment."

He opens a drawer, pulls out a few stacks of paper. Here, he says, are this week's scheduled movements of every famous passenger of a major limousine company in Los Angeles. He has an employee of the limo company on retainer, with bonuses "if there's results."

Here, too, are what Mr. Griffin describes as the passenger manifests of every coast-to-coast flight on American Airlines, the biggest carrier at Los Angeles International Airport. "I get the full printout," he says. "If they fly any coastal flight, I know. I can also find anybody in the world within 24 hours, I guarantee it. If they don't mask the tail number on a private plane, I'll find it." He says he has law-enforcement officers on his payroll, too, and can have a license plate checked in an hour on weekdays, 20 minutes on weekends.

(snip)

He pulls out a photocopy of what he says are the transcribed notes of a top film actress's examination by her doctor, and points to a reference to her breast implants.

What's really sad is that these people's lives revolve around getting a candid photo of...Alyssa Milano? Anyways, why can't the local paper get entertainment reporting like this?

The Supremes: Rumor has it that Edith "Joy" Clement will be nominated tonight to fill the O'Connor seat on the Supreme Court. Clement has been a federal judge for fourteen years, and an appellate judge for four; both times she was confirmed by 99-0 votes. People for the American Way has a page sampling some of her appellate decisions, but if this is the worst they have to offer, she shouldn't have any problems getting confirmed.

UPDATE: The timing of the nomination hasn't been lost on the media. According to Reuters:

Sources said the timing of an announcement had been moved up in part to deflect
attention away from a CIA leak controversy that has engulfed Bush's top
political adviser, Karl Rove. A Republican strategist with close to the White
House described Clement as the leading candidate. "She's pretty
untouchable," he said. "Plus, it helps take Rove off the front pages
for a week."

Unless, of course, it isn't Clement after all; ABC is reporting that an "informed source" told them that Judge Clement was notified this afternoon that Bush had decided to go in "a different direction".

UPDATE [II]: CNN is now reporting that Bush has picked John Roberts for the spot. Good--another white boy. We can filibuster this guy and not lose any sleep...

UPDATE [III]: ...or maybe we should just sleep on it. Several progressive bloggers are actually quite sanguine about this nomination, with one posting that it indicates how far Bush's star has fallen in the last few weeks that he has to settle for Roberts. We don't have to even think about a filibuster until after the Judiciary Committee decides whether to forward his nomination to the floor, which probably won't be til late September anyway.

Remember Heath Shuler? A former high first round pick by Washington (as a Blue Stater, this site has a policy of not printing racist slurs unless it's really, really necessary, so the team's nickname will be omitted), Shuler's NFL career quickly fizzled. But just to show that he's no Ryan Leaf or Todd Marinovich, Mr. Shuler has decided to run for Congress next year in North Carolina, as a Democrat !! That's right; there is actually a real life, honest-to-goodness, highly-paid white pro athlete who is also a Democrat. I haven't been so shocked since discovering John Malcovich was a Bush supporter.

Has any writer so completely and utterly destroyed whatever remaining bit of personal integrity he had faster than Christopher Hitchens? Going from an inheritor of the Mantle of Orwell and a self-proclaimed "contrarian" just a few years ago to a Pegleresque crank has got to cause anyone whiplash...I blame it all on Rickey Ray. Here, the once-inventive provocateur parrots Mehlman's Talking Points on the Plame Affair, including a reference to the discredited accusation that Valerie Plame "authorized" her husband's mission to Niger, and he might be the last person who still believes in the authenticity of the documents in question.

It would be like shooting fish in a barrel to come up with counter-examples for how he reacted when Clinton was President. He's gone from a defender and protector of Salman Rushdie to a supporter of the Bush Administration leaking leaking bogus information to discredit political opponents. The man has no bottom.

What earthly difference should it make to Mr. Alterman (or anyone else, for that matter) that the "extremely capable" Democratic opponent of George Pataki one election was African-American? Would it have been o.k. if the NY Times had endorsed Pataki over an "extremely capable" white nominee? Does the Grey Lady have some sort of responsibility to rubber-stamp endorsements of African-American Democrats?

Anyways, if whoever was so "extremely capable", how come he was running as a Democrat in New York, but still couldn't win?

What I Learned This Weekend While Attending My Cousin Dean's Wedding:

1. Never, ever go to Las Vegas in July unless you really, really have to. Lord, it was a scorcher. On the outskirts of the city, where the wedding took place, the thermometer got as high as 118°, and even at night, it rarely dipped below 100. Man was not meant to live in such an environment. Of course, casinos are always air-conditioned....

2. Avoid video blackjack. The odds are even more decisively in favor of the house than they are at the tables, where you at least have more options to double down, and the speed at which you can play ensures that at some point, you will encounter the bane of any player, which is the prolonged losing streak. If you must play video blackjack, do not drink. Besides the fact that the casino is comping the drink precisely so that you stay longer, you will end up doing things without thinking that you would never do at the tables. There is nothing better at killing the human spirit and shredding any sense of dignity than accidently hitting on 20 (twice !!), unless it's hitting on 19, getting dealt an ace, but still losing to the dealer's 21.

3. If you like to gamble, avoid the Strip. Most of the high-rent hotels aim for higher rollers, so the table minimums can be prohibitive for a working-class stiff like myself (my family stayed at The Venetian, which is tres posh). Downtown is less pretentious, has lower table limits, and you can even find places where they play single-deck blackjack, if you happen to possess certain Rain Man-like talents. Hotels on the Strip may be more comfortable, but you are not honor-bound to patronize their facilities, and the Downtown casinos are only a cheap cab ride away.

4. Never go to Vegas on a weekend of a major event, such as a title fight or a poker championship, both of which converged on the city at the same time Saturday. It pretty much made the south end of the Strip unnegotiable, so going to the MGM Grand or Mandalay Bay (two favorite stops of mine) was out of the question.

5. (For L.A. residents only) Always assume that at some point on a weekend visit, you will hit a major traffic jam both coming and going. Although there is plenty of room to do so, the federal government has never seen its way to construct a third lane of traffic for the I-15, so any accident or mishap will effect cars hundreds of miles away. Just accept the things you have no control over.

Little Green Futbol [III]: In the wake of last week's bombings, British authorities fear this alliance, between soccer hooligans and anti-Muslim hate groups. Of particular concern to authorities is the opening-day match in England's Championship (ie., AAA-livel minor) League between Millwall, which is notorious for its racist, out-of-control fans, and Leeds. [link via OffWing Opinion]

Claiming that he could run for reelection and defend his honor, but not do both at the same time, Randy "Duke" Cunningham announced this afternoon he would not seek another term. I suppose the next question is whether he will resign before his current term expires.

Ziffel's on the Take: Meanwhile, back on Planet Hollywood, the LA Times is reporting that the Governor of California, the man who holds what is arguably the Second Toughest Job in America, agreed to become a paid consultant for a number of fitness magazines. In exchange for his consulting, the governor is set to receive up to $8 million, firmly cementing his place in the party of Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham.

More suspiciously, Ahnolt vetoed a bill last year that would have regulated the prescription of "dietary supplements" to high school athletes, which would have directly impacted the business of the principal advertisers to said magazines:

Schwarzenegger's two muscle magazines are crammed with ads for performance-enhancing dietary supplements promising chiseled bodies and surges of energy. The 257-page August issue of Muscle & Fitness contains 110 pages of ads for supplements, from creatine ethyl ester to anabolic/androgenic "absorption technology."

The governor used his regular column in the June issue of Muscle & Fitness to defend the supplement industry. He vowed to oppose any effort to restrict sales of the products in California, writing that he is "so energized to fight any attempt to limit the availability of nutritional supplements."

An article in the August issue of Muscle & Fitness said Schwarzenegger had "lent his support" to a new lobbying group that would work to promote nutritional supplements. "The governor also made it clear that he will remain a phone call away as the coalition progresses," the magazine said.

Gives a new meaning to the phrase, "pay to play"....

Good primer on the underlying story in RoveGate, ie., the accuracy of the conclusions drawn by Joe Wilson following his trip to Niger, from Bloomberg News.

Among the rhetorical excesses in our current politics that I find most annoying is the habit of calling people you disagree with "liars". A lie is an intentional or reckless misstatement of fact, made in an attempt to mislead or deceive others. It is not simply making a false statement; the liar has to either know that the statement was false, or be indifferent to its accuracy (in fact, it's even theoretically possible to "lie" when making a true statement). Scott McLelland stating that Karl Rove was not involved in the Plame leak two years ago is only a lie if he had reason to know, at the time he said it, that Rove was the leaker. Joe Wilson denying that his wife recommended him to her superiors at the CIA is a lie only if there's proof he knew at that time she had done so.

Et tu, Rupert?: Even FoxNews hasn't bought the latest spin about Karl Rove being an intrepid whistleblower. {link via AmericaBlog}

From the Beeb:

The NHL and the players' union say they have struck a deal in principle that will finally end their labour row.

"Labour row", eh?

Prothonotary Warbler Revisited: Are the various apologias by GOP spindoctors and their acolytes in the blogosphere for Karl Rove beginning to sound nauseatingly similar? Maybe that's because those are actually real-life, honest-to-goodness "talking points" they're parroting...btw, is there any evidence that Joe Wilson has ever claimed he was personally sent to Niger to investigate by Dick Cheney or the V.P.'s office? The original N.Y. Times column that he wrote (ie., the column at issue at the time his wife's position was betrayed) asserts that he went to Niger at the behest of the CIA. Josh Marshall and Tim Grieve also answer no, while professional media scourge Bob Somerby says, well, maybe, kind of, he did.

Much of the talking points center around the argument that what Mr. Rove told Time Magazine (and possibly others) was true, and/or that he was motivated by the desire to dissuade them from publishing an inaccurate story. Such an argument does Mr. Rove no favors. In cases involving espionage, treason, or the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, the "truth" is not a defense; in fact, it happens to be an element of the crime. If Alger Hiss or Aldrich Ames had knowingly passed on information to the Soviets that was false, it is highly unlikely that they would have been prosecuted for anything. If Ms. Plame had never been employed by the Company, Karl Rove would still be resting on his comfortable perch, regardless of what he leaked.

YBK [Part 10]: U.S.A. Today has an interesting primer on how the changes in the bankruptcy law effect the ability of businesses to seek Chapter 11, along with the now-routine prediction that we will see a greater increase in such filings as we draw closer to October 17. To put it simply, the new law imposes mandatory time limits for compelling a company to assume or reject leases, and allowing a debtor to propose a reorganization plan, which will necessitate almost immediate access to credit post-petition. Actually, these changes, which aren't all that bad, as a whole, have little to do with the YBK problem, which deals with the unholy conjunction of increased consumer filings with the collapse in the housing market, but it is yet another worry for the economy as the fall months draw nigh.

Vote of Confidence: Turd Blossom is toast....

Terrific column denouncing racial discrimination at the college level, concerning the lack of black coaches, by former Auburn head coach Terry Bowden:

There are 117 colleges participating in Division I-A football and there are only three black head coaches. You don't have to be too smart to know how stupid this looks.

Let me lay it out for you:

Fifty percent black athletes leads to 25 percent black assistant coaches leads to 3 percent black head coaches.

Fifty percent white athletes leads to 75 percent white assistant coaches leads to 97 percent white head coaches.

A profession that so desperately seeks a level playing field offers nothing close to one for the black athlete who aspires to rise to the pinnacle of the college coaching profession.

Plainly and simply, folks, this is discrimination. More precisely this is one of the last and greatest bastions of discrimination within all of American sports.

In college football, we are winning games, building programs and making millions of dollars with the sweat and blood of African-American athletes. I should know. In the last dozen years, my family alone has made more than $30 million as Division I-A head football coaches.

At least once a day, I get asked, "When are you getting back into coaching?" Heck, schools don't need to hire me. They need to hire from the untapped talent that exists within the pool of black assistant coaches.

[link via Salon]

It now appears likely that none of the London bombers last week got out alive.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

To paraphrase Mr. Rove, liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers; conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared to ruin the career of one of the country’s spies tracking terrorist efforts to gain weapons of mass destruction -- for political gain.

Politics first, counter-terrorism second -- it’s as simple as that.

--Keith Olbermann

Fire Rove: The groupings for the first-ever Baseball World Cup have been announced. The U.S. is paired together with Canada, Mexico and South Africa (!) in the first round. Still up in the air is whether Japan and Cuba will participate.

UPDATE: Not up in the air is whether Gary Sheffield will participate:"My season is when I get paid," Sheffield told the New York Daily News. "I'm not doing that. ... I'm not sacrificing my body or taking a chance on an injury for something that's made up." Damn--I'm sure every American baseball fan wanted to see the colors represented by the likes of Sheff.

A defense of Malcolm Glazer, from the editor of World Soccer magazine. He, too, is somewhat confused about the animosity surrounding the Bucs owner, and asserts that the pathetic efforts to boycott the club by various Man United fanclubs are motivated by "pure xenophobia" against a "funny-looking septuagenarian".

A Cold One: Along with the very helpful tips at the end of this post, I would add that one should never drink Anchor Steam from the tap after partaking of Sierra Nevada, or any IPA. Lets just say the hoppiness doesn't contrast well....

"...Four small bombs....": Thanks for putting last week's attacks in perspective, Mr. Samgrass. What a dick.

Operation Yellow Elephant: First of all, it's not true that every Young Republican (or hawk) of age to serve his country is sitting this one out. I had the privilege of eating lunch last week with a beautiful and courageous attorney, Natalie Panossian, who is very active in local GOP politics (she volunteered for Bush-Cheney in New Mexico last year), has formed a Federalist Society branch out in Ventura County, and still has found time in her schedule to enlist in the Army Reserve. If the war in Iraq continues, she will likely be sent over there (as a JAG, of course), probably not on the front lines, but it seems that won't make much of a difference when you're fighting a non-conventional war. What I found to be most interesting about her is that she is not a hawk; she thinks the President should come up with an exit-strategy, pronto, and that it's time for the Iraqis to defend their own freedoms. She supports the mission, but her qualms are that of a serious person. Her courage and integrity make a mockery of my own.

And her qualities certainly make a mockery of these chickenhawks convening this weekend at the Mandalay Resort in Las Vegas. The issue, of course, isn't whether people need to enlist to have "the right" to opine about U.S. foreign policy; the First Amendment protects saints and assholes alike, and therefore allows all people within its borders the right to make whatever political statements they want. The issue, instead, is whether anyone who parades in front a banner "Supporting our Troops, Honoring the Fallen" at a desert resort and argues that this war is the paramount battle of our generation, but does nothing to take part in said battle, can ever be taken seriously. To put it another way, it's like being counseled by Ben Affleck on how to vote in an upcoming election, only to find out that he has not bothered to register.

Ms. Panossian has earned the right to be taken seriously when she discusses her feelings on the War on Terror. The assembled Dekes and Tri-Delts in Vegas, like their many comrades in the blogosphere, have not.

Reading this article is sad for those of us who grew up admiring Joe Morgan. It's also puzzling to me, since I could swear I read a profile in People fifteen years ago on Bill James, which included a quote from Little Joe praising baseball's Galileo. [link via Hit&Run]

UPDATE: I was right; Joe Morgan has flip-flopped on the issue of sabermetrics and its most famous practitioner:

"One of the problems in baseball is being able to judge a guy's value to the team," says Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame infielder now broadcasting for ESPN. "A .260 hitter can be more valuable than a .300 hitter. A player who hits 35 home runs may not drive in 100 runs. All those things were brought into focus by Bill James."[emphasis mine]

"Holy R.B.I. -- It's Statman!; Super stastician Bill James has baseball's numbers", People, June 3, 1991.

Warped Priorities: In the day following the worst terrorist attack in English history, only hours after the G-8 Summit concluded, and in the middle of what may be the most important Supreme Court confirmation battle(s) in history, can you believe that not a single question was asked by the White House press corps this morning about the IOC's decision to discontinue our national pastime as an Olympic sport? Or about Karl Rove, for that matter?

When George Bush was first told about a plane crashing into the WTC on September 11, supposedly his first thought was about the type of moron who had been allowed to fly that plane. A lot of people had hissy-fits about that, and the deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression he had immediately thereafter certainly didn't help, but that was always one criticism of the President that I couldn't buy, since I had the exact same reaction. When I logged in to the 'net on 9/11, and saw the headline, "Plane Crashes Into Twin Towers", my first thought related to the recent deaths of JFK II and Payne Stewart, and was along the lines, "dammit, when are they going to ground these amateur pilots anyways?", and not, "oh god we've been attacked by an Islamofascist terror network based in Afghanistan--The Battle is Joined, at last--Let's man the barricades, and keep the aspidistra flying !!" Maybe that wasn't the classiest sort of thought that a President needed to share with the American People during a time of war, even one engaged against a metaphor, but I could appreciate the sentiment.

So let's just say that I'm not going to join in the public condemnation over Brit Hume's remarks yesterday morning. He probably would like to rephrase what he said, but admitting that you briefly thought about how this would impact investments on Wall Street, immediately after you've been asked a question about how the stock market reacted in the wake of the bombings, is quite human. A lot of the things I thought about yesterday (as well as on 9/11) were selfish and petty as well, and if you don't live in the immediate vicinity of such a tragedy, I expect that the same was true with most of you.

That's why days like July 7, 2005 are such terrible days for blogging; one of our more annoying habits as a species is the attempt to cram events into little pigeonholes of our own devising. We bring certain beliefs to the table, and then when a traumatic event happens, we immediately attempt to shape the contours of that event to fit our world view. It takes time to reconsider our positions, but blogging is a craft that rewards snap judgments, harsh (even violent) rhetoric, and a manichaen, polarized mindset. So why should Brit Hume have been any different than you or me?

Strike Out: Seems I spoke to soon about the advent of British baseball and softball at the 2012 Olympics. The IOC has voted to eliminate both sports after the next Games, in Beijing: baseball, because the top professional players weren't competing (the sport's leaders are focused instead on a World Cup, scheduled for next March); and softball, because no one played it outside of the U.S., Australia and China. Among the potential replacements: rugby, golf, and karate.

Frankly, it's a bad day to be a blogger. The London attacks understandably cause a visceral reaction, and blogging, which rewards the ability to make strong, ideologically-extreme statements, as well as the ability to do so quickly, generates all heat on a day like this, and almost no light. We really don't know shit about what happened, who did it, and how it managed to occur, so any finger-pointing at this stage isn't merely ridiculous, it's cancerous.

As others have taken their predictably partisan stances, and used the deaths of the innocent to reaffirm their earlier position on U.S. military involvement in Iraq, I thinks it's fair to point out that in terms of preventing attacks, such as the ones today and on 9/11, our current war in the Middle East is worthlessly irrelevant. Having a democratic government in Iraq will not stop terrorism. Detaining any suspicious-looking Arab emigre will not stop terrorism. Passing the Patriot Act has not made us any safer than we would have been if we had done nothing at all, nor will the extension of certain provisions make future attacks less certain; Great Britain, for example, has even more onerous laws to that effect, but, at least today, they were to no avail.

Typically, Josh Marshall makes the most sense on this issue:

Beside the threat we face from the bacillus of Islamic terror, President Bush has created a great running wound on the whole country in the form of the mess he's created in Iraq -- a wound bleeding blood, treasure and a scourge of national division which is now impossible to ignore but which we can ill-afford. Even now his cheerleaders are trying to enlist this outrage in the battle to prop up their folly in Iraq. If anything our folly in Iraq has made the immediacy and intensity of this basic threat worse. But let's not be blinded by our outrage at that folly or distracted from thinking concretely, together and resolutely, how we defend our innocents from such religious fanaticism and the violence it spawns.

What we need is some acknowledgment of good faith on the issue of fighting terrorism, what it will entail, how best to go about the task, and not score-settling, or worse, demagoguery that focuses the blame on people other than the thugs who planted the bombs.

UPDATE: For an amazing example of the good the web can do on a day like this, check out the Wikipedia page on today's tragedy. [link via Hit & Run] Also, there has been amazing coverage from bloggers on the scene in London that puts the armchair punditry of the rest of the blogosphere to shame.

Terrorists attack London Tube. This would appear to be the work of Al Qaeda, if only because it's ambition is so grand. It's probably connected to the G-8 Summit; something like this would have required months of training, and yesterday's awarding of the 2012 Olympics was a bit of a surprise. To any and all readers in London: this blog is at your disposal.

"Reporter" jailed.

London sneaks past Paris at the last second to win the 2012 Summer Olympics. The host country gets an automatic slot in every event, so get prepared to see Her Majesty's finest baseball, softball, volleyball and basketball players in action. Both Blair and Chirac made last-minute appeals in person, but what may have screwed the French was a gaffe President Chirac made last week about British and Finnish cuisine. Didn't a wise man once say that a "gaffe" was anytime a politician got caught telling the truth?

Sarah Vowell gives a tip of the cap to Pat Robertson, of all people. And he might even deserve it !!

YBK [Part 9]: As if rising foreclosures and the looming housing bubble weren't enough to worry about, here's something about to come down the pipeline from the credit card industry: rising monthly payments. According to MarketWatch, credit card companies are expected to raise the minimum monthly payment from 2 to 4% of the balance in the next couple of months:

"Ultimately, the new policies are better because it can take forever to pay off the principal under current credit-card policies," says Michael Keene, vice president of new program development for nonprofit Money Management International, also known as Consumer Credit Counseling.

"But it will present some short-term problems for a lot of folks living on the edge, barely able to make minimum payments now."

Things might get very ugly pretty soon for people already in default on their monthly mortgage.
[My previous YBK posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here].

The irony of this story, of course, is that the World's Most Overrated Athlete plays a sport that his home country has refused to participate in past Olympics, due to the divided nature of the British soccer federations. In this country, we've had a lot of nimbyish opposition to the Big Apple's bid for 2012, but I'm curious if there's been similar opposition to the Paris and London bids. For what it's worth, those who have opposed Olympics for various localities since 1984 do not have a very good track record when it comes to their predictions. I have yet to meet an Angeleno who does not have warm memories of the '84 Games; it has always served as an example that we can collectively accomplish great things when we put our minds to it. And they never lose as much money, congest as much traffic, or cause as much havoc as even the proponents of the Games anticipate.

Not a Happy Fifth for the Duke, either. It now seems that he sold his personal yacht a few years back (the yacht he's currently living on is owned by Mitchell Wade) to a convicted felon who had recently served time for bribery and bid-fixing. He made a 200% mark-up on the deal. The new purchaser did not bother to change the registration on the yacht, as he intended to resell the boat to Cunningham soon afterward. But he did seek the Congressman's assistance on obtaining a pardon for his earlier misdeeds, and, perhaps in return for that mitzva, arranged to buy out the second deed of trust on Cunningham's new villa in Rancho Santa Fe.

A brave soldier, silenced....

Not a Happy Fourth for the Duke. On Friday, the Federales raided his Rancho Santa Fe villa, as well as the private yacht and business offices of his former benefactor, Mitchell Wade. Now, he's cancelled all public activities scheduled for July 4th, which for a politician is tantamount to getting hit on the head three times with a silver hammer while being asked his name. The only reason to cancel would be if he already knew he had lost the support of the local party...I wrote awhile back that Cunningham's seat was borderline safe; he was expected to win, but with a much lower percentage (betw. 57-62%) than other California incumbents. However, Boxer barely lost carried the district last year in her Senate victory, in spite of the GOP registration edge, and it's clear that the seat can't be taken for granted. At this point, he's Condit.

UPDATE: Yeah, I checked, and Boxer lost the 50th C.D. by 306 votes, out of 287,000 cast. Of course, she was running against a well-respected opponent who had won statewide office before, and who had not the whiff of scandal to him, so I think the point still holds.

Inhale, relax...This article, about the conventional wisdom that because of last month's deal, any filibuster against a Supreme Court nominee based on ideological grounds is now verboten, seems to have given a number of my bloggish cohabitants a bad case of the vapors. Rather than becoming emotionally overwrought about the alleged spinelessness of Ben Nelson, et al., let's remember the critical language in the deal, that all 14 signatories agreed that the Senate's role in giving "advice and consent" actually meant precisely that. To quote the agreement:

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word "Advice" speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President's power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

Now, does anyone think Bush is going to seek the "advice and consent" of any Democratic Senator before he nominates someone? Of course not. And that's going to be the hook that will be used to justify any filibuster, because let's face it, if we appear to be doing nothing more than the bidding of liberal interest groups, we're going to get slaughtered in the court of public opinion, just as we did during the Clarence Thomas nomination. The Bushies will stress the personal story of whomever the nominee is, about how he grew up the son of a sharecropper who had to walk ten miles to school every day, and paid his way through law school performing menial jobs, and we're supposed to respond by shouting, "he doesn't support Roe v. Wade," or "he'll end affirmative action," and get our asses kicked like we always do.

The "advice and consent" rationale, on the other hand, is about fairness, consensus, and adhering to the Constitution, and one that is easily saleable to the American people. It can also be tied to any ideological qualms we may have about a nominee, since we can always say that if the President had sought our advice, we would have recommended a more moderate, mainstream selection. And best of all, Lindsay Graham, whose role in the agreement was basically to mediate (he supports the "nuclear option"), and the other six Republican signatories have signed off on that. So chill out, my friends; that language was in the agreement for a reason.

I've received a lot of response about last month's post describing the strong correlation between the appreciation in the value of homes and voter behavior in the last election (which we will henceforth call "The Sailer Effect", after the conservative blogger who independently discovered the same phenomenum last December), thanks to Mickey Kaus (with some assistance from James Taranto, who helpfully pointed out to the world that "correllation" is not only not causation, it's not correlation either, and Mark Kleiman).

There seems to be some confusion about what the housing figures cited in my chart reflect. The numbers, based on the Housing Price Index put out by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, measure the amount single-family homes have appreciated in value, not the average price of a home. If my reading of the methodology used is correct, the numbers I cited were based on homes that existed in 1980, and have been sold at least twice since then. Also, multi-unit properties, such as condominiums and duplexes (duplexi?), are not counted in the survey.

The explanations I've seen for the Sailer Effect are quite interesting. They include population density, immigration levels, higher birthrates in Red States, the preponderence of college towns and dual-income families in Blue States, and the positive effect rigorous zoning, labor, and planning laws have in creating wealth for homeowners. One commenter even linked the correlation to abortion.

There is probably truth to each of the explanations, but what really intrigued me about the Sailer Effect was that it was a long-term phenomenum. Both 1980 and 2004 featured Republican victories across the board, but if you look at the states that Carter either won that year or came close, for the most part you are seeing a different collection of states than those that went for Kerry last year. Even though Carter lost big, he still carried two states (Georgia and West Virginia) that went for Bush last time, and ran relatively well in most of the South. With the exception of Florida, every Southern state is in the lower half of the chart. On the other hand, a number of states that Reagan carried easily that year, such as California, Michigan and Illinois, as well as small states like New Hampshire, are now in the Blue column. And each of those states is in the top half; in fact, generally speaking, the greater the increase, the larger Kerry's margin was (and vice versa).

Moreover, the shifting political allegiances of West Virginia and New Hampshire at the Presidential level call into question the view that it is liberal policies that cause housing scarcity, which in turn drives up home values. West Virginia, although it has become an increasingly safe Red State, has been controlled at the state level by Democrats for the most part since the 1930's, and it has a well-deserved reputation for having an activist, pro-labor government. New Hampshire, on the other hand, remains a Republican state down-ticket, and its policies at the state level are notoriously conservative.

In addition, while most of the commenters assume that the rate of growth in housing prices is a bad thing, since many people are priced out of the market, it's pure nirvana if you happen to own a home. People who set up roots in a particular state by buying (and keeping) a home gain a nice little nest egg, and what the Sailer Effect shows is that homeowners who live in states that favor liberal Presidential candidates make more money out of the sale of their homes than voters in states that back conservatives. I still have not seen an explanation as to why this form of wealth-creation should be more conducive to creating a Democratic base, or why people who lack access to that in a particular state would be more likely to vote Republican.

In the meantime, here's a related chart, showing a noticeable but weaker correlation between bankruptcy rates and the state's 2004 preference. More to follow....

Just thinking about the possibility that Karl Rove is the principal target of a special prosecutor and a runaway grand jury is enough to give any self-respecting liberal blogger some serious wood...btw, wasn't Rove recently in the news for some speech he gave? As a wise and learned professor once said, "heh !".

Today's retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor promises to provide all of us with a fun-filled, action-packed Summer of Love, so if I might offer my two cents on the issue to those of us (and I include myself) who anticipate opposing whomever is nominated by Bush: let's try to emphasize some issue other than his/her position on Roe v. Wade. Even without O'Connor, we've got five votes on the Court (since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the last major case to challenge Roe, was decided, pro-life White has been replaced by pro-choice Ginsburg). There are plenty of other issues, pocketbook issues, that will be dealt with by the next Supreme Court, and which the replacement for O'Connor will be the swing vote. So let's focus on those, rather than frivolously refighting a battle that doesn't need to be fought this time around, and will only serve to once again piss off a significant portion of the electorate. It might work to our advantage.

Three Women and a Piano Tuner: I could hardly claim to be a fan of the lady at the top right of the screen without mentioning at least one good review she's received. Well done, Mrs. Sturridge...UPDATE: more raves about the PhoeNix, from the Guardian and the Times.

A somewhat minor issue, compared with his home sale and yacht rental, but The Dukester now seems to have run afoul of a different ethical bylaw: a set of knives that were sold by his "Top Gun" business were imprinted with the Congressional Seal, which is a no-no...I'm thunderstuck by how anyone could be this ethically obtuse.

Absolute proof of the non-existence of a wise and merciful deity....

Youngest Future HuffPost Contributor: It's not quite there yet, but those of us who've been waiting for The Great Blog by an athete or actor might want to look at this contribution, by LA Lakers' first round pick Andrew Bynum...UPDATE: Mr. Bynum (or his agent) has thrown the page down the memory hole, apparently out of fear that making him seem good-natured and funny is bad for P.R. Here's the cached version on Google.

California Earthquake: For the first time, both of the announced candidates for the Democratic nomination for governor are beating Ahnold Ziffel, head-to-head, according to the Field Poll. [link via Daily Kos]

I've fixed my Atom feed problem...so syndicate away.

The Constitution Works: An oldie but a goody from the Onion, back when it was still funny....

Before reading Mr. Samgrass' rant on why our Hawks have no moral obligation to do anything more than send others to die in their stead, it is important to remember that he happens to have two children of fighting age. Apparently their asses ain't dogproof, either.

Implicit in Hitchens' argument is an arrogant, contemptuous slighting of the military; it's a vocation like any other. It is the opposite side of the coin to the claim made during the debate over Senator Durbin's remarks on the Senate floor, that anyone who holds soldiers responsible for their actions is, in fact, denigrating the entire military. It must have been quite a surprise to soldiers serving in the Middle East and elsewhere that so many chickenhawks back home now considered torture and war crimes committed in their name to be so routine that anyone who dares focus on such abuses is, in fact, slurring the brave men and women at the Front.

Far from being shamed by the courage others have shown in fighting for his ideological crusade, Hitchens offers a convenient explanation:

Did I send my children to rescue the victims of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center? No, I expected the police and fire departments to accept the risk of gruesome death on my behalf. All of them were volunteers (many of them needlessly thrown away, as we now know, because of poor communications), and one knew that their depleted ranks would soon be filled by equally tough and heroic citizens who would volunteer in their turn. We would certainly face a grave societal crisis if that expectation turned out to be false.

In other words, they had jobs they were paid to do, just like soldiers are paid to protect us, and people like him are paid to drum up the ideological rationale for their wars. So enough talk about the "sacrifice" of others. Who wouldn't kill for those death benefits....

YBK [Part 8]: Some good news, mixed in with the bad. In May, bankruptcy filings rose 5% nationally, the third straight month the number of filings were up significantly from the year before. However, the raw totals were sharply down from March and April, which, although historically not unusual, is a sign that the initial interest in the new bankruptcy law may be cooling, at least for the time being. In the meantime, keep watching those foreclosure numbers in Massachusetts and California....

Los Angeles [N.L.] 5, San Diego 4: Dodgers snap their two-game-with-Smythe-in-attendance losing streak, thanks to some timely power hitting by Jeff Kent and some solid pitching from rookie D.J. Houlton. The evening was marred by the theft of three commemorative Sandy Koufax statues (now selling for +$26 on E-Bay !!), belonging to me and my seatmates, Howard Owens and Rob Barrett, by a group of scofflaws who waited til the three of us temporarily left our seats on a beer run; those punks must have seen us coming a mile away. For those of you interested in the esoterica of MSM internet sites, word has it that the LA Times, in the wake of the "wikitorial" experiment, is planning to set up an unmoderated photoblog to prove its web bonafides, whilst the Ventura County Star should soon have its on-line "tweener" section going....

Not even trying...If I'm a shareholder at Time-Warner, my scrotum just shriveled into nothingness after reading the last sentence of this article.

The Dukester's former neighbors weigh in with their two cents on the 2003 transaction, and share their warm memories of the Congressman:

Neighbors got their first inkling that something was going on at Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's Del Mar-area home when they saw him packing.

Next door neighbor Kent Greene asked: "Are you selling your house?"

"Already sold," Cunningham answered.

When neighbors later learned the $1,675,000 price, they were even more astonished.

"There was something fishy with the whole thing," said Mark Konopacke, who had bought his home across the street six months before for $700,000 less [ed.-see here].

(snip)

Some have dubbed the controversy "Mansiongate," but the house's original owner, Barbara Casino-Mizer, laughs when she sees the house in the papers. She and her husband, Corky Mizer, bought the ocean-view home from the builder in April 1987 for $385,000.

Casino-Mizer loved the big kitchen, the mosaic-tiled bathtub and the mauve carpet that was all the rage in the late '80s. However, when the couple found another home with acreage nine months later, they put the Mercado home on the market. Cunningham, who had been teaching at the Navy's Top Gun flight school, bought it for $435,000.

(snip)

The decorative bars Cunningham put over the windows gave the stylish home an ominous prison-like look, some neighbors said. They called it an eyesore. The neighborhood, though, was desirable. Many homes have ocean views, and each has its own style. Values shot up.

Mark and Victoria Konopacke purchased their 2,806-square-foot home across the street in May 2003 for $905,000. In November 2003, Cunningham – a member of the House's defense appropriations subcommittee – sold his house to Wade.

Neighbors say they never saw Wade. Some heard the house had been purchased by a government employee with tax dollars. Others heard a friend bought it. The house went on the market again almost immediately for $1,680,000.

"When I saw the price, I said, 'Thank you for raising my property values,' " Kipnis said.

Many neighbors peeked in during the open house.

"We all knew it wasn't market value," said Victoria Konopacke. "It was a dump. The place needed to be gutted."

Her husband, Mark, added: "I'm not surprised at all people are asking questions."

(snip)

Next door to the congressman's old place, Kent Greene has a for-sale sign posted in front of his house. He's asking $1,650,000.

Greene said that while the price may have been "ridiculous" for Cunningham's house in 2003, his home is highly upgraded and the market has moved up.

"It's a good neighborhood," he said, "an improved house, and, let me put it this way, it's better without him here."

The article actually has some good news for the saleslady who provided the comps now in dispute: the house across the street that sold for $900k a few months earlier was about 3/4 the size of the Cunningham condo, so an argument could be made that a significantly higher price would have been justifiable. Still, the lack of any sort of independent investigation by the purchaser just gives this whole deal a bad odor, since it would have revealed why this was not a $1.7 million home in the 2003 market.

Some interesting takes on RoveGate, from Kevin Drum and Michael Totten. Both seem to get the truly outrageous part of his speech, where he accused liberals of treasonous conduct in opposing torture at G-mo and elsewhere. The part that seems to have everyone else exorcised (about how the liberal solution to the 9/11 strikes was based on "law enforcement" and "empathy") seems to me to be standard knuckle-dragging rhetoric from the far right, too banal to be taken as a credible attack, and as a criticism, unintentionally ironic: does Bush's Brain really want to go on record attacking the other side for its commitment to law enforcement and due process at a time when Osama bin Laden and other top leaders of Al Qaeda are celebrating their fourth year of freedom since the WTC fell, when the conservative solution to terrorism is to participate in an endless stalemate against arbitrary adversaries disconnected to the original attacks, and when the only justification that the soft-on-torture crowd seems to offer in defense of Abu Ghraib, G-mo and elsewhere is that we're not yet as bad as Stalin.

Exactly where does Karl Rove get his reputation for being a great genius anyways? This is the guy who had Bush sit on the ball with a double-digit lead in late-October, 2000, even going so far as to take days off from the campaign trail, only to see the lead collapse in the final two weeks; only a rigged vote count and some voting abuses in Florida that would have made Bull Connor proud saved his boss from a more embarrassing loss than Tom Dewey. Republicans maintained their majorities in Congress in both 2002 and 2004, due almost entirely to gerrymandering and the rural, small-state bias that dictates Senate elections (the dirty little secret of that "majority" right now is that Democratic candidates consistently receive more votes than their GOP counterparts in both the House and Senate). In spite of those majorities, they can still do little more than hit at New Deal and Great Society programs at the margins.

Even with a country at war and an improving economy last year, two factors which historically guarantee victory at the polls, Bush won by the narrowest reelection margin in history, against an unlikeable, politically-inept opponent (and a Massachusetts liberal, to boot), and managed to carry only one more state than he did last time, before 9/11. He has built the current Republican base on the least-productive, most-government dependent regions in the country, while pursuing a political strategy based on social wedge issues, particularly gay civil rights, that are heavily dependent on aging, reactionary voters who will have less sway as time passes.

Looking at the long term, color me unimpressed.

YBK [Part 7]: The official May figures for the Central District of California are now out, and they show a 22% jump in total filings over last year. Chapter 7 petitions were up by over 26% from the previous May, while Chapter 13 filings, where a debtor proposes to repay some or all of his debt over a 3-5 year period, continue to slide. The only thing stopping a full-fledged bankruptcy panic is the housing market.

Finally, a webpage dedicated entirely to Randy "Duke" Cunningham. If you want to see the actual deeds from the transactions in question, or view photos of the now-historic Cunningham estate in Del Mar, that is the place to visit.

Randy Cunningham speaks, finally, but won't answer any questions. Clearly, he's the victim here, and all the blame rests on the friend who gave him inflated comps and the other friend who believed them (and what does that say about Mr. Wade, whose company gets multi-million dollar top-secret contracts from the military but who won't perform due diligence when purchasing a house). It's hard to see how The Duke can explain away living at his benefactor's yacht for less than $1200 a month; if dockside living is that cheap, I'm surprised we don't see more slackers wasting their lives away on houseboats parked in San Pedro.

A reader comments on my comparison of brokers and salespersons:

While I agree that the Cunningham real estate deal sounds... corrupt as hell... you are mistaken on one point. A real estate salesperson is in no way comparable to a clerk or a paralegal in a law office.

Other than having their contracts reviewed and signed off on by their broker, they have all the rights and responsiblites as a broker. And even licensed brokers who work in an office usually get their contracts reviewed and signed off by the head broker in the office, or their assistant manager.

For that reason, many of the top selling and most experienced agents do NOT have a broker's license (I didn't and I was a top agent for almost 30 years off and on) since unless you own your own firm and need one, it really doesn't serve any real world purpose to have one.

The commenter is a salesperson who has both personal and professional experience with law offices, so I will of course yield to his expertise in this matter. It is an oversimplification to say that the responsibilities of a broker are similar to that of a lawyer, or that a salesperson does not have a good deal more independence in operating than a law clerk is allowed. When I've bought and sold property in the past, my aunt, a licensed salesperson, usually handles the transaction at my end; I couldn't even tell you the name of the broker, except that it was handled by Coldwell Banker.

However, I should point out that clerks and paralegals have taken on an increasingly important role in law offices, one that he perhaps underestimates. I happen to practice in an area of law, bankruptcy, in which most of the heavy lifting in representing a client is done by paralegals. That area of law is particularly paper-intensive, so the responsibilities of obtaining information from clients, filling out forms, and arranging pleadings for filing are almost entirely done by non-professionals. The attorney's job has become focused on reviewing (and signing off on) the paperwork, meeting with the client at the initial stages of the case, and appearing in court when necessary.

In fact, in larger firms, some paralegals and clerks become even more important than the associates they assist. Because of the fact that, as far as clients are concerned, there is no distinction between lawyer and clerk, it is especially important for the lawyer to perform his supervisorial responsibilities. I believe that the earlier analogy remains apt, at least in this limited way.

An interesting factoid: the house just across the street from Rep. and Mrs. Cunningham was dumped for $905,000 in April, 2003, less than seven months before the San Diego-Area Congressman sold his condo for $1,675 million. What a market !!

War Crimes: Whom we are fighting. [link via Suburban Guerilla]

YBK [Part 6]: Bankruptcy filings were up 8% over the first quarter of 2005, an astonishing jump, since much of that period was before the public became aware of the new law. My own cursory examination of state records indicates that the totals were, in fact, down in the first two months (reflecting a two-year trend), so the jump in March must have been huge. As I have noted previously, the figures in April and May were even higher. If history holds, we should have a slight raw decline in June and July, so the next figures to come out will be crucial.

Why MZM does it:

“We can’t say too much about what we do,” MZM spokeswoman Karen Theobald said, “but we can talk about our employees.” Community involvement is a part of the company’s philosophy, carried out through charitable causes, social events and political donations. The firm prides itself on being “patriotic,” Theobald said. [emphasis added]

-Charlottesville[VA] Daily Progress, May 23, 2005, on the local philanthropic dynamo that is MZM.

YBK [Part 5]: Local blogger Mark Kleiman shorts the housing bubble. Our best local columnist, Michael Hiltzik, comments here.

In the interest of full disclosure, I, too, shorted the market three years ago, when I decided to cash in the equity in my Woodland Hills condo. The place had more than doubled in value over three years, we were supposedly on the verge then of a bankruptcy reform measure that would kill the economy, and I couldn't imagine that the bubble could last much longer....

Finally, some backing from his homies. Darrell Issa, whose vanity project in 2003 resulted in the election of a man whose idea of "education reform" is to spend $80 million on a special election this November to lengthen teacher tenure at public schools, has come to the defense of the Duke. Pointing his finger at the true malefactors, Issa focuses the blame where it belongs: at the Cunningham friend (and long-time contributor) who provided the comps doubling the value of his home, as well as the businessman whose cash purchase at that inflated price enabled the Congressman to buy a three-acre, $2.55 million spread in Rancho Santa Fe.

FWIW, Rep. Cunningham is the chief House sponsor of the amendment to ban flag burning.

This must be uncomfortable: Luanne Kittle, the wife of the editorial page editor for the San Diego Union-Tribune, has just become the Head of School at K-8 Rhoades, an independent school in Encinitas. The Director of the School is none other than Nancy Cunningham, wife of the Congressman and recent target of more than a few Union-Trib stories (see here, here, and here).

Among the politicians to receive the blessings of the largesse of Mitchell Wade, benefactor to San Diego Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, is none other than Katherine Harris (R-FL), to the tune of $10,000 in the last election cycle (no word on whether she sold him a house as well), plus an additional $44,000 from officers, employees of his company, MZM, Inc. Apparently, his company, a DC-based military contractor, has also been very active in local Republican politics, says the San Diego Union-Tribune, with potentially illegal contributions being coerced out of employees to the company PAC.

UPDATE [6/21]: In fact, MZM was the largest single contributor to both Harris and Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) in the last election cycle (but, interestingly, not to Cunningham). A public watchdog filed a complaint today against MZM and Mitchell Wade with the F.E.C.

Did you know it's easier for both men and women to have orgasms when they're wearing socks? Explains everything....

Sideshow Bob? Perhaps the poorest-timed article in Slate since one of its pundits began a pool last January about how quickly Kerry would withdraw from the primaries.

The wonderful thing about the Golden Age in which we live is that so much information is now easily accessible to the public. If you are licensed to do anything by a state agency (or not, as the case may be), a few clicks with a mouse will provide you the basic data lickety-split.

And so it is with the family friend and retainer of Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Elizabeth Todd. Those of you who have visited Talking Points Memo recently may have heard the name in connection with her role in the mysterious sale of his home two years ago to a defense contractor, Mitchell Wade, on whose yacht the GOP Congressman lives while in Washington. As you may know, Mr. Wade purchased his friend's home, in a straight cash transaction, for $1.675 million; Mr. Wade then waited several months to resell the property for $975,000, a loss of almost 42%. Even in this inflated market, that whole transaction seemed rather unseemly. Ms. Todd provided the comps for the sale that are now under scrutiny by the FBI.

As the San Diego Union-Tribune pointed out a couple of days ago, Ms. Todd has been licensed by the state since April, 2002, and her subsequent sale of a home to Representative Cunningham the following year was her first-ever deal. But what the article only mentions in passing is that, in fact, Elizabeth Todd is not a licensed real estate broker, at least according to the state. She is a licensed salesperson.

The difference between the two licenses is enormous. A broker must have at least two years of real estate experience, take numorous college-level courses and pass a rigorous exam to be licensed. A salesperson, on the other hand, may have no experience, needs to pass only three courses and a relatively simple exam, but must work under the supervision of a broker in any deal in which she participates. In other words, her position is equivalent to that of a paralegal or clerk at a law office.

So anything she did concerning the sale of the original Cunningham manse, including providing comps, would have to be first vetted by someone else, a broker (state records indicate that she is employed by The Willis Allen Co., whose CEO, Andrew Nelson, contributed over $15 grand to GOP causes (incl. the Duke) in the last election cycle). Maybe that will exonerate her, but, in any event, the plot thickens....

The kerning, the kerning... In what may well be the silliest claim in the history of the blogosphere, we now have an assertion that the Downing Street Memo and related documents are forgeries. Why? Because the reporter in question (an employee of that infamous leftist America-basher, Rupert Murdoch) transcribed the copies of the originals he received, by way of an "old-fashioned typewriter", then destroyed the source documents to protect his source. Like Captain Queeg and his strawberries, the Bushies and their shills keep returning to the same meme, oblivious to the fact (as with the Rathergate docs) that the principals involved did not challenge their authenticity.

So is it a big deal? According to the blogger who "broke" this story, Captain's Quarters,

...a lack of protest from Downing Street after being asked to authenticate retyped copies of alleged minutes of secret meetings does NOT constitute verification. The same exact argument came up with the Killian memos in Rathergate and the Newsweek Qu'ran-flushing report last month. In both cases, the documents or sources turned out to be fakes. It's the reporters' job to provide verification, not simply a demurral by officials to opine on their authenticity. If that isn't obvious, then centuries of evidentiary procedure in American and English common law have gone for naught, as well as traditions of journalistic responsibility and professionalism. After all, this argument just means that reporters can type out anything they like and the burden of proof shifts from the accuser to the accused in proving them false -- hardly the process endorsed in libel and slander cases in the US, at least. [emphasis added]

It should be obvious why that argument doesn't hold water. The legal standards in a civil or criminal case must necessarily be more stringent than the standards the rest of society uses in its daily life. To hold someone liable for a tort such as defamation, or to convict a person of a crime, we require that the rules of evidence be more strict and exacting. Such things as the Hearsay Rule, the Best Evidence Rule, and the presumption of innocence burden trial attorneys in order to lessen the possibility that the wrong person gets convicted.

But those aren't the standards the rest of us live by. Michael Jackson should be presumed innocent by his jurors when he's being tried by the state for pedophilia, but that's not the standard a mother of a twelve-year old should use when deciding whether to let her son attend a sleepover at the Neverland Ranch. If Tony Blair ever is indicted for war crimes, or if Congress moves to impeach Bush based on the DSM, than of course the originals must be introduced as evidence (that is, if Bush or his English bitch ever decide to challenge their authenticity), and any hearsay issues will have to be dealt with by the prosecution. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to give them a free pass in the meantime. [link via Kevin Drum]