The Guardian reports that George Galloway is a contestant on a British celebrity version of Big Brother. I think I'd rather have him as a housemate than Norm Coleman, but prefer him less to Hitch the Snitch. Actually, whichever of the three hogs the TV the least would be best, so never mind.

UPDATE: One of Gorgeous George's housemates, it turns out, is none other than the Worm.

UPDATE [1/13]: According to someone who has actually watched the program, the show also features actress Rula Lenska, most famous in this country (if that's the right word) for having done Alberto vo5 ads in the '70's, in which she was referred to as an "international film star", even though no one had actually heard of her. As a fan of obscure British TV actresses, I salute her.

Texas 41, USC 38: The computers nailed this one...but I'm still trying to figure out this analogy:

So the Trojans are denied a second straight championship. Not a third. USC and its fans have been talking a lot about a "three-Pete" -- as in Pete Carroll, you see -- because the Trojans were No. 1 in the final Associated Press poll in 2003.

But the 2003 national champion was LSU. The Bowl Championship Series is a lousy system, but it's the system USC signed up for. You can't agree to play for a championship under one set of rules, then, when you don't win the championship, say, "Well, we won the championship under these other rules."

Unless you think the accountants at Enron were straight shooters.

Huh?!? Does that go the same for people who think Raging Bull was a better pic than Ordinary People? I guess they're screwed too, since the Academy had the final say in 1981.

Last time I checked, there is no official "national champion" in college football, since, unlike every other Division 1 college sport, there is no playoff. The BCS has a system that's supposed to match-up the two best teams, and remove most of the controversy, but it didn't work out in 2003. The best-ranked team that year failed to make it, so the vast fraternity of college football fans outside of Baton Rouge, Lousiana, treated it the same way boxing fans have learned to ignore the machinations of the WBC when determining who the "real" heavyweight champ is. They went with the best team, the team that earned it on the playing field, phony system be damned.

In fact, the same writer observed at the time:

This is of course what's so great about the BCS: It's complete nonsense. It was supposedly designed to end these end-of-year arguments over who should be named the national champion by presenting a championship game between the top two teams. It does no such thing. But here's a shocking secret: That wasn't the real purpose. You mustn't tell anyone.

The BCS ought to be used in business schools as a lesson in how not to approach problem solving. The Cliffs Notes version is that the people trying to solve the problem have to have clear, attainable objectives, and they have to be free of conflicts of interest.

The professed objective of the BCS is to crown a true national champion. If that were really the goal, the plan would be to figure out a way to have a playoff system, same as they have in Divisions I-AA, II and III. Simple. But the real purpose is to crown a national champion using a system that increases profits and consolidates power for the six biggest conferences, the four biggest bowls and the TV networks, the parties that created the BCS. That's a very different thing, and an impossible one.

Two years ago, he was as apparently deluded as Enron's investors. Thank god Vince Young made it safe for him to jump on an another bandwagon. Not even Plaschke is this loathsome.

Although this may come as a surprise to those who watched last night's thriller, it has been scientifically proven that soccer is the most exciting spectator sport, sayeth the Beeb.

We're all MSM'ers Now: Kos has a point.

With the Rose Bowl coming up in 15 minutes, check out the site of USC's number one gay conservative blogfan.

The press will take the ABA's rating of Judge Alito as "Well Qualified" more seriously than it deserves. No matter the ideology, most of the candidates for this position are, by definition, exceedingly "qualified", that is, they have graduated from elite schools, worked at the right law firms, and held the standard jobs within government. The GOP's efforts of late to paint the nation's bar associations as liberal cabals ignores the plain fact that they're all old boys' networks, run by wealthy corporate shills and entirely comfortable with the status quo.

It's when they withhold the highest rating that there's a story. Once Clarence Thomas received only a "Qualified" rating from the ABA in 1991, his nomination was destined for trouble; it gave the fencesitters in the Senate, like Howell Heflin, a way to vote against him without having to fear any political repurcussions. The "Not Qualified" rating Janice Rogers received from the State Bar of California when she was first nominated for the state Supreme Court (based mainly on a lack of judicial temperament) has trailed after her ever since, symbolizing her as just another in a long line of empty suits the GOP trots out to prove they aren't racists. All Alito has done is clear a very low hurdle.

Texas 36, USC 34: Or so the computer says. The Longhorns win three-quarters of these match-ups, by an average margin of two touchdowns; in this one, they came back from an early 13-point deficit. And this doesn't take into account the fact that the Longhorns are a hungrier team, or that so much of the pre-game hype has been in the form of a victory lap for the Trojans. Ouch.

The real game is hours away....

Marc Cooper's out to lunch on this one if he thinks the Abramoff indictment is an indication that the stench of corruption in the Beltway is somehow bipartisan. Needless to say there are crooked Dems, but Abramoff was the money man financing the DeLay money machine, the K-Street Project, the objective of which was to shut out Democrats from the filthy lucre of corporate giving. This was a scam on a level quite a bit different from AbScam, the "House Bank", or the Keating Five. Who cares if a few Democrats also got a taste of Tribal Casino Booty.

By turning state's evidence, Abramoff has assured that the issue of corrupt, out-of-touch Congressmen will be front-and-center this November. Too bad for Cooper that it's always the party in power that gets bled to death over this sort of thing.

Blind Date with Ilsa? There's hope for me yet !!!

Much of the criticism of blogging from mainstream media sources has the tone and feel of pre-1960 criticism of Rock and Roll; the critics don't get it, they don't speak our language, so they end up looking like idiots. Michael Hiltzik, an LA Times reporter who also blogs, is an exception, as he shows here. His critique, while focused on conservative "media critics" in the blogosphere who cherrypick their way through the daily newspaper looking for any evidence that will support their position that biased reporters and editors are in cahoots with Satan, is equally valid against most of their counterparts on the left. As such, it is the type of "media criticism" that one would expect out of lawyers.

O-Ver-A-Ted: Jonathan Chait, one of the new op-ed columnists for the local paper of record, has a fine piece on the 2005 USC Trojans. Considering that there is nothing to indicate that the PAC-10 was a particularly deep conference this season, or that the Big-12 was particularly weak, I don't see why Texas should be such a significant underdog next week. USC has a spectacular offense, led by the winners of the last two Heisman Trophies, but their defense (Pete Carroll's strong suit, after all) is not that impressive. Besides the now-legendary game with Notre Dame, they almost lost to Fresno State and Arizona State, teams with four and five losses, respectively, and were a bad call away from being 17 points down to Oregon.

Texas is a hungrier team, had only two close calls (both against schools named "O.S.U."), and actually know how to play good defense. They would be hard to beat even if they were playing an opponent that wasn't undeservedly being included among the greatest teams of all time. As the author alludes to, the last time we had a match-up like this, Ohio State knocked off Miami, the defending national champion, in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl.

One of the drawbacks about being a single, 40-ish guy is that I always stay home on New Years Eve. That, and the infrequent sex, the assumption by some that because I haven't gotten married, I must be gay (not that there's anything wrong with that), the fact that most of my friends are functioning alcoholics, the realization that my life is never going to get any better...yeah, I admit: I'm drowning in a torrent of clinical depression right now, one that massive quantities of Prozac won't cure. Life sucks.

Loneliness is a terrible burden, and there's no amount of rationalization that's going to sweep it away. December 31 always brings this issue to the forefront. It's the one occasion that people, no matter what creed, race or socioeconomic class, find the time to just have a blast. No presents to buy, no fake ethnic tie-in, like March 17 or May 5, just an evening to stay up all night and party. And I never get invited.

Going on a year-end cruise has been one way out of the thicket. I don't get to be with friends, either, and the other party-goers are either blue hairs or teenagers, but at least there's festivity everywhere. I don't have to drive home, and the cruiseline is usually generous with the champagne. For me, it's as good as it will get, and I'm only out a month's income.

This year, that isn't an option. So while everyone else is having a blast, I'll be at home, watching cable reruns and trying to figure how my life took such a wrong turn.

Ewwwww.....

A liberal blogger discovers, to her chagrin, that conservative bloggers take care of themselves. Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with banging a tin cup and asking other people to beg for money on your behalf.

It should come as no shock that for a blog to be both popular and good, it requires a great deal of time and effort on the part of the host. When I first started this site, back in April, 2002, it seemed that most of the people doing this sort of thing were either freelance journalists, professors, college students, or lawyers with their own practice. That is to say, bloggers were people who already wrote for a living, and who had the time to post frequently and write deliberatively. To them, blogging was a hobby that could supplement their normal routine.

Once blogging became "hip", it drew in a lot of people who had writing talent, and were not in any of those professions. Those bloggers included a tremrndous amount of undiscovered talent, but only a few who will ever be hired to write for a living. As a result, once the high of writing something for a public audience wore off, making money off this gig became paramount for the neophyte. Unfortunately, bloggers don't have anything to sell but their work product, so unless you can find a sugardaddy willing to support you, or happen to be independently wealthy, you better be writing about something that can turn a profit for somebody else.

With almost no exceptions, political blogs can't turn the trick. Moreover, perhaps inevitably considering the string of recent defeats Democrats had in the aftermath of the 2000 election, liberal blogging has become dominated by a style of rhetoric that ensured that such blogs would never make mucho dinero: an in-your-face, abrasive, attack-oriented style that focused most of its wrath primarily on the media, and secondarily on the Bushies and neocons. People who were comfortable with the status quo weren't going to turn to this newfangled medium anyway, but for the significant number of people who weren't, those blogs were a godsend. The more extreme the invective, the more rhetorically violent the site, the greater the page visits. While it was cathartic to finally have someone take the fight to the other side, it does tend to be even less successful in generating a cash stream than it has been in winning elections.

And alternatively, bloggers who hoped to use their access to this public forum to formulate policy alternatives got the short end. Ironically, it was the bloggers who actually had something, in the form of ideas and policy prescriptions, that might be of value to the marketplace, that lacked the volume of traffic necessary to make the sale, while the ones who did have the traffic only sold snark and invective, products that nobody's buying.

Why television may be on the verge of making motion pictures as passe a form of entertainment as radio drama....

November totals for the Central District of California are out...and they show that the number of bankruptcy filings fell by more than 90% from the totals of one year ago. The large drop in Chapter 13 filings after October 17 (remember, that's the provision favored by the new law) is perhaps the strongest indication that it's not so much the new law scaring people away as it was the end of the old law drawing a high number of people out of the woodwork, who then filed before YBK.

Last night's much-hyped final episode of ABC's Monday Night Football (won, incidentally, by the Patriots, 31-21, over the Jets, the same score the Jets lost the first MNF game thirty-five years ago) included the airing of several clips featuring one of the most important figures in the development and popularity of that show in its early years. I am, of course, referring to John Lennon, the ex-sidekick of Paul McCartney with the Beatles, who allegedly made at least one appearance in the booth in the early-70's, where the most-overrated figure in rock history suffered the indignity of being interviewed by the most-overrated figure in TV sports history.

I say "allegedly", because after an hour or so of googling, I can't pinpoint an exact game, date, or season that the "Smart Beatle" actually appeared on the broadcast. I have seen references to him showing up at the '71 game at Candlestick Park (famous for being the site of the last Beatles' concert) between KC and Frisco, a '73 game at the LA Coliseum between the Rams and New York (where he supposedly said, according to one account, that while he still gives peace a chance, he couldn't say the same thing for the Giants, who lost 40-6), and a game in '74, between the Rams and Washington. The latter game would appear to be the best bet, since he had famously separated from Yoko Ono around that time, and was living in the City of Angels.

Also, he apparently befriended the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, that night; according to Frank Gifford, the Great Communicator also visited the booth, and during a lull before they were to be interviewed, explained the rules of what we Yanks call "football" to the Walrus (Lennon, not Craig Stadler). Nevertheless, the actual details of what happened don't appear to have been studied by any Beatles historian with any depth, no transcript of the Cosell-Lennon interview seems to have survived, and so we are left with what appears to be an "authentic" videotape of the artist known for such treacly classics as "Imagine" and "In My Life" comparing that night's crowd to a rock concert.

More detailed information does exist about the other famous MNF link to John Lennon: the announcement of his death in 1980, late in a game between Miami and New England. Like many other Beatles fans, I still remember Cosell, with his very unique delivery, intoning the words, "dead on arrival" to punctuate his scoop. I doubt that it was actually the first notice by which many of us received the horrible news; in Los Angeles, ABC's local sports anchor, Ted Dawson, had announced the bulletin several minutes earlier, and in all likelihood other local stations broke the news the same way. But Cosell being Cosell, we were bound to remember his announcement more.

We must be do something right...: Matt Welch, wintering in Paris, has some interesting thoughts on the world's two oldest democracies, and why they stay that way.

Festivus Reading: A sanguine analysis of the topic of impeachment, by Michelle Goldberg of Salon, and a brief rundown by Josh Marshall of an op-ed piece by former Bush advisor John Yoo, now a Boalt Law Professor.

The prevalent view among his apologists seems to be that President Bush must have absolute power during "wartime", and that any Congressional or judicial oversight is unnecessary. Regardless of the merits of the claim that permitting the executive branch to review any telephone call, e-mail, or personal communication without a search warrant is an effective way to stop a terrorist attack, the notion that fighting a war necessitates giving a single man absolute power is, quite frankly, a noxious one. It is not only un-American to expect that the Constitution be suspended every time a President decides to start a war, it is counterproductive to the goal of actually winning that war, once our troops are so committed, when the Commander-in-Chief who has been vested with those powers is so completely incompetent.

Moreover, Yoo's argument, that the Constitutional mandate limiting the power to declare war to Congress alone has no substantive meaning, and can therefore be ignored by Presidents, is one of the most frightening claims ever made by a sitting law professor. A declaration of war isn't some legalistic archaism left over from eighteenth century political theory; it's a principal that requires that any war we fight be subject to the approval of the people, by way of the one branch of government that is directly chosen by the people. It's not a condition for committing troops, but you better damn well have a declaration in hand if you want to act as a "war President".

In the military actions taken since 9/11, there was no exigent circumstance requiring the President to bypass Congress, no immediate necessity that forced us to take up arms against Iraq, or even the Taliban. Ignoring the Constitution was Bush's way of saying "screw you" to coequal branches of our government, making them as relevant in the checks and balances within our government as the British monarch is in that country. If the Republican Congress does not wish to put the brakes on Bush's folly, then the Democrats must press the issue of impeachment, or we'll losing something more important than our lives.

Mr. Kos grows tired of the Bay Area real estate market, and a conservative attempts to gloat:

Attention Markos Moulitsas Zúniga: did it ever occur to many in Blue state America that Houston (that doesn't have zoning) is a lot more affordable than let's say Berkeley, California. Also, Houston residents don't have a state income tax that they are paying. It appears Kos can't afford the very values he promotes, which is regulation of markets which leads to artifically high real estate prices.

Or, to put it another way, the "values he promotes" enable ordinary people to attain wealth through home ownership, while living in a diverse community that values the environment, stable growth, a low crime rate, etc.

Although it is unfortunate that Kos missed the boat by a few years when it comes to buying a house in the Bay Area, the policies that enabled the value of homes to soar also make it a very desirable place to live, work, and raise a family. The Berkeley Hills are dotted with the homes of people who never made a huge income, but through happenstance, hard work, and good fortune, have become wealthy, all because they bought homes in a city that followed progressive policies that made the community desirable for people who had money to live in. And in the fullness of time, once this blogging thing starts to become big, someone as ambitious and entrepreneurial as Kos will also be able to buy a share of the Blue State dream as well.

Of course, Houston is a lot more "affordable" than Berkeley, California. So is the Aceh Peninsula, the Sunni Triangle, and the Gulf Coast. That's the great thing about the Third World: housing bargains are always available for people with a few dollars to spend, as long as you don't care about that whole "quality of life" thing. [link via Instapundit]