And one week later, I'm back...well, I didn't go anywhere, really: it was a slow news week and a busy job week for myself, and having to put together a real estate fraud complaint seemed a bit more pressing than trying to figure out whether the "Duke Lacrosse Scandal" was really Tawana II. Since "Guest Bloggers" are typically a fraud on the public (as well as the advertisers), the site went dark for a week.

Anyways, circumstances led me to watching Fahrenheit 9/11 not once, but twice last night. One of things that makes any work of art special is how its impact changes over time. When F9/11 was first released, it was essentially a humorous piece of anti-Bush agitprop, designed mainly to effect the 2004 election. In that respect, it failed miserably; Bush supporters were put off by the tone, and its frequent reminders that their leader was a stupid, conniving, dishonest asshole humiliated them to such a degree that it was inevitable they would rally behind their man come November.

Today, the film is three times more powerful. The election has come and gone, and the smug bits in the first hour of the film concerning Bush and the bin Ladens, etc., are even less effective, but the last hour...shit, the only thing that's changed in Iraq is how much crappier its gotten since the film was released: Abu Ghraib, the insurgency becoming a full-fledged civil war, the number of Americans dying doubled, plus everything else falling apart for the President on the domestic front, compounded by the fact that the Democrats are a worthless opposition party, and how nothing will change even if they win control of one branch of Congress in the next election. The military is still vulturing teen-age recruits from the least-wealthy segment of our society, no-bid contracts are still going to the most-connected, Iraqi children are still having their limbs blown off, the children of Congressmen are still far from the conflict, and mothers are still burying their sons, two years later.

The film was disparaged and denounced in Red America, because they couldn't stand to see their "Christian" leader shown to be a fool, and now America suffers, its greatness as a nation on the wane. I could barely sleep last night.

Four years ago...this blog was founded.

Two Ships Passing in the Night:

But as I look back at December 2001, and prepare to hang up the blogging fun of Reason’s Hit & Run for the stodgier print pages of the L.A. Times, I can’t shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they’d previously sealed off from themselves. You couldn’t predict what anyone would say, especially yourself.

--Matt Welch

Well, as it turns out, Frist didn't have the backing from his own caucus for the immigration compromise yesterday...Lord, what a putz....

UPDATE (4/8): It now appears to have been Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid's fault for the scuttlement, not Frist's. From a partisan perspective, it may not be a bad idea to have an untrustworthy, unprincipled Machiavellian as your leader, but if you actually care about government being an instrument for good, we can do better than Reid.

So my apologies for calling Dr. Frist a putz, at least in this instance. Republican readers may not be so generous: being unable to pass anything, or passing only palliative measures, won't satisfy the nativists in their ranks, and will demoralize their base for November. If this sounds familiar, it's because it was the GOP strategy against Bill Clinton, circa 1994. Then, the issue was universal health care, which Clinton had to press forward because he had already outraged the base with NAFTA and Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Not getting a bill passed sounded a death knell to Democratic control of Congress, since it alerted the party base that the Democrats couldn't get anything done, even with comfortable majorities, while signalling to swing voters that Clinton, Foley, Rostenkowski, et al., were incompetent.

So not being able to pass any grand initiative should be a good thing for Democrats, no? Well, I think it's safe to say that there were Republican voters in 1994 who are dead today, because Congress didn't pass a healthcare bill. There were a lot of people who filed bankruptcy in the intervening years, unable to maintain a staggering health care burden, who probably wished Congress hadn't dicked around on the issue back when it was in the public forefront. If there's an opportunity to pass a good bill, then do it, no matter who gets the partisan credit in the end.

This might be as good a time as any to chide the bloggers who persist in calling the outing of a CIA agent by the White House, "Treason Gate". Or for that matter, any of its related affiliates. Besides being hackneyed and cliched, and redolent of McCarthyism to boot, its usage contradicts the essential point of using the "-gate" suffix everytime there's a scandal afoot: tying a banal, otherwise inoffensive word or name to the dark conspiracy that's gotten you all riled up in the first place (ie., "Watergate"), thereby giving the scandal a colorful name. Back in 1974, no one needed to call the events that led to the resignation of a President, "Break-in Gate" or "Nixongate".

If you believe that the sheer act of publicly disclosing the name of a spook is "treason", then say so. You're alleging a crime, it's easy to understand, and you don't look like a routine partisan thug in the process. More importantly, it shows your outrage is to be taken seriously. If you must, call the matter, "PlameGate", or even "LibbyGate", if you so lack originality that you have to return to the old chestnut. But "Treason Gate" is so Ann Coulter....

Is Peace At Hand? Concerning the immigration debate, possibly. Frist has capitulated, the Democrats are on board, and it looks like the Senate will pass a version enabling all but a few of the immigrants now in the country a path to citizenship. The House bill favored by the bedsheet crowd is dead, and with DeLay out of the picture, and Bush and Rove tacitly supporting the Senate bill, there's no enforcer to keep House Republicans in line. There's no political momentum, either; the wingnuts have no where else to go, and someone like Rove can always rile them up over some other issue that doesn't piss off a swing segment of the electorate.

Consider this hypothetical: Congressman X, from Orange County, is notorious for his pierced eyelids and his shaved head, bald everywhere except for the spiked red mohawk atop. He's also had several previous run-ins with the authorities, who often confuse him for one of the riff-raff at various Capitol Hill check-points. Don't you think that someone in the upper hierarchy of the Capitol Police would point out to his minions that Mr. X is, in fact, a Congressman, and should be given all the privileges and benefits of same, regardless of whether he's wearing his lacquered I.D. when he walks through checkpoints?

Well, if he was a white Republican from Orange County, of course that message would go out. There are only 535 faces to remember, and if the principal component of your job is to spot a face, that shouldn't be too hard. This isn't to excuse the bizarre antics of the Congresswoman from Georgia, but it seems to me that it wouldn't have been very hard for someone in authority to put the word out that one of the members of Congress has a rather, shall I say, distinctive hairstyle, she's black, and she's cross-eyed, but that she's not a terrorist, and in fact she's a sitting member of the House and can be presumed to be not carrying a bomb with her when she's traversing the Capitol Steps.

And a bit of advice to Representative McKinney: if you want respect, try showing some to the nation you serve, starting with your constituents. They deserve better than someone whose personal appearance is shoddy and bagladyish, and whose sense of entitlement would outrage Jennifer Lopez or Barry Bonds. You're a U.S. Congresswoman, and serve in the People's House, so act the part, damnit.

Mickey Kaus, on the Senate debate on immigration, and in particular the issue of amnesty:

The actual sight of millions of illegals having to leave the country might have a deterrent, they-mean-business effect that could counterbalance the inevitable incentive effect (on potential future illegals) of the deal's partial semi-amnesty.

(snip)

To get a disincentive we-mean-business effect, potential immigrants would need to see large numbers of recent immigrants actually leaving the country.

Lord, is there anything that would trigger the Law of Unintended Consequences faster than the sight of millions of our friends and neighbors being booted out of the country, many of them unwillingly...has Kaus ever seen the mass deportation of refugees, of what the "actual sight of millions of illegals having to leave the country" would look like? Neighbors ratting out neighbors, jackbooted INS thugs arresting people (sorry, "illegals") in the middle of the night, entire sections of our cities evacuated, current citizens being compelled to carry national I.D. cards to stave off being deported on a whim; if there is anything less consistent with showing "we mean business" than the voters two or three years from now, deciding that Bosnia or Kosovo, circa 1994, isn't what we really wanted, and demanding that the law be changed yet again to undo such a policy?

And think about how such images would stain the image of the United States overseas. As if Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and our other torture camps aren't bad enough, we would now have on our collective souls the sight of people being uprooted from their homes, involuntarily, to return to a life of destitution, unemployment and political repression in their native countries. Of course, this assumes that we even have the will to show "we mean business"; more likely, who ever is in charge of Homeland Security will be satisfied not with the mass eviction of illegal immigrants, but a few token arrests, enough to show the Tancredos and Malkins of the world that the House version of the proposed law is being enforced, but not enough to actually send any deterrent to future immigrants. In short, it would be like the current legal regime, where immigration is treated with the same rigor as laws illegalizing pot.

In the long run, the more draconian the law Congress passes, the less likely it would have any long-term impact on immigration, other than to alert potential immigrants as to who their real friends in the halls of government are. Needless to say, it would be a half-century before the GOP gets anything more than 5-10% of the Latino and Asian-American vote. Florida would become as blue as California, and Texas would become competitive again. We can't pretend that crossing a national boundary for the purpose of finding work and supporting your family is inherently wrong, and passing a law making it a felony on par with carjacking and selling crack to schoolchildren isn't going to make anyone respect the rule of law.

That Lynn Swann was an overrated player, undeserving of Hall-of-Fame stature, is something that has become such conventional wisdom for so long that I hadn't paid it much mind until I read this piece, by Chris Bowers at MyDD, attacking his election to the Hall in 2001. Having now looked at the numbers used to discredit Swann, who is running for the governorship of Pennsylvania, I was surprised to find that, in fact, his credentials for the Hall were as strong as they were.

Bowers makes three basic arguments: that Swann's career numbers are unspectacular, that he was not a dominant receiver even in his prime, and that he doesn't compare well with John Stallworth, a teammate of his with Pittsburgh who was also elected to the Hall. None of his arguments holds water.

First, not being from Pennsylvania, I can't attest to how much of his current campaign is based on his Hall-of-Fame membership, but as far as whether someone should be in, in spite of low career numbers, well, that ship sailed a long time ago. Gale Sayers is perhaps the best example of someone with low career totals being a HOF member, but Joe Namath is also a member of the Hall, notwithstanding the fact that his career totals as a quarterback were, shall we say, not spectacular. Among the QB's ranked ahead of Joe Willy for most yards passing are Norm Snead, Mark Brunell, Joe Ferguson and Rich Gannon, none of whom are even plausible Hall-of-Famers. Wisely, the voters ignored that, as well as the fact that most of the prime of his career was spent playing in a minor league, and gave more weight instead to who won Super Bowl III.

Like Namath, Swann compiled unimpressive career numbers because he played a short career (only nine seasons), and played hurt during most of it (he was particularly susceptible to concussions). Moreover, the Steelers had the best running game in the sport for most of the decade, and more frequently than not, had the lead entering the fourth quarter, so they were near the bottom most of the time in pass attempts. In fact, during his career, the Steelers ran the ball on almost 60% of their offensive plays. And there was far less passing in the game than there would be in the 1980's and 1990's, when most of the all-time statistical leaders played. Any opportunity for Swann to pad his stats in order to be among the league-leaders was almost nil.

As for him being a mediocre receiver in his prime, who conned his contemporaries into idolizing him because of a few, endlessly-replayed catches, he was selected to the Pro Bowl three times, and was the best reciever on one of the all-time greatest teams in the sport's history. In any event, claiming that Swann was elected because of the voters were "endlessly subjected to watching replays of two or three of his most spectacular catches", is silly; the catches being referred to were in the freaking Super Bowl (two of them, to be exact, against the hated Dallas Cowboys). Of course those plays are going to carry a little more weight than what John Jefferson might have done against the Chiefs in a mid-season game in 1978. When it counted, Swann came up big.

The fact of the matter is, the Steelers were not a Super Bowl team before Swann arrived, even with Bradshaw, Harris and the Steel Curtain, and immediately fell out of contention for a decade after he retired. But while he played, they won the biggest prize in American sports four times in six years.

Lastly, comparing Swann with Stallworth, who is also a HOF receiver, is a bit foolish, since both were exact contemporaries from 1974 to 1982, and Swann's numbers were superior in each category save yardage-per-catch. If Swann played on the same team with another HOF player, at the same position, for nine seasons, and had better numbers, isn't that clear evidence that he was a Hall-of-Fame caliber player? Or at least, not the worst player at his position in the Hall?

Bowers' real point, though, is to attack Lynn Swann, gubernatorial candidate from Pennsylvania. The Democratic incumbent, Ed Rendell, endorsed the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, and is basically a Gentile version of Joe Lieberman (or the Gray Davis of the East, if you prefer). In short, he is not the sort of Democrat that any liberal should go to bat for, the marginal HOF credentials of his opponent notwithstanding.

Protocols of the Elders of Aztlan: As soon as the first Mexican flag was spotted at last week's demonstrations, the conspiracy theorists on the Far Right were bound to make the sort of arguments detailed here (and btw, since when is it inappropriate for a citizen of another country to wave his nation's flag? Are Americans living abroad not supposed to wave the Stars and Stripes?). Among the pundits weighing in is the author of a screed (edited, as it turns out, by the blogger fired last week for plagiarizing the opinion columns of others) justifying the internment of the Nissei during WWII, and a professor who wrote a book not too long ago attacking the stain of Latino culture on "Mexifornia".

Others have chimed in, claiming that deep within the heart of every Latino is an avenging monster, lusting for the day when he can reclaim his ancestral homeland west of the Rockies for "Greater Mexico". And usually, their evidence is of the anecdotal variety, a sign at a demonstration here, or the past collegiate membership of a politican there. It seems if you're Latino, and you aren't willing to pay fealty to the foreign policy of the Polk Administration, you're a fifth columnist waiting to rape and pillage Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Santa Fe (funny, how each of the names of each of those cities seem to be derived from some strange foreign tongue...).

There are plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about tightening border security, ending "birthright citizenship" for the children of people in the country illegally, clamping down on "coyotes" and others who facilitate the peonage economy that exists in our nation's agricultural plantations, etc. But pretending that Latino immigrants are a potential fifth column is beyond the pale. Cherrypicking a few off-the-wall remarks by high schoolers, or having a case of the vapors every time you're reminded that much of the Western United States was absorbed from another country after an unjustified war, isn't just wrong; it's bordering on racist.

From an otherwise routine profile of Barry Bonds:

Where father Bobby had known Jim Crow up close—in the Carolina League, Bonds Sr. was often laconically addressed as "nigger"—son Barry was raised surrounded by the blandishments of white privilege. Through no particular fault of his own, Bonds grew up saddled with the attitudes of black victimhood and surrounded by far fewer of the mechanisms of white power that had at first degraded and then killed his father.

In fact, Bobby Bonds died in 2003 after a battle with lung and brain cancer, none of which seem obviously attributable to the "mechanisms of white power".

Another GOP Congresman has a fishy real estate purchase. Yeah, it's that Jim Ryun, who was only the greatest middle-distance runner in American history, silver medalist (to Kip Keino) in the '68 Olympics. I ran the mile and two-mile in high school in the late-70's, and Ryun was the flip side of the coin with Steve Prefontaine, his contemporary. Ryun was the clean-cut, almost-stereotypical athletic star from Kansas (in 1965, he ran the mile in 3:55.3, a high school record that would stand until 2001), while Pre was the cocky rebel, but they were both my heroes growing up. Both had nightmarish performances in the '72 Olympics (Ryun was tripped in a prelim and failed to qualify for the finals, while Pre led for much of the 5000 before fading badly in the final 200 meters, getting nosed out at the wire to finish out of the money). Prefontaine got hammered one night a few years later and flipped his convertible, dying young, while Ryun seems to have taken the same sense of entitlement possessed by so many other athletes into his political career, where he's now one of the most right-wing members of Congress. Pity....

Most of the attention that is placed on the immigration issue concerns Latinos, but another interesting trend (and one that may be particularly lethal for Republicans nationally) is the increasing political influence of Asian-American voters. While the stereotype many people have of the "illegal immigrant" is the prospective farm worker from Mexico, sneaking past the Border Patrol in the Arizona desert, in California it is increasingly the family from Ho Chi Minh City or Seoul, visiting America on a temporary visa to stay with loved ones, then "overstaying", all the while building a family-run business in Huntington Beach or Alhambra.

And they are starting to vote, too, in large numbers, and quite heavily for the Democratic Party. In 1994, the year Prop. 187 passed, Asian-American voters only made up four percent of the electorate, and essentially divided their support between Democrats and Republicans. In 2004, they made up 9%, and voted for John Kerry and Barbara Boxer as overwhelmingly as Latinos did.

The California electorate was 81% white in 1994; in 2004, it was down to 65%. All told, the increased participation of Latino and Asian-American voters, coming at the expense of white voting, has shifted the outcome of statewide elections by between 3 and 4 percent, enough to make what was a dependable Red State for most of its history into a solid Blue State in a single decade. Again, the critical event was the passage of Prop. 187; both Latino and Asian-American voting in California doubled in just one election, with the Democratic Party gaining almost all of the new vote, and those numbers have stayed there ever since.

Interesting Rasmussen poll on the immigration issue, with a down-the-middle split between the Deport-Them-Alls and the Give-'Em-Amnestys. As always, where public opinion is evenly divided, what ends up being pivotal is which side feels the most passion. Liberals may have the majority view on Roe and gun control, but they killed every election on those issues because the people who care the most are in the minority.

On immigration, far from it being an issue of intense interest for the Republican base, most of the people who actually care about the issue live in a specific region (the Southwest), and they have already formed their party allegiances in large part based on this issue. Nativisim has the effect of enlarging the voting rolls, by encouraging the historically high percentage of Latino and Asian non-voters to exercise their franchise, a mistake California Republicans have regretted only once, and constantly.

Jerome Brown Lives:

America was founded by explorers and conquerors, not "immigrants." If those guys had been immigrants they'd have had to learn indian...

--Michael Ledeen [link via Rox Populi]

Karl Rove is a Patriot: Something to think about this Saturday.... [link via Deadspin]

Mickey Kaus and William Bradley both see the weekend's demonstrations as leading to a possible backlash in the '06 elections. As to why that might not be a bad thing electorally for the Democrats, see here.

Prop. 187 is the ultimate example of why nativism, while it may bring about short-term political benefits (see Herbert Hoover, 1928, and Pete Wilson, 1994), invariably leads to devastating long-term harms (see national Democratic Party, 1932-68, and California Democratic Party, 1995-present). Anti-immigration sentiments, whether against legal or illegal immigrants, have been commonplace throughout the history of our country, but rarely resonate beyone one election. And if there is one thing that American history has taught us, it is that those who are the targets of wedge issues tend to have longer memories than those who briefly got all riled up in the first place.

Using illegal immigration as a wedge issue would accomplish several things, none of which would harm progressive politics. It would lock in Democratic gains among Latino and Asian voters for a generation, as effectively as the GOP's campaign against Al Smith made Roman Catholics a dependable Democratic bloc after 1928. It would change the status quo in the states of Texas and Florida, two states the Republicans absolutely must win to be competitive nationally (not to mention states like Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado), while putting no Democratic states at long-term risk. It would allow the GOP yet another opportunity to impose some ill-conceived policy (hey, everybody, let's build a Berlin Wall from San Diego to El Paso !!), further reinforcing the notion of the Republicans as the party of dimwitted ideas. And all of that would, in turn, lead to public policy more favorable to immigrants, no matter who controls the government, just like the passage of Prop. 187 ultimately strengthened the position of Latinos in American society.

If that's the long-term prognosis, who cares what the Tom Tancredo's of the world scare up this election. Both the anti-Catholic campaign against Al Smith in 1928 and the pro-Prop 187 campaign in 1994 gave the Republicans temporary victories, in years where they would have likely won anyway. But the aftermath proved devastating. So if House Republicans want to use this as their wedge issue for November, I say, Bring It On !!!

There's something about a demonstration of about a half-million people that concentrates the mind...here I am, depressed about life in general, about the nasty trend of the blogosphere towards hate and incivility, about how the local college hoops team will likely win the national title playing the most negative and dispiriting style of funsucking strategy imaginable, and I wake up to the reminder that political change does, in fact, ultimately emerge from the streets, and not from someone's laptop.

The thing people seem to forget about the whole immigration debate is that the laws that are being broken are civil, not criminal. The proposed laws focused on punishing so-called "illegal aliens" are an attempt to substitute a malum prohibitum code (that is to say, conduct that is against the law because it is against the law) with a malum per se version (ie., conduct that is illegal because it is wrong). For most of us, malum per se conduct is self-policing: it is not so much an issue of adhering to laws against rape, theft, and murder as it is following the morals one is taught from an early age not to engage in that activity in the first place. Malum prohibitum conduct is not like that; if we can get away with speeding or parking our cars at an expired parking meter, we will do so, even though we acknowledge the good public policy reasons for why such laws are on the books in the first place.

Several millenia of homo sapiens migrating from one area to another to find a better life will not be changed by whatever legal technicalities Congress enacts, and we simply don't have the resources to do what's necessary to arm our borders with Mexico. As long as America has jobs and wealth, and Central America does not, people will cross northward, our immigration laws not withstanding. The only reform worth debating is one that deals with reality, the millions of undocumented people already here, and the vital contributions they make to our society.

I wouldn't mind being Jewish. I wouldn't mind. Really.

--Kobe Bryant The article goes on to note that while there are 24 Jewish players in the NFL, and 18 in Major League baseball, there are none in the NBA, which, when considering the make-up of the sport before WWII, is ironic. [link via Deadspin]

Kevin Drum has a good post on the trivial nature of blogger obsessions...or not trivial, as the case might be. Plagiarism might not have been part of the original indictment against Mr. Domenech, but this speaks to an utter lack of due diligence by the Post. They gonzaga'd this one. [updated on 3/24].