Some intriguing speculation about Mary McCarthy, the CIA analyst cashiered this week for leaking info about American gulags to the Washington Post.

The L.A. Times has suspended columnist (and blogger) Michael Hiltzik for posting anonymously on the internet. That's right, "posting anonymously", not for making death threats or making defamatory statements. Just for putting his opinions in the mouth of a nom de plume. A s if pseudonymous blogging was some sort of ethical violation. Morons.

Not a good day to be Julia Roberts. According to the critic for the New York Times:

Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.

This probably accounts for my feeling so nervous when I arrived at the theater, as if a relative or a close friend were about to do something foolish in public. I don't think I was the only one who felt that way in the audience, which had the highest proportion of young women (from teenagers to those in their early 40's) of any show I've attended. There was a precurtain tension in the house that had little of the schadenfreude commonly evoked by big celebrities testing their stage legs. We all wanted our Julia to do well.

That she does not do well — at least not by any conventional standards of theatrical art — is unlikely to lose Ms. Roberts any fans, though it definitely won't win her any new ones among drama snobs. Your heart goes out to her when she makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost, as if to move too much might invite falling.

Sometimes she plants one hand on a hip, then varies the pose by doing the same on the other side. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second.

Unfortunately it's in the second act that Ms. Roberts plays the character who is always on the verge of a breakdown, and in this part she's comparatively relaxed, perhaps because she has a slipping Southern accent to hide behind. In the first act she's supposed to be the normal one.

One of the trends in popular theatre in recent years has been to cast a film star to lead a major production, in a desperate attempt to generate hype and bring the crowds back to Broadway or the West End, and sadly, all such attempts seem to end badly. Last month, it was Cate Blanchett attempting Ibsen, to great derision.

In a different context, Bill James has written about the Defensive Spectrum, which warns teams about shifting players in mid-career from less challenging positions (the outfield, first base) to the most challenging, defensively technical positions (shortstop, third base). You can turn a shortstop into a rightfielder, but don't even think about making a first baseman play third, as the Giants so memorably did with Dave Kingman in the early-70's. Of course, right fielders and shortstops share many of the same technical skills; to play both positions skillfully requires speed, a good throwing arm, an ability to anticipate where a ball is going to be hit, etc. But whereas a team can survive even with a slow-footed, mediocre outfielder, as long as he can hit, a team with a shortstop who has trouble fielding his position is going to be in for a long season.

Much the same thing is probably true in the performing arts. Roberts and Blanchett are trying to transition from a medium where their physical beauty is part of their talent, where performances are shot out of sequence and with multiple takes, and where mistakes can be edited out later, to one where they are performing before a live audience, without a safety net, and where their voices have to carry to the cheap seats, without a microphone. It's still acting, so many of the same tricks carry over from one realm to the next, but the consequences of mediocrity are much greater on stage.

Poe Knew: What Edgar Allan Poe might have thought about the current immigration debate, courtesy of local pundit Ron Smith.

The benighted sport of professional basketball wraps up its six-month long regular season in the next two days, to be followed by a ten-week post-season. The old saw about how basketball games never start until the final five minutes is equally true now: a playoff series never begins until Game 5, and the playoffs don't really get interesting until the semis. The NBA has seen fit to eliminate only half the league from the playoffs, most of whom were playing for the draft lottery since Christmas, thereby creating a situation where the game gets overshadowed by its college counterpart (which appeals to serious fans of the sport due to the fact that its participants use something called "strategy") for months at a time, and the only thing of interest to fans since February is playoff seeding.

And tonight, in Memphis, a clusterfuck of monumental proportions is about to result. The NBA, in its infinite wisdom, has drawn up a playoff system where the divisional winners (San Antonio, Phoenix and Denver in the West, Detroit, Miami and New Jersey in the East) are assured of the top three seeds in each bracket. There is also a longstanding rule that gives the team with the best-record home court advantage in any series. The one drawback is where, due to an imbalanced league, one of the divisions is so weak that a divisional titlist has a worse record than almost every other team in the playoffs. In that situation, it's theoretically possible for such a "champion", which would automatically receive the third seed, to face a sixth-seed with a better record (and hence, have the home-court advantage), while the fifth-seed, a team with a superior record, would be forced to go on the road against the 4-spot.

And behold, that's exactly what's going to happen in the West. The Clippers, one of the teams that's usually preparing for summer vacation right now, is set to play the Grizzlies, with the winner probably assured of the fifth seed in the Western Conference playoffs. That will mean a face-off with the Dallas Mavericks, the team which barely missed out on the top record in the conference, with the winner likely playing the team with the best record, the world champion San Antonio Spurs, in the conference semis. The loser of tonight's game will play the third-seeded Denver Nuggets, but since both Memphis and the Clips have better records than Denver, they will get to play 4-out-of-7 at home (and the winner will likely get Phoenix, a much easier opponent than the Spurs).

Both teams are going through the motions, claiming that they're all about winning and developing momentum for the playoffs, but the temptation is too obvious to ignore. It makes no sense to create a "loser wins" situation, but that's what's going to happen tonight.

Some differing perspectives on the Duke LAX rape case, here, here, here and here. I'm inclined to the position of "I don't have a clue who's telling the truth, since everyone who's commenting has a motivation to lie", but I was intrigued by the statement last week by the Durham D.A. after DNA results allegedly failed to tie any of the accused to purported crime, that between 70-80% of all rape convictions in his bailiwick occur in spite of the lack of DNA evidence. Is that true?

Certainly, in a community like Durham, that wouldn't be hard for an enterprising reporter to research...also, remembering the fact that DNA testing is still considered to be a luxury for many criminal defendants, isn't the 70-80% figure going to be impacted by:

a) cases where the defendant confesses before trial, thereby not requiring the introduction of physical evidence;

b) situations where the wrong guy gets convicted, b/c DNA wasn't available to exonerate the innocent; and/or

c) prosecutions that are dropped early on, b/c DNA evidence has exonerated the accused?

The prosecutor seems to have a good ear for how this case plays out locally (he is, after all, running for reelection), but a tin ear for how the media is playing it. He clearly believes the alleged victim's telling the truth, unlike the Kobe Fiasco. There are certainly Fourth Estate organs that would like a different angle; Sports Illustrated, in particular, has always shilled for the prosecution when an athlete is under criminal investigation. So if he believes the alleged victim enough to seek a grand jury indictment, why isn't he fighting harder before the public?

Whenever Christopher Hitchens writes something like this, it can only be good news for Bill Clinton. Up until 9/11, Hitchens was basically a priggish, leftist scold, obscure for the most part, except for his obsessive writings about the Big Dog. People who didn't know any better gave him more street cred on this topic than he deserved, because he was purportedly attacking Clinton from the left. Now, everytime Hitchens writes something completely nutty, like trying to blame Saddam for the Niger Forgeries, Clinton's historical legacy improves.

Same thing goes with Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa.

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.