Separated at Birth: Theatre critic John Simon and baseball Hall-of-Famer/raconteur Yogi Berra both turned 81 today. Happy Birthday, ye quotesmiths !!!

Juiced: In the tradition of the President joking about a "search" for WMD's at a White House correspondents' dinner, comes this piece of sick humor.

Some background on the sudden resignation this week of Appeals Court Judge Michael Luttig, who was once the frontrunner to be the first Bush nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Luttig, considered to be the most conservative judge in the most conservative circuit in the country, fell out with the Bush Administration over their extreme positions on executive power and their mendacity in justifying the secret detention of terror suspects.

The hidden cost of NAFTA--illegal re-emigration?

In Defense of Civility: Well, maybe Chait had a point after all. The entire "Steve Colbert Was Ignored by the Mean D.C. Press Corps So Let's Have a Hissy Fit" controversy has started to generate a nasty, internecine battle in the lefty blogosphere. The debate seems to be over whether "civility", the notion that people who disagree with you should be treated as human beings, is a virtue that progressives should continue to profess, or whether being an asshole is a more winning tactic.

As you can tell, I'm in the former camp. The most noxious trend among lefty bloggers in recent months has been the abandonment of any pretense that people who take contrary positions can do so in good faith. It is not enough that someone has an opposing viewpoint; they must be lying as well. Or if the media doesn't report a story, or give emphasis to the right set of "facts", it's because they're in bed with the Bushies.

Liberal bloggers seem to have looked at the weapons the right uses in playing the political field, what with talk radio, FoxNews, etc., and decided that the tone of political discourse doesn't need to be changed, but copied. It's as if there has been a collective decision that what's objectionable about Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter is their ends, not their means.

It's no wonder that most of the megabloggers on the left are snark-oriented, rather than policy-oriented. If you've been beaten down so long, it's entirely predictable that you are going to turn violent, even if it's only rhetorical. Anger and attitude can be very appealing, and bloggers who appeal to that will gain many readers.

But it is a dark and barren path, even if it may lead to occasional electoral successes. For liberals, the notion of "civility" is always indistinguishable from authentic progressive politics. Civility arises out of the same wellspring as compassion, a principle every liberal was supposed to have learned from Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy forty years ago. Our great victories have come not from beating people over the head with our principles, but from our willingness to love the people who oppose us, even those who hate us. It is from the belief that we are no better than anyone else, that the soul of an oppressor always lurks within the heart of the oppressed, that the progressive belief in equality, social welfare and tolerance for others emanates.

Civility is the acme of non-violent action. By abandoning civility, or by deciding that it be practiced only when it is reciprocated, we forfeit our principles. We become anti-Republicans, rather than liberals.

It's comforting to realize that the current national debate over immigration policy is not a new one:

They were portrayed as a disreputable lot, the immigrant hordes of this great city.
The Germans refused for decades to give up their native tongue and raucous beer gardens. The Irish of Hell's Kitchen brawled and clung to political sinecures. The Jews crowded into the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish, fomenting socialism and resisting forced assimilation. And by their sheer numbers, the immigrants depressed wages in the city.

As for the multitudes of Italians, who settled Mulberry Street, East Harlem and Canarsie? In 1970, seven decades after their arrival, Italians lagged behind every immigrant group in educational achievement.

The bitter arguments of the past echo loudly these days as Congress debates toughening the nation's immigration laws and immigrants from Latin America and Asia swell the streets of U.S. cities in protest. Most of the concerns voiced today -- that too many immigrants seek economic advantage and fail to understand democracy, that they refuse to learn English, overcrowd homes and overwhelm public services -- were heard a century ago. And there was a nub of truth to some complaints, not least that the vast influx of immigrants drove down working-class wages.

Yet historians and demographers are clear about the bottom line: In the long run, New York City -- and the United States -- owes much of its economic resilience to replenishing waves of immigrants. The descendants of those Italians, Jews, Irish and Germans have assimilated. Manhattan's Little Italy is vestigial, no more than a shrinking collection of restaurants.

It's an excellent article; read the whole thing.

A bizarre apologia for Joementum, by Jon Chait, in this morning's local paper:

In the end, though, I can't quite root for Lieberman to lose his primary. What's holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman's sins. It's a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.

Were it to be so !!! Hell, I think Lieberman's being scapegoated, being held to account for sins other Democrats have committed with the same enthusiasm. But primary challenges are a good thing; they prevent incumbents from taking the base for granted. And the Democratic Party has suffered for too long from elected officials who value the office more than the people they represent. We shall not be free until the last corporate Democrat is strangled by the entrails of the last liberal hawk. One, two, a thousand Lamonts !!!

Clichegate: Another example. C'mon folks, "Hookergate" isn't even trying. This scandal is so much bigger than that.

Here's another trivial controversy that has dwindled precious minutes from my life: the National Anthem en espanol. I remember a couple of occasions in the early-70's (usually involving the Golden State Warriors) when one of the other verses of the Star Spangled Banner would be sung before the game. Is there some sort of Francis Scott Key lobby that demands that song be kept as the national anthem?

Of all the things I'll regret on my deathbed, the fact that I lost precious minutes of my life reading bloggers obsessing over the non-coverage of Stephen Colbert last Saturday will have to be one of them. Jesus, people, get a life....

Perhaps demonstrating, once and for all, that the LA Times doesn't get the internet or the blogosphere, the Times has fired columnist/blogger (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Michael Hiltzik for...using a pseudonym when he comments at other blogs. Being a monopoly allows you to do stuff like that.

YBK, Revisited: It looks like we caught a break with the Housing Bubble. It burst alright, but at least it did so after the new bankruptcy law went into effect last October. My great fear last year was that people were going reach the limit as to how much they could borrow off their home's equity, and thereafter falling into foreclosure, at precisely the time that the expiration of the old bankruptcy law would occur. We ended up having a panic anyway, but it could have been a lot worse.

Now come these figures, showing that the foreclosure rate on homes has dramatically gone up nationwide immediately after the new law went into effect. The bankruptcy rates are starting to go up again as well, albeit nowhere near the typical numbers from recent years. [link via Sploid]

Now here's a name from out of the past...it's funny he's getting back into coaching, since I thought Todd Bozeman's entire raison d'etre at Cal was that he was a brilliant recruiter, and that the pay-to-play scandal that sank his tenure with the Golden Bears was a reflection of that skill. Should be interesting to see how the eight years out of coaching have changed the man.

Finally, a website devoted to mapping the impossible itinerary of Jack Bauer....

Our next President? Meet Sen. George Allen [R.-VA]:

George Allen is the oldest child of legendary football coach George Herbert Allen, and, when his father was on the road, young George often acted as a surrogate dad to his siblings. According to his sister Jennifer, he was particularly strict about bedtimes. One night, his brother Bruce stayed up past his bedtime. George threw him through a sliding glass door. For the same offense, on a different occasion, George tackled his brother Gregory and broke his collarbone. When Jennifer broke her bedtime curfew, George dragged her upstairs by her hair.

George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense, the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled, is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend's head. "George hoped someday to become a dentist," she writes. "George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession--getting paid to make people suffer."

Whuppin' his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen's interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn't grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father's coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin. It had handmade Italian tiles and staircases that his eccentric mother, Etty, designed to match those in the Louvre. "It looks like a French château," says Linda Hurt Germany, a high school classmate.

Allen, in fact, didn't even live in Dixie until he was 19, when his father became the head coach of Washington.

The similarities between Allen and the current President are rather eerie. Both namesake sons of famous men, who wear their dissolute youth on their sleeves, until becoming governor in mid-life. Both men have a rapport with some of the darker aspects of Red State culture that their fathers lacked. George Allen, the football coach, was a local legend in these parts when I was growing up, having led the Rams back to preeminence in the late-60's, and every post-season he always seemed to be candidate to return to the club that fired him in 1970; although a Nixon supporter, he always struck me as being a rather decent, interesting guy whose teams were fun to watch.

Excellent King Kaufman column on the "scandal" involving Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush. The problem with malum prohibitum regulations, whether we're talking about traffic, immigration, drugs, or the arcane standards the NCAA expects college athletes to compete under, is that if the regulations don't reflect at least some measure of what constitutes ethical or moral conduct, people will disobey them the first chance they get.

Thus, we have laws on the book outlawing marijuana, or restricting people from migrating from Mexico to the U.S., or setting a speed limit of 65 m.p.h., that few people don't think twice about breaking. If you want to smoke pot, you smoke pot. If you want to cross the border illegally, you cross the border illegally. The fact that it's against the law only means you take great efforts to avoid the constabulary, and not that you're going to lose any sleep due to an uneasy conscience over having done wrong.

What Bush (or should I say, his parents) is accused of doing is no different, morally speaking, than having coasted along at 75 m.p.h. on the freeway. It has nothing to do with the integrity of the game, it didn't effect whether he would give his best effort, either on the field or in the classroom. It's wrong only because it's against the rules, and since the rules do not reflect any moral or ethical code, it's hard to get too upset when someone violates them.

Cactus Rust: The second effort by Ken Layne & the Corvids will soon be out. Here's a sampling...as you can tell, no sophomore jinx here. And still, Bush lied.

Long lost Beckett Play Found !!!

I settled in this evening to watch what I thought would be a routine costume drama on HBO, only to witness, about an hour in, a graphic scene involving the drawing and quartering of some sixteenth century religious dissidents, replete with the sort of sadism and gore that would shock Tarantino. In the future, before watching scenes of people being gutted alive, and their internal organs being dropped on frying pans before their eyes, I'd like to be warned....

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