We're now less than a week from the quadrennial sporting baccanallia that is the World Cup. Even with the recent growth of soccer in the United States, and especially the expansion in fan interest in the event, most American sports fans still possess an attitude that ranges from casual dismissal to frothing disdain at the world's biggest sporting competition. To that end, I am repeating my efforts of four years ago, and comparing the teams at this year's World Cup to an event near and dear to the hearts of many of my compatriots, the NCAA basketball tournament.

The two events have much in common, from the intense national focus they generate, even after the local favorite has gone home, to the early-round interest in seeing an upset by a school/nation no one has heard of over a long-time power. So, without further adieu, your Field of 32:

Brazil: Kentucky (great history, exciting style; can never be ignored); actually, the college team most like Brazil is USC’s football team, a second-choice national fan favorite with its relentless offense, the band, and the gorgeous young women dancing on the sidelines. It’s a different sport, but Brazil always seems to play a different game, and like the Trojans, they always seem to bring the most stars. Fight on, Brazil...

France: Florida (recent champs, with an all-or-nothing tradition; interestingly, the star player for both teams is a French-born son of African immigrants)

Argentina: UConn (perennial favorite; talented, but bland)

England: Kansas (oldest tradition in the sport, with a history of choking in big games)

Germany: Arizona (guaranteed to qualify, but going through a down-period), or Duke (talented, smart, and the team everyone loves to hate)

Spain: Illinois (always talented, but never win a damned thing)

Italy: UCLA (great history, and a defensive juggernaut) or North Carolina (good counterpoint to Germany)

Portugal: Washington (on the attack, but never fails to disappoint at the Dance)

Mexico: Gonzaga (high seed, overrated, will win a few games but under-perform when it counts)

Cote d’Ivoire: MAC champions (at least one African team always "surprises", and even if they don't get out of the first round, they'll make the foes bleed)

Czech Republic: Villanova

Saudi Arabia: MAAC champs

Croatia: Mountain West champions

U.S.A.: Nevada (solid recent performances earn it a high seed, but beware the weak conference)

Australia: Creighton

Sweden: California (perennial underachievers; rarely excite or do anything to convince people they have a legit shot at winning anything)

Ghana: MVC at-large team (see Cote d'Ivoire; their opener against Italy has the potential to be the upset of the tourney)

Costa Rica: Pacific (underrated; their next bad first round game will be their first)

Paraguay: Bucknell (overachievers)

Iran: Montana

Ukraine: Tennessee (sudden emergence at the top-flight, easily winning a tough qualifier but have a lot to prove)

Poland: 4th at-large team from Big Ten (see Sweden)

Angola: SWAC champs

Holland: Texas (exciting, offensive-minded team that never wins the big one)

Japan: George Washington

South Korea: George Mason (memorable Cinderella run recently; iffy long-term prospects)

Ecuador: Air Force (it's the thin air)

Togo: Big South tournament champions

Serbia: Syracuse (boring, mediocre and defensive; will play down to their opponents)

Switzerland: Wisconsin

Trinidad & Tobago: Play-in winner

Tunisia: Sunbelt tournament champions

And of course, feel free to dis my comparisons if you have any better ideas....

Having been skeptical of the claims made by some that the 2004 election was rigged, I would be remiss if I didn't link to one of the more thorough treatments of the subject, which concludes that the outcome was one of the most fraudulent in the history of democracy. Having seen exit polling give consistently inaccurate results in the past, I take the amount of faith the writer gives these polls with a grain of salt. And the fact that it is theoretically possible to rig a voting machine doesn't mean that it happened in 2004. But the weight of evidence, the totality of circumstances, are just too overwhelming to ignore...[UPDATE {6/3}: Or maybe the evidence should be reexamined. Two different reviews, here and here, of the allegations contained herein question the charges that Ohio was rigged (second link via Armed Liberal). The exit polling-as-gospel charge has always been the weak link in the conspiracy arsenal; besides the example of exit polling errors giving Clinton a much larger victory in 1992 than he actually won, the exit polls also gave Michael Dukakis a slight edge in 1988, and gave wins to Tom Bradley in 1982 and Neil Kinnock in 1992.]

The report, released today, exonerating Lance Armstrong for blood doping before his 1999 Tour de France victory, also takes a long-overdue crack at the unethical conduct of the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) and the autocratic martinet who runs it, Dick Pound. Among its findings are that the tests conducted on the urine samples tied to Armstrong did not satisfy even the minimum standards for a finding of a positive result, and that WADA, the laboratory that conducted the test, and the French ministry in charge of the lab all refused to provide evidence and fully cooperate with the investigation.

Troubling, but predictable:

With immigration perhaps America's most volatile issue, a troubling backlash has erupted among its most fervent foes. There are, of course, the Minutemen, the self-appointed border vigilantes who operate in several states. And now groups of militiamen, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are using resentment over the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. as a potent rallying cry. "The immigration furor has been critical to the growth we've seen" in hate groups, says Mark Potok, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center counts some 800 racist groups operating in the U.S. today, a 5% spurt in the past year and a 33% jump from 2000. "They think they've found an issue with racial overtones and a real resonance with the American public," says Potok, "and they are exploiting it as effectively as they can."

(snip)

In addition to white supremacists, the immigration debate seems to have reinvigorated members of the antigovernment militias of the 1990s. Those groups largely disbanded after the Oklahoma City bombing orchestrated by militia groupie Timothy McVeigh and, later, the failure of a Y2K bug to trigger the mass chaos some militia members expected. "We've seen people from Missouri and Kentucky militias involved in border-vigilante activity, especially with the gung-ho Arizona group Ranch Rescue that used face paint, military uniforms and weapons," says Mark Pitcavage, fact-finding director of the ADL. "It's a natural shift. Militias fell on hard times, and this anti-immigration movement is new and fresh."

As Time Magazine details, the resurgence of hate groups, like the Minutemen and the Klan, in the context of the immigration reform battle in Congress, only raises the stakes for why any enforcement-only measure cannot be allowed to pass the Senate. There can be no appeasement with the forces of hate. [link via Crooks and Liars

Back when I was writing about YBK, I used a chart showing the relationship between home values and a number of other variables, including bankruptcy filing rates and voting patterns in Presidential elections. The most recent numbers are out, and they still show the strong correlation between rising property values over the past quarter-century and Democratic voting in Presidential elections. The twenty-five states that have seen the smallest increase in home prices since 1980 are, without exception, states that cast ballots for George Bush in the last election. All but six of the states in the top half went for Kerry, and of the Red States that cracked the top twenty-six, five (Virginia, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada) are states that are either Purple States and/or trending Democratic, and the other state, Montana, has a strong historical track record of backing progressive Democrats in statewide elections.

In the meantime, here's an interesting summary of what the recent flood of foreclosures means, and how the new bankruptcy law has exacerbated the problem. [link via Susie Madrak]

Back from Vegas, where I just spent an exhausting weekend with my buds from college (and their children). For many people, the drive from Vegas to LA on Sunday (or Monday holiday) is one of the most discouraging travel itineraries, an event lasting from 6-7 hours, depending on the traffic on the I-15. Few locals have heard of the Pearblossom Hwy shortcut, a straight, flat road that cuts across the northern part of Los Angeles County, starting in Victorville, and which is invariably empty. Since the worst traffic on the 15 is always south of Victorville heading into the Cajon Pass, this simple detour will save the driver at least a half-hour every trip.

I'm off to Vegas...Luxor, to be exact...everyone have a safe and sane Memorial Day Weekend.

The Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh this morning, after a three-year delay. The Dems didn't even try to filibuster.

Atrios approvingly links to this HuffPost by Eric Boehlert, on the Gore-Bradley battle for the Democratic nomination in 2000:

But did Gore really "struggle" putting away primary contender Bradley at the ballot box? I went back and looked up the answer. Here's a look at the 2000 Democratic primary results, state-by-state in alphabetical order (Bradley was not on the ballot in every state):

Arizona, Gore +59
California, Gore +63
Colorado, Gore +47
Connecticut, Gore +14
Delaware, Gore +15
District of Columbia, Gore +90
Florida, Gore +63
Georgia, Gore +66
Idaho, Gore +59
Illinois, Gore +70
Indiana, Gore +53
Kentucky, Gore +65
Louisiana, Gore +52
Maine, Gore +13
Maryland, Gore +39
Massachusetts, Gore +23
Michigan, Gore +42

You can see where this is gong [sic]. In the end, Gore won every primary contest against Bradley in 2000, and did it by an average of +47. Gore threw a shut-out in what was one of the most lopsided routs in recent primary history as Bradley, despite spending $40 million, was only competitive in a handful of New England states. But now Slate, which fawned over Bradley in real time, casually re-writes history to suggest Gore "struggled" against Bradley. That's pure fiction, as well as lazy and dishonest.

Actually, Eric, what's "lazy and dishonest" is not reporting the result of the New Hampshire primary, which was where Bradley spent most of his time and money (btw, it would have been next on his alphabetical list). Gore won that won as well, but by only four points; the subsequent primaries listed by Boehlert were all after New Hampshire, when the battle was effectively over. There was a five week gap between New Hampshire and the next primaries, on "Super Tuesday", and Bradley, running as a progressive alternative to Clinton and Gore, needed a win in New Hampshire to remain viable for the Super Tuesday primaries. He didn't get it, had almost no funds left, and Gore's narrow victory in the Nutmeg State effectively ended the race.

Boehlert's book, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, has predictably been embraced by one of the more depressing elements in our body politic, the Whiny Left. The Whiny Left is perhaps best seen in its native habitat, the blogosphere, where it moans about how mean the New York Times is to focus on the Clintons' sham marriage, or how outrageous it is that the Washington Post attempts to draw links between Jack Abramoff and Democrats, or what a satanic thug Joe Lieberman is, or, even more importantly, how vicious the MSM is for not hyping an after-dinner speech by Steven Colbert a few weeks back. The Whiny Left is the core audience for anyone who writes a book detailing what a spineless bunch of wussies the media is (are?).

The fact that the Whiny Left may be right (especially about Lieberman) is less important than the fact that its only effect is to harden the attitudes of those less invested in their partisanship, who might otherwise be potential allies. The Whiny Left offers nothing in the way of solutions or alternatives to the status quo, and seem united only by an intense and unwavering hatred of George Bush, not understanding that the broad disapproval the general public has toward the President and his policies does not mean that they will embrace the agenda, such as it is, of the Whiny Left.

If there's one thing I've learned about angry people, it's that they may be publicly amusing, but privately, they're all bores.

From this morning's Kausfiles:

Steve Sailer chops up Dana Milbank's sneering treatment of Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has committed the sin of arguing in a detailed, reasonable and lawyerly fashion against the Senate immigration bill. ... Sample Milbank sneer and Sailer response:

(Milbank) Sessions has joined the immigration debate with typical ferocity, impugning the motives of those who disagree with him. "We have quite a number of members of the House and Senate and members in the media who are all in favor of reforms and improvements as long as they don't really work," he said last week of those who opposed the 370 miles of fencing. "But good fences make good neighbors. Fences don't make bad neighbors."

The senator evidently hadn't consulted the residents of Korea, Berlin or the West Bank. [Emphasis added]

(Sailor) Killer line, Dana! Obviously, the residents of Korea or the West Bank would have lived in perfect harmony without those horrible fences keeping them separate.

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but isn't there a bit of a difference between the relationship our country has with its neighbor to the south, and the relationship between Jews and Arabs on the West Bank, or North and South Korea since 1950, or between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War? Not even the most paranoid fantasists obsessed with Reconquista and Aztlan believe that our relationship with Mexico is akin to that of two countries at war.

Kaus goes on to defend Senator Sessions, whose track record on civil rights is, shall we say, a bit spotty. To wit, back when President Reagan attempted to put the then U.S. Attorney on the U.S. District Court in 1986, during his confirmation hearings:

Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.

It got worse. Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks." Figures echoed Hebert's claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "un-American." Sessions denied the accusations but again admitted to frequently joking in an off-color sort of way. In his defense, he said he was not a racist, pointing out that his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled at the time by the G.O.P., voted against sending his nomination to the floor. Since then, his record on civil rights has been even more spotty, a fact that obviously hasn't inhibited the good people of Alabama from electing the man to two terms in the U.S. Senate.

The fact that Senator Sessions is, or is not, an unreconstructed bigot is not, by itself, a reason not to pass strong laws against illegal immigration. I just got through reading a biography of William Jennings Bryan, the perennial Democrat Presidential nominee of the turn-of-the-century, and one of the fascinating points the author makes is that most, not just some, but most of the cherished progressive principles liberals believe in, and defend, today, were ideas that came from the heads of some of the most virulent racists of the day. This wasn't just true of Southern Democrats, who because of competition from the Populist Party in the 1890's were forced to evolve into the wing of the party that most embraced economic liberalism at that time. Many of the great radical figures of the day, men like Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and "Big Bill" Haywood, were also racists, but that doesn't mean that child labor laws, the 40-hour work week, or collective bargaining were bad ideas. The fact that the poison of racial bigotry was mixed in with the soup of modern progressivism is a reminder that we are all prisoners of the culture in which we live.

What it should mean today, however, is that no immigration law that seeks to punish border crossers should be taken up until its supporters get their own house in order, purge their ranks of the bigots, in the same way that supporters of welfare reform were made to purge their ranks of the idiots who saw the black "welfare queen" as their bête noire before any serious debate about welfare legislation could commence.

Of course, not all people who support tighter border enforcement are bigots, and not all reasons for supporting such a policy are nativist, but unfortunately, racism does permeate the issue. As long as the fear of the brown-skinned lurks behind the surface of this debate, we must make sure that any legislation ultimately passed not be tainted by such an association with racist bigotry. I would rather live in the Aztlan of the nativist's warped fantasy than in Jeff Sessions' America.

Gorillas in the Mist: Believe it or not, this isn't from The Onion....

UPDATE: A dyspeptic commenter asks: What's the difference between the Senate Majority Leader and his patient? One is a bi-pedal mammal with opposing thumbs and a brain the size of a lemon, and the other is a gorilla.

We should all be so lucky: The actual CNN headline is different, but the RSS feed I got for this story read "O.C. star pleased at her death".

Do you realize that, historically speaking, the 2006 mid-term election is probably the least important national election we've had in some time, or will have in some time to come? It's a non-Presidential election, so it's automatically less pivotal than '08, '04, '00, '96, '92, etc. Mid-term elections in years ending with zero or eight are always important, since they determine who gets to redraw districts at the state level, and thus shape who controls the House for the next ten years. Compared with this November, the mid-term election four years from now will be infinitely more important, falling as it does in 2010, the midway point of President Hillary (or President McCain)'s first term.

Next in importance are mid-term elections in a President's first term, such as '34, '46, '62, '66, '74, '82, '94 and '02, since they impact the scope of the domestic agenda of the party in power, at a time when the power of a President is at its zenith. Then come mid-terms falling on a year when a disproportionate number of Senate seats are held by one party ( '42 and '86), where a strong performance by one party can shape control of the Senate for some time to come.

This mid-term has none of those factors. Reapportionment won't be decided until after 2010, so no one elected this time around will necessarily be involved in the future reshaping of the political map. Bush is already a lame duck, even with his party firmly in control of Congress, and any investigations a Democratic Congress might initiate will have dubious long-term impact, other than reaffirming that he has been an awful Chief Executive. And the Democrats are actually defending more Senate seats this time around, thanks to their strong performance in the 2000 election, so even a good performance this time around will probably not net much in the way of gains, or have much long-term impact.

So don't let anybody fool you when they say that "this is the most important election in our lifetime". It's not. In the context of history, it will barely even register.

Tonight was probably the greatest night in the history of television.

Props to Kevin Drum for setting up the "Eating Liberally" meet-up this afternoon at Farmers Market in Hollywood. It was nice getting to put names to faces...I have lived my whole life (so far, at least) in L.A., and up until today I had been to Farmers Market maybe twice, even though it's one of the biggest tourist attractions locally, and it was the site of Gilmore Field, the home of the late and legendary Hollywood Stars baseball team. Just goes to show what you miss out on in life while you're waiting for something else to happen.

Michael Hiltzik returns to the LA Times this morning with a piece on Clipper superstar Elton Brand's forlorn attempts to succeed as a movie producer. Hiltzik, you might recall, was stripped of his column and blog for having the audacity to use pseudonyms when commenting on other sites (as well as, embarassingly enough, his own). I spoke with a high muckety-muck at the Times about that this past week, but only got special pleading about how "any journalist would know what he did was wrong", as if that would have any weight in the wild, unfettered world of the blogosphere. What Hiltzik did was embarassing to his employer, but not unethical.

A good primer on the Senate race in Hawaii, which will be likely settled by the Democratic Primary in late-September. The octogenarian incumbent, Daniel Akaka, has a liberal voting record (although he did support cloture in the Alito debate), but otherwise has been an undistinguished backbencher, and is being challenged by Representative Ed Case, who is running to the right of the incumbent, particularly regarding the Iraq War. Hawaii has a Republican governor who's a near-lock to win reelection, so she would appoint a successor should Akaka die in office. Unlike the more-widely publicized primary in Connecticut, this one's close....

The Da Vinci Code: A critic raves:

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

--A.O. Scott, N.Y. Times.

Over at Slate, David Plotz is bloggin' the Bible. On the Great Flood, he posts:

God announces His first covenant with man, that He will never again destroy the earth with a flood. He doesn't rule out other catastrophes. (God, apparently, is the opposite of an insurance company. He offers flood protection, but no other coverage.)

And who knew the destruction of Sodom and Gomorroh had such an interesting after-story !!

Blair for Lieberman: Harold Meyerson has a "modest proposal" on how to deal with the problem of "Transatlantic Insufferable Moralists With Blood On Their Handsblood on Their Hands".

It's five months too late, but NCAA officialdom is finally admitting that it botched two critical calls in the Rose Bowl that led to Texas winning the national championship (subscription required). The first play was the by-now-infamous Reggie Bush over-the-shoulder "lateral", which should have ruled a dead-ball illegal forward pass, and the other was a lateral thrown by Vince Young for a touchdown after his knee was down. In both cases, the instant replay booth failed to alert the refs on the field that it was reviewing the plays. The championships for both college and pro football this year featured some of the worst officiating I've ever seen for games at that level.

Why Adam Nagourney is Wrong About 2006:

1. November represents the best chance in a generation for the Democrats to win a transformational election in the House. The most reliable indicator in determining who wins a Congressional seat is knowing which party has won that seat in the past. However, every so often there is an election that one party utterly dominates, shattering years of partisan consistency in voting patterns. Among mid-term elections, we can look at 1894, 1910, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1974, and 1994, as years where one party made huge strides, leading to a temporary realignment in how people vote. The Democrats have a chance to make 2006 such an election, and just as 1994 was a more important year, over the long haul, than Clinton winning reelection in 1996, so too might this year. Merely picking up a handful of seats does nothing to change the long-term trends, and it blows a rare opportunity.

2. Any GOP majority in the Senate means that Bush can handpick his judicial nominees. Short of nominating a Klansman, there is no way Senate Democrats will filibuster a Supreme Court nominee from the floor. If you want to impede the reactionary trend of the judiciary, you have to bottle up nominees in the Judiciary Committee, and that requires a Democratic majority.

3. Even partisan investigations benefit the country, if only to make the powerful accountable. Moreover, the public has a right to know what went wrong in our war planning with Iraq, or whether how homeland security is prepared to stop the next domestic terrorist attack. Since the ruling party hasn't evidenced any interest in conducting such inquiries, the Democrats have to step up to the plate. If the Democrats overreach, so be it.

4. With the possible exception of 1992, I've heard some liberal/progressives make the same argument before every election, ie., maybe it's not such a bad idea for the GOP to win this one, let them take the responsibility for the budget deficit/war/recession/whatever. Since the base of the GOP is more concerned with whether our country has gotten right with Jesus in time for the Rapture, things like "screwing up the environment" or "bankrupting the national treasury" or "losing our military in Iraq" won't necessarily discredit the ruling party in Red States, and a complacent political attitude is a terrible one for anybody who truly loves his country.

My home away from the dorm in college, Cody's Book Store, is closing. Back in the mid-80's, I used to park myself at its Telegraph Avenue location, waiting for the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract to come out, where I knew it would have a prominent spot at one of the front tables. Today, I would just order it from Amazon.

Busy day yesterday. Visited my grandma in Kernville (she's 93, and in spite of burying all three of her sons, she continues to brighten the lives of those around her), then attended my high school reunion, which I hope to describe further as soon as I get pictures of the event (hint, hint).

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.

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.

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].

Star Princess: Back in '02, I had the pleasure of sailing on the cruise ship in the news today. Large cruise ships, as I wrote then, do not provide the same enjoyable experience as their more homey brethren.

The Princess line has about five comparable ships to the Star, with three dining halls, two smaller restaurants, a 24-hour buffet, a casino, about a half-dozen boutiques, a disco situated at the top of the ship, and bars everywhere, and can accomodate about three thousand people per cruise. There's an orientation before the ship "sets sail" where you're supposed to learn what to do and where to go in the event of an emergency, but it generally receives the same sort of attention from passengers as the obligatory recital from airline attendants of what you're supposed to do in the event of a drop in cabin pressure. Today's story will inevitably focus on the death of one of the passengers, of a heart attack, but someone dying on a cruise ship is actually not uncommon, largely due to the advanced age of many cruisers.

About half the members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate voted for cloture concerning the nomination of Samuel Alito, including six (by my count) Senators from Blue States. Three of those Senators are facing tough primary battles, including Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, who actually has to run against a Democratic Congressman.

So why is Lieberman the only one who gets attacked? Just asking....

Is George Bush the worst President ever, or merely a run-of-the-mill bad President? I'm in the former camp...it's hard to put anything in the "plus column" with Shrub. His popularity is at historic lows, and that's without any of the normal factors, such as high unemployment, runaway inflation and/or a prolonged string of criminal indictments, that normally cause that particular phenomenum.

His competition for that title centers on the men who held the office before the Civil War, most notably James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, but also including pretty much everyone who held the office, besides Lincoln, between Andrew Jackson and Chester Arthur. Pierce and Buchanan(who, incidentally, may have been the best-qualified man ever to hold the position) were Northern Democrats who pretty much fronted for the slavocracy, and did nothing to stop the South's drift towards intransigence on the slavery issue. Buchanan, in particular, endorsed the Dred Scott decision, tried to admit Kansas into the Union as a slave state, and attempted to run Stephen Douglas out of the party for his apostacy on that issue. Although, truth be told, the final outcome of the Civil War led to some very good results, it was a damn close thing that the country wasn't forever destroyed by his incompetence.

However, Pierce and Buchanan were leading a country that was, at the time, a militarily insignificant backwater. The position they held was not as powerful as it would become, and their ineptitude only affected a few million people. The whole notion of a national economy, that a decision made in Washington could impact farm prices in Minnesota, was still a generation away. Congress was still the dominant branch of government (the opposition party, the Whigs, even believed that a President could not veto an act of Congress unless he found it to be unconstitutional), so much of the blame for what resulted in the 1860's has to lie there. The notion that we could maintain a large peacetime army was one that most of the country, abolitionist and slaveholder alike, would have blanched at in the 1850's, and a national law enforcement entity, something that could have been used to arrest and prosecute seccessionist traitors, was not on the table.

Bush, on the other hand, is not merely the President; he's the World's Most Powerful Man. His decisions affect billions of people, in the most remote areas of the planet. Today, the Presidency is the supreme branch, and where, as here, the same party controls both branches, it is the Congress that is the rubber stamp. He inherited a strong economy, low unemployment, a budget surplus, and a nation that was at peace with other nations. And unlike his two immediate predecessors, he was given an opportunity that gave him almost universal backing from his own people less that eight months into his Presidency, as well as support from nations, both friendly and hostile.

It is safe to say that six years into this Administration, Bush has thrown all of that away. It's not just the fact that so much of what he touches has turned to shit in front of our eyes, it's that much of what he's done badly isn't even on the radar screen yet, so no one's paying attention, at least until the day another Katrina hits, and we have to stare dumbly at our TV sets and mutter, who are these morons? Will it be the economy tanking in 2007, because of high credit card debt, or the collapse of the Housing Bubble? Or will it be the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Maybe the foreign countries that have been financing our deficits will decide there are better investments elsewhere? With this President, most likely it will be all that, and much more besides....

What with the NCAA Tournament underway, I'm not going to be spending much time here the next few days, but my two cents on the Feingold Resolution is that it is appropriate, certainly more so than the whiny calls for impeachment, where a President has knowingly violated the law, as is the case here. Far from acting rashly, the junior Senator from Wisconsin's announcement over the weekend was long overdue. It is not simply a matter of acting like an "opposition party" for Democrats, it's defending the rule of law, a prerogative that should be of equal concern to Republican Senators who are perhaps tired of being rubber stamps for an Administration that has compiled some of the worst public approval ratings since the Carter Presidency.

And frankly, I don't give a rat's ass if this hurts the Democratic Party this November. Contrary to the opium fantasies at other websites, the Party is not going to win back control of the Senate this year. There, I've said it. The House, maybe, particularly if the President's numbers don't improve, but the Senate, nope. It's not going to happen. We're not going to net six seats, and we're not going to impeach the President's sorry ass.

That's why I'm bored with the argument that we need to rally behind the Party, as if the Democratic Party was some holy vessel, inviolate and pure, in which we can invest our hopes. It isn't; it's a loose confederation of hacks and interest groups, and means different things in different areas of the country. If the Democrats controlled the Senate, I wouldn't have a second's hesitation to assert that Roberts and Alito would still be on the Supreme Court, and we still would be fighting a losing war in Iraq. And the President would still be running roughshod over the Constititution.

So don't ask me to lift a finger to support Bob Casey. Or pretend that having Mary Landrieu chair some committee is going to matter a whit, as opposed to Pat Roberts. Liberals need to look at the problems of the day and come up with solutions, not obsess with the irrelevant intricacies of partisan politics during an era in which we are in the minority. Hopefully, the Feingold Resolution will allow us to see that the road back to power is a long one, so we can act accordingly.

Dennis the Peasant: Verrrrry conservative, funny as hell, and perhaps the baddest ass in Blogolia. First encountered the guy back when I was still allowed to comment on the pre-PJM Roger Simon blog, and was invariably torn a new one before I went fetal. Not for the faint of heart.... [link via MaxSpeak]

I feel just like Jesus' son....

Those who are both college hoops fans and love reading something that will make you run gagging and screaming from your monitor by check out this.