Classy: James Wolcott, the number one fan of the late and odious fabulist Albert Goldman, sucks up to one of the leading lights in the lefty blogosphere:

But all of Las Vegas's top dominatrixes cleared room and clung to the walls last week when Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher hit the neon strip for Yearly Kos, her arrival heralded by whipcrack lightning and the baying of distant coyetes. Now Jane Hamsher looked amiable and sweetly accessorized hosting a panel on C-SPAN, almost schoolteacherly in her glasses; but cross her, displease her, and the cruel lash will be one's crimson reward.* She has visited her wrath upon the former Wonkette, shown here flanked by a jovial pair of freeloaders. But even that pales beside the rejoinder she offers a critic in the comments section. It's quite a pithy exchange.

"margaret says:
June 12th, 2006 at 2:16 pm

"Well, now, we have a bunch of folks who love the nastiness, and we have a small bunch who like some intelligent analysis, sans vituperation. And, we have a few who suggest if you don’t like what you read, go……..somewhere else. And, a really physically lovely, intelligent woman with a gift for language, i.e., Jane, abuses her gifts with really the kind of words, I’m afraid I have never encountered, not even on bathroom walls while in college. I don’t even know what they mean.

"The problem with these dark words is that they stay in the head, and change one’s internal grace as a human being. I simply don’t want certain images in my head, be it bathroom graffiti, or, to carry it further, detailed descriptions of beheadings by Middle East terrorists, or stories about rape victims, or accident victims, or any other victims of horrendous action. Words have great power, and we should be careful how we use them. They can incite the unhealthy to assassinations and other kinds of violence. On the FDL level, it doesn’t amount to anything with any depth. It’s only word-slinging back and forth to give the Poster and the bloggers who share the Poster’s low-mindedness strokes. Weird, to me. And, a form of word-rape.

"It’s responsible to be inventive and creative with language; it’s dangerous to sling language around, carelessly, insensitive to whom it may hurt or offend. Ah, for the days of Addison and Steele."

"Jane Hamsher says:
June 12th, 2006 at 2:17 pm

"Margaret 116 — 'Ah, for the days of Addison and Steele.'

"You’re a smug, self-righteous bitch. How about those words?"

To which I say, the compassionate liberalism of MLK and RFK is truly dead. We have become our enemies.

France 0, Switzerland 0: Two teams that have a problem putting the ball in the back of the net played to a scoreless draw. The French, who scored only a handful of goals in qualifying, where they tied the Swiss twice, have now been shutout in the four Cup games they've played since they won it all in 1998; the Swiss now have three straight goose eggs dating back to 1994. France ties Peru (1978-82), England (1982-6), and Tunisia (1978-1998) in that regard; the record for goalscoring futility is held by Bolivia, which was blanked in the first five games they played in the World Cup before scoring against Spain in 1994.

In addition to being a racist scumbag, a perjurer, and a plagiarist, who despises the widows, police and firemen of 9/11, it also appears Ann Coulter is a world-class airhead. Kudos to Rude Pundit for discovering that she can't even rip off the mistakes and typos of smarter people very well...and to Art Buchwald, who has come out of retirement to pen this column eviscerating NaziPundit. It starts:

A broomstick in my closet was missing. I asked someone about it and he said,
"Ann Coulter took it."

"What did she do with it?" I asked.

She's flying around on it as a witch, looking for more 9/11 widows for a follow-up
book called 'The Coulter Code.'"

I said, "She's a very busy witch. This is her fifth broomstick."

There's also a good Walmart dig at the end.

No Fitzmas: Karl Rove walks. Bush aide didn't break law. Man Bites Dog.

In the long run, this was probably good news for progressives; Plamegate focused a great deal of attention on the hypocrisy of the Neocon Right, their willingness to expose the identity of a covert agent out of ideological spite, but there are hundreds of better reasons why they should be purged from the engines of power, none of which involve the First Amendment or give blanket protection to the CIA from public exposure. Rove is an odious person who did a crummy thing, but that doesn't mean he committed a felony, and as Ken Starr could attest during his investigation of Ms. Lewinsky, actually proving "perjury" is a damnable task.

Finally, the issue seemed to be a particular obsession of some of the biggest s**ts, c**ts and a**h***s in the lefty blogosphere, so it will be fun listening to their whining the next few days. Joseph Wilson may be a noble public servant who was only doing his job, and he was certainly telling the truth about what he found in Niger, but his fifteen minutes ended a long time ago.

If the megabloggers of the left would spend half of the time thinking about health care or urban poverty that they do popping off about like some low-rent McCarthyite about"Treasongate", the blogosphere might live up to its promise. At least now there's one less distraction to worry about.

South Korea 2, Togo 1: Ahn Jung-hwan, whose game-winning heroics four years ago against Italy merited him the honor of being dumped from his Serie A team in favor of Saadi Gaddafi, once again came up big, blasting yet another knuckleball into the upper corner. Incidentally, Togo has saved Otto Pfister from a career of being a "character actor" much in demand on certain Chatsworth and Reseda sound stages, and he was on the bench today.

Italy 2, Ghana 0: So much for the theory that the Juventus Scandal was going to distract the Azurri. Hard-fought match, decided on goals late in each half, with the Ghanaians screwed on a no-call late in the game inside the penalty area. Since both teams should have an easy time against the U.S., the games against a Czech team that lost another of its stars will be critical. For Italy especially, anything less than a three-goal margin Saturday could be devastating; the Czech Republic has an edge in goal differential, and the runner-up in this group will likely play Brazil in the Second Round. Ghana, on the other hand, needs at least a point Saturday, then hope Italy beats the Czechs in the final game, to have any chance of advancing.

I see Thomas Lipscomb is still hyping his non-existent Pulitzer "nomination." The first time, it can be excused as excessive puffery; the second time, you really have to call his honesty into question. What is simply inexcusable is that the conservative bloggers hyping Mr. Lipscomb know the truth, and they just don't care.

Czech R. 3, U.S.A. 0: Men playing with boys. I saw this same game sixteen years ago, when we sent college kids to our first World Cup in 40 years and got smoked by a veteran Czechoslavakian team. Other than Reyna and sub Eddie Johnson, the team played with no heart; collectively, the team had the same look George Bush has at an unscripted event, when someone asks him about WMD's. Nevertheless, if the Czechs play at this level the rest of the way, they win it all.

Australia 3, Japan 1: On the verge of an undeserved defeat, the Socceroos scored three times in the final six minutes to pull out a stunning victory. Australia was shutout in its previous World Cup, in 1974, and took 84 minutes to pop its World Cup cherry this time. Questionable calls were prevalent; Japan's first goal came after a rather blatant foul on the goalkeeper, while Australia received the benefit of a non-call inside their penalty area after they tied the game in the 82nd minute. All three of the winners' goals were scored by second-half substitutes.

Thinking Outside the Penalty Box: The New Democrat Network is spending $2 million on an ad campaign during the World Cup, focusing on Spanish-language media. The voice of the ads is none other than Mr. Goalllllllllll himself, Andres Cantor.

Did you know "Rock's Renaissance Man" (as Time Mag once called him) has a blog? I didn't...he posts even less frequently than Matt Welch, but more so than Brian Linse.

Portugal 1, Angola 0: Zzzzzzzzzzzz. Early goal (in fact, Portugal almost scored in the first eleven seconds), then 85 minutes of a Euro power treading water against an outclassed opponent. See here for more of the same.

For Angelenos Only: If you want to watch World Cup action with an interested audience and some liquid sustenance, LAist has some suggestions (including my old hang-out, Joxer Dalys).

Mexico 3, Iran 1: That's Brooklyn Avenue over Rodeo Drive, Huntington Park over Encino. In the Battle of the Great Satans, the Paleocons' edge the Neos. Going where Team U.S.A. so ignomoniously failed in 1998, the Pride of Aztlan dominated play throughout, taking advantage of the Iranian keeper's blunder with 15 minutes to play to score the winner. Viva Reconquista !!! Por las Tricolores, todo. Fuera de las Tricolores, nada.

Holland 1, Serbia-Montenegro 0: The Clockwork Orange banged out an impressive victory, both offensively and defensively. The S&M squad had managed a long scoreless streak in qualifying, but conceded an early breakaway by Arjen Robben, and never sustained any prolonged pressure on the Dutch goal.

I assume that many of you reading this blog are watching the games on ESPN or ABC. If you have access to the Spanish-language Univision network, you might partake of its programmming, which is pretty much non-stop soccer during the day. Right now, Univision is airing a between-games show featuring a mariachi band, a feature piece in which the reporter asked some Bavarian locals what they knew of Mexico (sadly, more of them seemed to know a good deal more about who the President of Mexico is than their American counterparts), and two absolutely stunning co-hosts clad in t-shirts and dolphin shorts (sex is truly the universal language). Hopefully, this will be continue to be on throughout the tourney.

A number of you have asked me whether I was going to YearlyKos, the convention of lefty bloggers now going on in Las Vegas. Having just been to Vegas over Memorial Day, I wasn't about to spend another weekend in that city so soon. Maybe next year.

If, in fact, they hold another YearlyKos next year, we should have a great deal more data on the effectiveness of the lefty blogosphere in terms of political influence. The political reporter for the nation's paper of record remarks here that blogs have become as important to the left as talk radio is by the right, which is true, but which also has the potential to worsen the partisan cancer that has afflicted our national dialogue. Talk radio reaches a much wider audience than blogs, and its listeners are a good deal more diverse than the white upper-middle class readers of Kos or Atrios. When Rush Limbaugh lies, a lot of people listen, and it actually has an impact on the political debate.

Although it is untrue that Kos has a perfect losing record in terms of endorsing candidates (his blog endorsed two special election victors in 2004), it is not irrelevant to note that the intense partisanship, while an effective money-raising tool among the party base, is a pretty lame strategy for liberals when it comes to putting up W's on the scoreboard. If liberal blogs were really all that, Howard Dean would be President, and not holding the exalted title of DNC Chief.

Hopefully, the loss last week in the special election will prove to be chastening. Tarring the other side as a cabal of corrupt hacks may be affirming to our sense of moral superiority, but it doesn't elect squat. People are concerned about the continuing quagmire in Iraq, immigration, the cost of health care, and of course, the economy; they don't give a rat's rectum about who leaked Valerie Plame's identity or who Jack Abramoff is. Conducting e-mail campaigns against least-favorite reporters or whining about how the mean MSM doesn't laugh at Steven Colbert's after-dinner jokes doesn't redound to the prestige of the blogosphere, especially when there are serious problems afflicting our country. It would be nice if the stars of next year's convention actually have ideas to tout, rather than just anger and strategies for fundraising and sucking up to the media establishment.

Argentina 2, Cote d'Ivoire 1: Argentina played without two of its stars, but still found a way to beat a determined Ivory Coast team. The Ivorians, playing their first-ever game at the World Cup, fell behind by two at halftime, but had the run of play for almost the entire second half as the RG's were content to coast and play in a defensive shell. Even after Drogba cut the lead in half with just under ten minutes to play, there was no sense that the Argentines were in trouble.

This was my first visit to a public establishment in this World Cup. After the experience of 2002, when games started at 11:30 p.m. and 2 and 4 a.m., and I discovered the sad truth that there is nothing more depressing than seeing a sunrise from a bar, getting to watch games at noon is much more to my liking.

Trinidad & Tobago 0, Sweden 0: In my Idiot's Guide, I compared T&T to the play-in team at the NCAA Tournament, while Sweden was this year's CAL, a bland, boring team that shows up with the belief that they can win a game or two, but has no serious shot at ever contending for the title. Today, even playing a man up the entire second half, the Swedes seemed to play like Ben Braun was calling plays on the sidelines. A gutty, wonderful draw by the Soca Warriors.

Much of the conservative commentary on last Tuesday's special election in San Diego has the feel of someone whistling past the graveyard. This article gives a much better sense of what the significance of Bilbray's narrow victory, but I think it bears noting that for the second time in nine months, a special election took place in a heavily Republican district, and the GOP candidate failed to crack 50% against an underfunded Democrat.

As far as the race being a test of the immigration issue, the result should be chastening for any Republican who wants to pursue the nativist bloc. If any district should have been ripe for this issue, it was the 50th; a largely white, upper/upper-middle class suburban community north of San Diego, where the Republicans have an partisan edge, and the Democratic opponent had clumsily gaffed on the issue of documentation in the final week of the campaign. If the best the xenophobes can do in a district like this is win by less than 4 points, the resonance of the issue can be called into question.

In a normal year, or even in a year that was mildly trending Democratic, like 1992 or 1998, this should have been a convincing win. It wasn't; Busby improved by almost ten points over her run in 2004, while Bilbray was down by the same amount from Duke Cunningham's performance, in spite of the large spending edge. The LA Times (and Mickey Kaus) noted that two other candidates siphoned off about 5% of the vote, but those same two parties took 3% of the vote in 2004, and even assuming that every additional voter those candidates received would have voted for Bilbray, an improbable scenario given the psychology of third party voters, it still would have left him with barely 51% of the vote, well behind even the mediocre showing the President received in the district (in a state where he didn't campaign) last time.

Did someone order a pizza? Togo soccer skipper Otto Pfister has resigned, three days before his squad plays its World Cup opener against South Korea. For those of you who want to see how well a country you've never heard of plays without a manager with the name of a gay porn star, set your TiVo for 6:00 a.m. Tuesday.

England 1, Paraguay 0: Yawn. England's best team in 40 years took a quick lead, off a David Beckham-directed own goal. Nothing happened thereafter. The win probably puts England into the second round, and reduces the need to use Wayne Rooney any earlier than necessary.

I doubt I'm going to be able to do this for every game....

Ecuador 2, Poland 0: For some reason, the Poles were favored. Other than the home crowd advantage accruing from playing in a neighboring country, it's hard to see why. Poland didn't do anything in the last World Cup, other than defeating an American team that was clearly overconfident, didn't qualify for Euro 2004, and they qualified for this Cup from a very easy group; in fact, the other good team in that group, England, beat them twice. And yet they were picked to finish second in the group, and were even seen as possibly threatening the Germans for the top.

On the other hand, coming into the W.C. Ecuador was dissed as a lightweight, a team that took advantage of altitude to create an overwhelming home field advantage in qualifying, but their road losses to Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, the other qualifiers from South America, were by one goal each; I think it's safe to say that it would be hard for most of the teams in this tournament to beat Brazil and Argentina at home, then go to Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo and lose by a single goal. Like Poland, Ecuador went 1-2 in 2002, but they were in all three matches, and their final win, over Croatia, eliminated a semifinalist from the previous tournament. One would think being the third best team from South America would have earned them some respect.

Anyway, Poland hit the post a bunch of times, but were otherwise listless, and Ecuador can probably advance to the next round with a win over Costa Rica next week. I have a couple of friends who are Ecuadorian, so congrats to them.

Germany 4, Costa Rica 2: Impressive start to the Cup. The Costa Ricans, badly outclassed, nevertheless refused to play cynically, and although the Germans sometimes cut through their defense like a knife through butter, managed to keep the game in doubt until the end. The hosts outshot the Ticos 24-4, but were stunned by two breakaway goals by Paulo Wanchope. The Germans, playing without the injured Michael Ballack, didn't ice the game until a spectacular 35-yard blast by Torsten Frings in the final three minutes. Incidentally, Wanchope attended Vincent Memorial High School in Calexico, where he was the 1994 California Division V player of the year in basketball.

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting World Cup-related query for the Far Right....

With the World Cup starting in nine hours, here's Deadspin's list of blogs, both MSM and off-beat, dedicated to the El Copa Mundial, and a useful primer from the local paper (did you know Brazil has a player with the one-word nom de guerre, "Fred"?). Steve Gilliard, lefty blogosphere's biggest soccer obsessive, will no doubt be posting frequently on the topic. And of course, there's my Idiot's Guide to the Cup, here.

Mr. Kournikova Gets Promoted !!!

Had a very weird and frightening dream last night. I woke up with a start in the wee hours of the morning, and my imaginary girlfriend, Charlize Theron Princess Madeline Maria Sharapova, asked me what was wrong. I told her I had just had a very bizarre dream, and it was troubling me. She said that it's good to talk about these things, and that she might be able to help.

So I told her about my dream: that I was on my computer, and had just spent an entire day on Blogger without having a single problem posting or logging on. Maria just looked at me and said, sympathetically, "Ah, honey, we all have dreams like that. You just have to let it go."

In the meantime, here's a preview of what we can expect in the NBA Finals, starting tonight.

As I noted several days ago, a possible defense of right wing flack Thomas Lipscomb's claim to being a "Pulitzer Prize nominee" is that since the Pulitzer website only lists "Nominated Finalists", those writers who were merely "nominated" aren't included. Of course, since anyone can nominate anybody for a Pulitzer, boasting about that kind of "nomination" is a joke, and far more disingenuous than anything Lipscomb is accusing Senator Kerry of having done. It would be like Lyndon LaRouche claiming that he was a Democratic nominee for the Presidency, simply because a delegate voted for him at the convention.

And sure enough, someone is now making that defense of Lipscomb. The Swift Boat controversy is a stupid one for the Far Right to be refighting. When bloggers were initially dismissed as pajama-wearing nerds at the outset of the forged documents imbroglio involving 60 Minutes II, it was in large part due to the then-recent Swift Boat controversy, after the allegations made by bloggers defending the Swifties collapsed and were discredited once the mainstream media belatedly investigated. The Swift Boat allegations became a blogospheric disgrace, and helped solidify the reputation that all bloggers, right and left alike, were more interested in winning ideological and partisan battles than discovering the truth.

Lipscomb's credibility on the topic is therefore important. There are no permalinks in his column, so he's requesting that his readers take his accusations against Senator Kerry and the New York Times on faith. Most of the people who read his piece, or read summaries of his piece at other blogs, are not going to be able to go back and do the necessary research on what the public record actually says about whether the Senator contributed to action reports whilst in Vietnam, for example. Lastly, the entire point to his, and other, attacks on the service record of John Kerry is the claim that the Senator exaggerated his military record. It therefore ill-behooves Lipscomb to be exaggerating his own credentials as a journalist.

Claiming that his previous investigations “earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination” gives the false impression that his work was peer-reviewed and found to be meritorious. At the very least, it calls into question the reliability of his research, and the blind citation of his work discredits the credibility of the blogosphere.

[UPDATE]: Mickey Kaus was not the only blogger to have been conned. Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Democracy Project, Instapundit, Free Republic and Tom Maguire were also hoodwinked, although only Captain Ed was gullible enough (along with the aforementioned U.S. News and Liz Smith) to regurgitate the Pulitzer claim.

More perspective on Thomas Lipscomb's bogus Pulitzer "nomination":

One of the editors dropped by with a list of pieces I might want to submit for a Pulitzer. That’s right! I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer! Along with a ham sandwich a piece from the Chancre Falls Fistula-Gleaner on the peculiar nomenclature of “twice-baked potatoes.” (I mean, what do you get when you microwave them? Three-time baked potatoes? What’s up with that?) Anyone can be nominated. He handed me a print out of my story slugs and asked me to make a few recommendations. Apparently I wrote 174 stories for the paper last year. They want the top 12. Can’t wait for next year, when I’ll have to choose from 312. (emphasis added)

--noted lefty James Lileks [link via Tristram Shandy]

Everything about the new bankruptcy law detailed here is true: the impractical and irrelevant hoops debtors have to jump through, the "credit counseling" that's next to worthless, the byzantine language judges are trying to interpret, the higher fees lawyers are charging everyone, the luxury car/vacation home "exception" to the means test, etc. Filings, at least for now, are way down, but that's largely because everyone who was even close to thinking about bankruptcy filed last October. Simply put, a stupid, evil law....

Huh? Mickey Kaus approvingly links this morning to one Thomas Lipscomb on the Swift Boat allegations from two years ago, calling him "the nation's leading expert on why not all of the Swift Boat veteran allegations against Senator John Kerry are discredited." The column in question states that Mr. Lipscomb has been "nominated for a Pulitzer for his reporting on Kerry during the 2004 elections." Wow, and I always thought the allegations attacking Senator Kerry's war record had been discredited...but since it turns out the person investigating those allegations had been nominated for the highest award given to journalists in this country, we should all have second thoughts on the traitorous coward who almost became our Commander in Chief....

One problem: the Pulitzer Prize website actually lists the people and newspapers who were nominated in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and Mr. Lipscomb's name appears...nowhere. [link via Pamela Leavey] In fact, if you search the Pulitzer archives, not only has Thomas Lipscomb never been a nominated finalist, no one with that last name has been so honored, nor was anyone else for "reporting on Kerry during the 2004 election". According to the website:

Nominated Finalists are selected by the Nominating Juries for each category as finalists in the competition. The Pulitzer Prize Board generally selects the Pulitzer Prize Winners from the three nominated finalists in each category. The names of nominated finalists have been announced only since 1980. Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided.

OK, so maybe Lipscomb was an "entrant" for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. To be an entrant, you have to fill out the entry form, and anyone who has published something in a daily newspaper is eligible. Although "many newspapers prefer to submit entries of particular staff members or achievements," that doesn't matter, since the nomination can be "made by newspaper readers or an interested individual." For example, the brilliant writer who penned this Op-Ed piece for the L.A. Times last October, on the YBK problem, could have feasted on the reflected glory of the most prestigious prize in American letters, had he simply sat down and taken five minutes to fill out the application, and sent it out with the warmest regards to the Nominating Jury. And, best of all, its free it only costs $75.

So I suppose it would be like Jennifer Lopez claiming she was "nominated" for an Oscar for her work in Gigli. Her name wasn't one of the five contenders rattled off on the last Sunday in February, but I'm sure someone (her publicist?) voted for her. It's a neat, harmless way of building up your resume, in much the same way that Tookie Williams was a Nobel Peace Prize "nominee" (actually, it is even less impressive than those two examples, since the Oscar and the Nobel have closed nomination processes). What it has to do with the truth, however, is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: Apparently the Pulitzer nomination claim is an ongoing part of Lipscomb's reputation. Both the U.S. News & World Report and columnist Liz Smith have cited his "nomination" in recent articles about his latest bit of investigative reporting, into the alleged tampering of the Zapruder Film.

A good primer on the tactical divide that prevents the left side of the spectrum from consistently winning, by the Grumpy Forester.

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.