Imagine trying to generate news on the day Brownback announces for President....

How Al Jazeera covers American football. [link via LAist]

Shorter Richard Dawkins:

Tis a slippery slope indeed twixt MLK and OBL.

(and with all due props to Daniel Davies, Elton Beard, et al., for the "Shorter..." form.)

Any good investigative piece should have some real world impact, and Michael Hiltzik's series on the ongoing fraud that is Olympic dope-testing seems to be getting some positive results in the right places. International sports officials have begun to lobby to end the policy of strict liability, which bans athletes from competition even when testing reveals amounts too tiny to have any effect, or where the doping was purely accidental. The International Basketball Federation is particularly aggrieved at the inclusion of cannibis as a banned substance, even though it provides no known competitive advantage to athletes; it is the number one cause of positive tests in that sport (who knew?), and the notion that an athlete can get banned from his sport and stripped of any medals simply because he got baked after competing is absurd. Moreover, the reliability of the testosterone testing procedures that has besmirched the good name of Tour de France champion Floyd Landis has come under scrutiny, apparently because the scientific principles it adheres to are similar to those of creationism.

Ouch:

And although they all praised the troops before they dissed the troops, we're also starting to see some in the pro-war crowd place the blame for the coming defeat on the troops themselves. Here's NRO's Michael Ledeen slagging the soldiers last week:

Note that an increase in embeds [U.S. troops embedding in Iraqi military units] doesn’t necessarily require an increase in overall troop strength. We’ve got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don’t know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it’s a substantial number. Enough of that.

Could you imagine the reaction from Ledeen's pals at Pajamas Media if Markos Moulitsas (or God forbid, John Kerry) had said exactly the same thing in the exactly the same context? It would have been a pure shitstorm of indignation. Roger Simon would have written a cute little post about liberal reactionaries that incorporated a Buddy Holly song, Charles Johnson would have cited it as inconvertible proof of the worldwide conspiracy between Islam and The Left to enslave us all using the Vulcan Mindmeld, Glenn Reynolds would have sputtered something about Markos (and/or Kerry) hating America and the troops, while Michelle Malkin synthesized it all into a really stupid post of fifteen or so very small words.

In any event, per Ledeen, the war is being lost because our goldbricking soldiers are sitting around drinking latte instead of shooting Muslims. That sounds pretty bitter, too.

--Dennis the Peasant.

DTP used to brutalize me over at Roger Simon's comments, so I do feel empathy for Malkin, et al.'s for being his latest targets...but not a lot. Better them than me. [link via James Wolcott]

Sadly, the California congressional delegation seems to contain a fair share of xenophobes, particularly among the Democratic contingent. According to the LA Times, at least seven California Democrats on the Hill would oppose any move to amend the Constitution to remove the ancient anachronism barring naturalized citizens from running for the Presidency. More telling, a number of supporters say that such a change would be a "low priority," adopting the language many civil rights "supporters" used in the '40's and '50's to justify their inaction in combating Jim Crow. Speaker Pelosi also qualifies her support, demanding that any such amendment have a ludicrously long residency period of thirty-five years.

There are a thousand good reasons why Ahnold should not be elected President, but the fact that he was born in Austria almost sixty years ago isn't one of them, and efforts to point to immigrants having divided loyalties and/or dual citizenship, or references to his piggish behavior on movie sets, are irrelevant to this topic. The real issue is that the governors of Michigan and California, as well as millions of other loyal Americans, are barred from running for President, and it is no different than a Constitutional provision limiting the office to Christians, or to men. Kudos to Henry Waxman, who averred "I favor a constitutional amendment to allow naturalized citizens to run for president, even those I may not support myself."

I dream of things that never were: Could Tommy Lasorda have saved the country from the Nixon Presidency, and ended the Vietnam War five years earlier, if only he hadn't worn tight shoes on the night of June 4, 1968? Some questions are raised....

Not a good day for Andrew Sullivan. He seems to unintentionally "out" Condaleeza Rice, here, then approvingly quotes an anti-chickenhawk argument made by a racist xenophobe, here. Senator Boxer, of course, is exactly right. Whatever the merits of requiring a person to have some sort of stake in the policy they're arguing for, it must be clear to anyone who doesn't have his head up his ass that the ongoing debacle in the Middle East stems in large part from this being a war in which our governing elite and our fighting men and women come from two different classes. So much of our thinking stems from two interrelated notions: that we extrapolate onto the universe our own unique experiences, and that we feel much greater empathy to those closest to us. The full gravity and horror of war cannot be wholly appreciated by those who've never seen combat, or who've never had a loved one do so.

UPDATE: Another moronic take on the subject, here (esp. in the comments). Those conservative cheerleaders for war have never had an effective counter to why they're sitting this one out, besides the Modified Liston Alibi.

David Beckham signing to play with the locals is probably the thing needed to free Major League Soccer from its malaise. The league gets good but not great attendance and TV ratings, but has not matured to the point where it can sell to the fan the notion that American sports fans take as their birthright: that it is a top calibre league where the best players in the world congregate. Americans can accept the fact that the U.S. national team is not even close to being at the top in ice hockey, and that other countries have now surpassed us in baseball and basketball, since our domestic leagues in those sports are still the best.

But it's next to impossible to develop any sort of passionate interest in teams like D.C. United or the Galaxy as long as they remain content to dominate a very mediocre league. Fanatics of the sport in this country can easily dial into the Premier League or Serie A on the Fox Soccer Channel every weekend, while the casual fan has other, more palatable options during the season than watching the Houston Dynamo take on Chivas U.S.A. Giving Americans a reason to watch is one way the MSL can make itself more credible, and the best way to do so at this point is by signing top-flight players. Beckham, who has had so much attention paid to his demotion, at both the club and national level, that he can now be classified as one of the game's most underrated players, will do that, in much the same way Michael Jordan's return to the hapless Washington Wizards several years ago gave hoops fans an excuse to watch Eastern Conference basketball.

Oh, to be in England...The Trial of Tony Blair debuts this Monday. For the swelling legions of Phoebe Nicholls fans, it will surely be nirvana, and the early word is that it will even be worth watching the scenes she doesn't appear in. She has a line about Bush being in a coma that may surpass "Game, set and match" as the greatest line she's ever uttered. Otherwise, it's got some telling points about the responsibility (or lack thereof) that Western political leaders have for the consequences of their actions, including the fairy tale notion that we would actually allow international tribunals to judge our own actions.

The ICC, which tries Blair in the satire, got a bad rep from the Milosevic trial, which lasted for four years; needless to say, a four-year trial that ends only because the defendant died is contrary to any elemental notion of due process, and ends up being self-defeating if the goal is to illuminate the atrocities of the accused. After about six months, even the most passionate adherents of human rights and accountability are going to be more interested in what Paris Hilton or Posh Spice are wearing than who ordered what in Bosnia. But it obviously beats the travesty of the victor's justice that we just saw take place in Iraq. How we can consider ourselves civilized for applying one standard of justice to Pinochet and Milosevic, and another to Bush and Blair, who have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands, is beyond me.

This is directed at women, but it's something for a fat bald wastrel on a cruise ship to think about:

Beauty is power -- except for those who'd rather not spend the time. They call it "pandering to the male gaze." Yeah, it's that, too. Like wastrel kids whose legacy relative gets their asses into Yale, sometimes a little cleavage, a nice smile, and a fabulous hat get you a better seat on the plane. When they offer to move you to first class, what do you do, offer your seat to the ringer for Andrea Dworkin?

Just my luck, I'm seated in first class, and I get seated next to Miss Dworkin...or Jack Abramoff. If you haven't checked out her site recently, Amy Alkon is on a run comparable to Urban Meyer tonight.

Congrats on ending a 207-game losing streak, but when did Cal Tech become one word ("Caltech")? Have I been pronouncing it wrong all along?

Our Long National Nightmare, Part II: A profile of Robert T. Hartmann, the man who crafted the most famous line Gerald Ford ever spoke, in this morning's LA Times by the Burt Blyleven of the blogosphere, Matt Welch:

Hartmann, a Times reporter from 1939 to 1964 (with time out for service in the Navy during World War II), was no fan of the Nixon staffers, who he derisively referred to as "the Establishment." He blamed them for Ford's 1976 defeat and warned about their influence early in the Reagan era. Rumsfeld, he thought, was a cunning opportunist, while his sycophantic assistant Cheney, according to Hartmann's 1980 memoir, was "somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld or, for that matter, Genghis Kahn."

The feeling was mutual. Rumsfeld eventually undermined Hartmann by arguing successfully that the counselor's office — which shared a door with Ford's — should be converted into a presidential study. Cheney, dissatisfied with the speeches Hartmann was writing for the president (especially a historic April 1975 Tulane University address in which Ford declared the Vietnam War was "finished as far as America is concerned"), simply created his own separate speechwriting shop. And Nixon Chief of Staff Alexander Haig landed the most lasting blow of all by working around the counselor to discuss with then-Vice President Ford the possibility of pardoning the outgoing chief executive.

Hartmann, a former Counselor to the President, was a pallbearer at President Ford's funeral last week. Ironically, he spent a quarter of a century as a reporter at the Times, where he had been a particular favorite of the politician who was most famously a creation of the paper, Richard M. Nixon. Hartmann opposed the pardon of Nixon, and as recently as seven years ago called the act "an extremely selfish decision" by Ford, geared more towards making his life easier as President than any desire to put the past behind him.

We've just left Hilo on the Big Island, and it's five days at sea until the Island Princess hits San Pedro. So far, the highlight of the cruise has either been the 17-year old girl on the Aloha deck who was reported missing on the ship at four a.m. Wednesday morning, causing a great consternation among the crew and waking up half the ship (it turns out she was bonking a passenger in another cabin, and her dad overreacted), or the two, count 'em, two, performances by the legendary ventriloquist act, Willie Tyler & Lester," who for some reason was plugging a new CD (how exactly would that work?)

As anyone who has ever been on a long cruise can tell you, the port days are the least interesting part of the voyage, since you're never at any locale for longer than ten hours. Once there, you either have to overspend on a cruise-sponsored tour, make your own arrangements (always an iffy proposition), or hope there's something to do near the port. On this trip, the Island Princess stopped in Kauai for the day, and I managed to spend my visit to one of the world's most breathtaking islands doing nothing more than walking to a nearby mini-mall and buying a newspaper. On the other stops, I was more lucky, visiting the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, with a side trip to the USS Missouri, and today hooking up with a friend of a cousin-in-law to tour the spectacular (and undeveloped) outskirts of Hilo, a town which doesn't appear to have changed much in the last fifty years.

So now the fun part begins, with five days with nothing to do but eat, get smashed and play bingo. I'll have pictures to post next week. Be seeing you.

Two more black eyes for the blogosphere, here and here. For the record, I am not a Media Watchdog; if the most important thing in your life is whether Meet the Press has any left-of-center pundits on its panel, or whether the LA Times is biased against conservatives, you are living a very sad existence indeed. But the right wing obsession with the media isn't simply an embarrasment, it may eventually get someone killed. I know that there hasn't been a lot to cheer about as far as successes for the keepers of the starboard flame (sorry, I've been on a cruise ship for the past week), but some bloggers really have to get over the fact that they busted Dan Rather three years ago. Claims that the media has falsified evidence or invented sources are starting to be reminiscent of Queeg's Strawberries, and it's starting to taint the rest of us everytime they go off the deep end.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald says it better, firing both barrels:

And now the right-wing blogosphere stands revealed as what they are -- a pack of gossip-mongering hysterics who routinely attack any press reports that reflect poorly on their Leader or his policies, with rank innuendo, Internet gossip, base speculation, and wholesale error as their most frequent tools of the trade. They operate in packs, constantly repeating each other's innuendo and expanding on it incrementally, and they then cite to each other endlessly in one self-feeding, self-affirming orgy of links, as though that constitutes proof.

And they are wrong over and over and over -- and not just in error, but embarrassingly so, because so frequently their claims are transparently, laughably absurd, and they spew the most righteous accusations without any sort of evidence at all. The New Republic has its Stephen Glass and The New York Times has its Jayson Blair. But those are one-off incidents. The right-wing blogosphere is driven by Jayson Blairs. They are exposed as frauds and gossip-mongerers on an almost weekly basis. The only thing that can compete with the consistency of their errors is the viciousness of their accusations and their pompous self-regard as "citizen journalists."

The comparison with Glass and Blair may be a tad unfair, since those journalistic malefactors were caught deliberately falsifying stories, while I have no doubt the bloggers involved in this the AP fiasco sincerely believed they were purusuing some sort of Higher Truth. But that makes it even more frightening. As a wise man of the blogosphere once said in a completely different context, "screw 'em."

It appears I'm not alone. From Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press:

Since it can safely be assumed that millions are now in possession of copies of "Cars" and "Six Feet Under: The Complete Season," this is the perfect opportunity to trade in or up for other, less obvious DVDs or sets you really want -- or in some cases, need.

My personal want list, fulfilled this year, begins with the best limited TV series ever made, "Brideshead Revisited," adapted from Evelyn Waugh's novel and originally shown here on PBS in 1982.

All 660 minutes of the drama -- about the life-altering friendship of would-be painter Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) and Oxford classmate Lord Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Edwards), who introduces him to a world he would have never known when he takes Charles home to meet his his family and his upper crust London crowd -- have been remastered for the "25th Anniversary Edition Collector's Edition" (FOUR STARS out of four stars, Acorn Media, $59.99).

The perfect cast includes Sirs Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, and as Sebastian's sisters, Diana Quick and Phoebe Nichols (sic), for whom I developed life-long crushes.

Or maybe I am alone; it would stand to reason that if you truly have a life-long crush on the Phoenician, you'd be able to spell her last name correctly. It's not like the first "l" in her last name is silent.

Long live the splendor and glory of Ms. Nicholls against the depradations of the infidel !!! Kobe Akbar !!!

The Poor Are Still With Us: As you enjoy the Rose Bowl at home this New Year's Day, perhaps a thought can be spared for these benighted wretches, our nation's federal judges. According to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts:

In 1969, federal judges earned substantially more than the dean and the senior professors at Harvard Law School, Roberts said. Today, federal judges are paid about half of what the deans and senior law professors at top schools are paid, he said.

During the same period, the average U.S. worker's wage, adjusted for inflation, has risen about 18%. By contrast, the pay for a federal judge has declined about 24% compared with inflation, creating a gap of 42%, he said.

Federal judges, who have lifetime appointments, "do not expect to receive salaries commensurate with what they could easily earn in the private sector," Roberts acknowledged. Indeed, judges in many cities know that lawyers fresh out of law school will earn more than they do, he noted.

But judges should not have to accept salaries that "fall further and further behind the cost of living…. The time is ripe for our nation's judges to receive a substantial salary increase," he said.

--From today's Onion Los Angeles Times. For the record, federal district court judges, who serve lifetime appointments, have had to make do on a meager stipend of $165,000 a year, which is less than four times the average national income. It would be terrible if all the young principled ideologues that have been placed on the courts these last six years would have to leave for the private sector so soon.

After an embarassingly shabby show trial, Saddam Hussein may go to meet his maker on the morrow, and Josh Marshall has a good overview as to what it signifies:

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one -- claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade "prissy and finicky." Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

Putting Saddam on trial was always going to be hard; the more internationally-legitimate tribunal at The Hague for Slobodan Milosevic lasted four years, and was as much a debacle as the Hussein "trial", ending only because the former dictator died. Obviously, though, there is no a way a fair trial could have taken place in Iraq, and the fact that they're still debating whether the execution should be televised is an indication that only the names of the rulers have changed.

Blogging will be intermittent the next two weeks, as I cruise to Hawaii aboard the Island Princess. First night's weather made for a very rocky passage, but it's settled down enough for the crew to allow people on deck. It's five days there, five days in the islands, and five days back, so I'll see you after the new year....

Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the U.S., has died. Our nation was lucky Ford was vice president when Nixon resigned. He represented a brand of conservative Republicanism that seems quaint today: hawkish on foreign policy, moderation on hot-button issues like abortion, and adherence to economies of budgeting that would seem naive to the Cheneys and Bushes of the world. The Republican Party that Ford joined in his youth still identified itself as the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and viewed support of civil rights and the E.R.A. as part of its birthright. Goldwater, Nixon and the Southern Strategy would alter the party beyond recognition; by the time he became President, he was already out of touch with much of his party's base, and 170 of the electoral votes won by the Democrats in 1976, and 143 of those won by the G.O.P., were captured by the other party in 2004.