January 26, 2007

Paging Gretchen Mol: An absolutely cruel take on west-Pennsylvania native Sienna Miller, in Defamer. Vanity Fair has always been good at spotting It Girls-Who-Never-Were (remember Sophie Dahl?), as well as other trends that never quite got off the ground, a tendency memorably recounted by Toby Young in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. To wit, this month's cover girl is "hot" actress Demi Moore, recently snubbed by the Academy for her stellar work in Bobby, and leading the casual reader to wonder why Ellen Barkin or Cher weren't available for the shoot.

January 25, 2007

Sorry, but the headline, "Key Tapes Said to Exist in Bush Case," is particularly lame. It's not even hearsay evidence; it's the hearsay possibility ("said to exist") that hearsay evidence exists (that is, the "key tapes") that may circumstantially prove Reggie Bush's family was receiving money at some point during his career at U.S.C. And the underlying Yahoo!Sports story is even thinner gruel, since it's based not on what anyone has claimed on the record, but on the fact that during discovery, "at least one of the witnesses was asked to produce 'any recordings in (his) possession of conversations between Lloyd Lake and Reggie Bush, Denise Griffin, or LaMar Griffin.' Denise Griffin is Bush's mother. LaMar Griffin is Bush's stepfather." In fact, asking the other side to produce any recordings that may be in their possession is asked in almost every civil case, and is part of the standard form interrogatories in California civil cases. Duh.

January 24, 2007

It may be too late for Zach Lund, but WADA has agreed to relax anti-doping sanctions that result in suspensions for athletes who inadvertantly ingested (or ingested trivial amounts of) stimulants tangentially found to improve performance. The group also hinted at possibly reducing the punishment for positive tests for cannabis, a drug with no known performance-enhancing characteristics in Olympic sports, but which has been tested at the strong urging of American representatives.
Eric Alterman points out that Bush's approval ratings are now less than half of what Clinton's were at the same point in his Presidency, which also happened to be when his impeachment trial was taking place.
Among the suitors for the Tribune Company's stake in the LA Times is Rupert Murdoch, apparently. Considering the financial mess his paper in New York City has been, or the clusterfuck that was News Corp's prior trusteeship of a local Angeleno institution, there's no reason to believe he will do much to stem the paper's continuing brain drain or its falling circulation, and as his cable "news" channel attests, he never has been one for practicing actual journalism.

January 23, 2007

Congolese Yellow Cake: It would be interesting to see how the Mutombo Myth got started, since I doubt anyone in the White House was clever enough to invent it. Since the final five minutes were all I saw, a good question would be whether anything else the President said bore any resemblance to the truth. [link via Hotline]

January 22, 2007

Today was the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the death of LBJ, and the Foreman-Frazier title fight (ie., "down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier...."). I wonder if there are any other historical dates that had three distinct, unrelated events that were as momentous as those. Roe was perhaps the biggest Supreme Court decision of the past fifty years, and Foreman's stunning knockout of Smokin' Joe not only crowned a new heavyweight champ, it also helped resuscitate Mohammed Ali's career. But the big headline in the paper's the next day was Johnson's death, only two days after his second term would have ended had he run (and won) in 1968.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss....

January 21, 2007

Your sister is a thespian !!! I didn't believe this guy was still alive, until he wasn't...in all fairness, Smathers did deny ever accusing his opponent of having a thespian relative, or practicing "nepotism" with a sister-in-law.

January 20, 2007

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

January 19, 2007

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.)

January 16, 2007

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]

January 15, 2007

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....

January 12, 2007

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.

January 08, 2007

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.