33 Dead at V.P.I.: This story just staggers the mind. If you want some deeper understanding of this tragedy, it's a good idea to stay away from the comments sections of blogs. All you'll get are paranoid fantasies ("it's a distraction from Gonzalez testifying," or "the media are covering up the fact that the shooter is an Arab") and political score-settling.

What he said:

Let me submit to you the problem we have today is not that we didn’t listen enough to people like the Washington Post. It’s that we listened too much. They endorsed going to war in the first place. They helped drive the drumbeat that drove almost 2/3 of the people in this chamber to vote for that misguided, ill-advised war. So I make no apology if the moral sensibilities of some people on this floor, or the editorial writers of The Washington Post are offended because they don’t like the specific language contained in our benchmarks or in our timelines. What matters in the end is not what the specific language is. What matters is whether or not we produce a product today that puts pressure on this Administration and sends a message to Iraq, to the Iraqi politicians that we’re going to end the permanent long-term dead end babysitting service.

--Rep. David Obey (D-WI), 3/16/2007, in response to this op-ed in this morning's Post.

Jimmy Durante...and Creed from "The Office," together again:

Warts and All:

I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person, any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the forums to defend themselves.

And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true even before the world met his victims. So while I still don’t know whether Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded like hate to me. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that isn’t conveyed by his words alone.

Does that mean he should be silenced? The Rutgers team pointedly never asked for that, and I don’t think the punishment fits the crime. First, as a longtime Imus listener rather than someone who tuned in for the first time last week, I heard not only hate in his wisecrack but also honesty in his repeated vows to learn from it. Second, as a free-speech near-absolutist, I don’t believe that even Mel Gibson, to me an unambiguous anti-Semite, should be deprived of his right to say whatever the hell he wants to say. The answer to his free speech is more free speech — mine and yours. Let Bill O’Reilly talk about “wetbacks” or Rush Limbaugh accuse Michael J. Fox of exaggerating his Parkinson’s symptoms, and let the rest of us answer back.

Liberals are kidding themselves if they think the Imus firing won’t have a potentially chilling effect on comics who push the line. Let’s not forget that Bill Maher, an Imus defender last week, was dropped by FedEx, Sears, ABC affiliates and eventually ABC itself after he broke the P.C. code of 9/11. Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think the Imus execution won’t impede Ann Coulter’s nasty invective on the public airwaves. As Al Franken pointed out to Larry King on Wednesday night, CNN harbors Glenn Beck, who has insinuated that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, is a terrorist (and who has also declared that “faggot” is nothing more than “a naughty name”). Will Time Warner and its advertisers be called to account? Already in the Imus aftermath, the born-again blogger Tom DeLay has called for the firing of Rosie O’Donnell because of her “hateful” views on Chinese-Americans, conservative Christians and President Bush.

--Frank Rich, 4/15/2007, N.Y. Times

Read the whole thing; it's an honest examination of why pundits like him found the Imus Show to be so appealing, as well as a critical look at the potential long-term ramifications of its cancellation. Atrios thought it worthy of his coveted "Wanker of the Day" award, which is ironic, since lefty bloggers have not exactly been averse to using (or ignoring the use of) racist and sexist invective to attack their targets, whether they be Condaleeza Rice, Michelle Malkin, "Wonkette," or Roman Catholics.

But Rich misses the important point about what happened last week. If it was only Al Sharpton who publicly expressed outrage, the story would have died a quick death, since no one takes Sharpton seriously. It was when Imus' advertisers began pulling out that his fate was sealed. These periodic bloodlettings all occur in a specific context, which makes the ritualistic purging of the bad influence inevitable. Al Campanis wasn't just fired because he made some stupid remarks about black quarterbacking skills and swimming ability; he was canned because over the preceding five years, he had made a series of boneheaded trades (getting almost nothing for Lopes, Cey and Baker, and swapping Sid Fernandez, Jeffrey Leonard, John Franco, Sid Bream and Candy Maldonado for nothing) that had put the team in the second division by the 1987 season. Jimmy the Greek was axed after a series of embarassing incidents, his racial comments only being the last straw.

And in Imus' case, it wasn't the bigotry, which is pretty much par for the course over much of talk radio, that got him in trouble. Imus has underachieved for years in his timeslot, and it was only his ability to attract well-to-do, high end listeners with his political guests that has kept his show on the air. Once it became clear that no viable Democrat could appear on his show, the attractiveness of his show to advertisers disappeared. Cancelling his show became a no-brainer, and it's why Rush Limbaugh doesn't have to worry about being exiled to satellite radio anytime soon.

Next on Imus: Ho dies.

A rare early clip of the Ken Layne-Matt Welch musical juggernaut:

Taking a closer look at a closer look at those breasts: Prof. Althouse returns to Bloggingheads, attempts to explain what happened last month when she went all David O. Russell on the show.

95% of Children Abused by Their Parents: A shocking study, if true....

The Lebowski Anthem:



I don't know what any of it means, but apparently bluescreen effects have been around for ages.

Disrespecting the Bing: At long last, an interesting story (ie., one not involving arcana about obscure Hollywood attorneys) about the Pellicano Affair: Marlborough girl (Class of '81) sets her gunsights on Harvard boy (Class of '82). Hilarity ensues.*

*Ms. Weiner and Mr. Bing were both in my (Harvard, Class of '81) social circle back in the day. Oh, the parties we attended, the laughs we all shared, the crank phone calls we exchanged....

Media Matters steps away from its normal programming of counting the number of liberals are on Sunday talk shows to do something worthwhile: a damning indictment of other popular radio shock jocks and call-in hosts whose past behavior makes Imus seem like an altar boy.

Racist Quote of the Day:

Oh oh....looks like a pouty Brown Sugar is going to ask Daddy to buy her another pair of Ferragamos. Or invade another country.

--TBogg (referencing a photo of the Secretary of State).

There's an amusing debate going on in the blogosphere over whether Imus is a liberal or a conservative, as if that makes any difference. If "nappy-headed ho" comes out of your mouth when you describe a female college basketball player, you're a racist. If making a lewd reference to a black prostitute is what comes to mind when you need to dis Condaleeza Rice, you're a racist. And it doesn't matter if the nazis over at LGF are pretending to take offense.

The first national poll since the 2008 campaign began to gel shows Clinton leading Obama by 10, Giuliani over a fading John McCain by a 2-1 margin, but Obama the only candidate to lead all comers from the other party. There is a national preference that a Democrat win, but no one has much of a lead in head-to-head matchups. Still, it's hard not to be optimistic if you're a Democrat.

UPDATE [4/12]: More results from that poll (via Yglesias). Edwards also trails Hillary, but does better head-to-head against Republicans. For some reason, Mitt Romney is included in this poll, even though he trails badly within his party, and he's getting walloped by each of the Democrats. Mitt may be the Phil Gramm or Howard Dean of this election, a candidate who raises a lot of money, has intense grass roots support, and is treated seriously by the national media, but proves a disaster before the electorate. Fred Thompson is not matched against Democrats in this poll, and he's the only potential Republican candidate that scares me.

I would be a lot more willing to stomp on the throats of Fineman, Carville, Oliphant, Begala, et al., for standing by their friend Don Imus, if I hadn't seen lefty bloggers do the exact same thing during l'Affaire Marcotte last month (interestingly, Marcotte's former boss, John Edwards, was one of the few Democrats who said he felt Imus was entitled to a second chance). Hell, I'd have done the same thing, if one of my friends was in the same position. There is a time for saying difficult truths to a person you care about, and there is a time to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the onslaught.

It's human nature, and it doesn't matter if your friend or loved one is a racist, an anti-Semite, an anti-immigrant, or an anti-Catholic bigot (and yes, I have had friends and relatives who fit in each of those categories; I don't force potential friends to take political tests, I just want them to take that s*** somewhere else). If a person is truly your friend, your first instinct will be to deny that bigotry is what defines them, then attack their more outspoken opponents (as Imus' buddies are now doing with Sharpton, and Marcotte's allies did with Bill Donahue), even make farcical arguments that what they said is "satirical" or a "joke."

But Imus is not my friend. Calling the Rutgers players, "nappy-headed hos" wastn't an isolated incident, and each of his Beltway Friends knew that. If they wanted to be a true friend to him, to give their loyalty to him some meaning, they had plenty of opportunities in the past to sit him down and tell him that his shtick isn't acceptable, and that it will get him into a lot of trouble one day. But apparently, Carville, Oliphant and the others didn't.

UPDATE: MSNBC axes Imus.

There's a rumor going around that there having problems with the parking at Dodger Stadium.

Don Imus, in his own words.

UPDATE: More Imus "jokes," here:



[link via My Two Sense, who also has a clip of the Beltway's Favorite ShockJock using the other "N-word" last month]

I think Atrios is missing the point here. Sen. Bradley is talking about how the political system has become dysfunctional, how it can't accomplish anything, because it encourages polarization. Bipartisanship and compromise, which have become dirty words in the lefty blogosphere and with its evil twin, the Bush Administration, aren't simply an expedient way to get what you want enacted into law; they are the only ways to create permanent, lasting solutions to whatever afflicts society without bloodshed.

As we are now seeing in Washington, the only lasting thing that an ideologically polarized government produces is massive discontent, a backlash that undoes whatever temporary partisan advantage that accrued (it also helps that the Bushies went about systematically remaking government in as incompetent a way as possible). If Atrios wants the Democrats to pursue the same rovian tactics after the 2008 election, then he will be fated to see his party become as discredited as the Republicans are today.

Heroin junkies, and the crackwhores who love them:



Easily the most insipid three minutes of singer-supermodel self-indulgent excrudence since the days of Serge and Jane. (h/t via Shannon Collette)

From Matthew Yglesias, comes the Best Blogpost Title of the Year.

The world is introduced to another future scourge of the GOP....

Blog turns five today. Happy Easter.

If Karl Rove were to come to a complete stop, would Fred Hiatt's tongue break off?

Pete Rose must really be kicking himself he didn't grab this hired gun back in the summer of '89:

In the present circumstances, members of your Committee have already reached conclusions about the matter under investigation and the Deputy Attorney General has pointed the finger of blame at our client. These are precisely the kinds of circumstances in which even innocent persons are well advised to assert their right not to respond to questions. After all, when counseling our client, we must consider how others…may perceive the facts to be, notwithstanding that such perceptions may not be accurate.

Yeah, right...he even pulls out the "McCarthy Card," a clever distraction always useful for striking at aggressive inquisitors. The rest of the letter focuses on the real purpose, though, which is to plead with Chairman Conyers not to call his client before the House Judiciary Committee and have her actually assert the privilege, in public, under oath. Considering the import of this investigation, and the fact that his client remains on the job at the Justice Department even after she has stated her refusal to answer questions on the grounds that said answers might incriminate her, Dowd's frothing over the issue doesn't win him any sympathy points.

Trivial Pursuits: New York Magazine lists Out Mag's Fifty Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America. The closet most of these people have to walk out of is the one entitled "Who the F*** Are They?" I mean, who knew that "Chi Chi Larue," "Ingrid Sischy," "Lorie L. Jean," or "Irshad Manji" wielded "power", much less that they were gay?

The LA Times spotlights Gov. Schwartzenegger's practice of filling top state positions with friends and allies with whom he's had a past business relationship (link via Kevin Drum):

On the state chiropractic panel, friends of the governor face complaints that they're protecting the profession at the public's expense.

Board Secretary Franco Columbu, a chiropractor, was best man at the governor's wedding. Chairman Richard H. Tyler, the governor's former chiropractor, is another longtime associate; he greeted Schwarzenegger at the airport when the bodybuilder arrived in the U.S. in 1968.

As chairman, Tyler plays a major role in setting the board's agenda. Allegations that the board has abused its power were the focus of a three-hour hearing Wednesday in the Legislature. Lawmakers examined whether board members voted to endorse a chiropractic treatment because they wanted to protect a chiropractor facing criminal charges in San Joaquin County.

Mr. Columbu should be a familiar name to readers of this blog; besides being the governor's Best Man at his wedding to Maria Shriver, he was also his "business partner" and co-conspirator behind one of Ahnold's early scams in this country.

LA Times Liberated !!: So it would seem, as the Tribune Corp. announces plans to go private. I don't know much about Sam Zell, but I figure any person will be better than the corporate management that sabotaged a once-great newspaper. Hopefully, this will be the start of a national trend, where the gross inefficiencies of publicly-traded corporate ownership of newspapers will be replaced by private control. The sports section might even be worth reading again.

To answer the question, I guess the easiest answer as to why the ERA should finally be enacted is symbolic: it would enable the Constitution to reflect the principle that men and women are equal before the law, in the same way the 14th Amendment recognizes the principle that there is no master race. The consensus in our society now is such that any policy which discriminates based on sex, or any policy which has a clearly adverse impact on women, is going to be legally questionable, if only under the Equal Protection Clause, so "heightening the scrutiny" such laws will face following the enactment of the ERA won't make much difference. I can't believe this would be such a difficult decision for the Democrats, now that they control Congress.

Psychotic to adapt ex-Veep's daughter's chick-lit novel for screen, here.

Good to Know:

As witnesses were trooping to the stand in the federal courthouse in Washington to testify in the case of United States v. I. Lewis Libby, and the Washington Post was publishing its series on the squalid conditions that wounded Iraq war veterans suffer at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while thousands more soldiers were surging into Baghdad, President Bush held one of his private book club sessions that Karl Rove organizes for him at the White House. Rove picks the book, invites the author and a few neoconservative intellectual luminaries, and conducts the discussions. For this Bush book club meeting, the guest was Andrew Roberts, an English conservative historian and columnist and the author of "The Churchillians" and, most recently, "A History of the English-Speaking People Since 1900."

The subject of Winston Churchill inspired Bush's self-reflection. The president confided to Roberts that he believes he has an advantage over Churchill, a reliable source with access to the conversation told me. He has faith in God, Bush explained, but Churchill, an agnostic, did not. Because he believes in God, it is easier for him to make decisions and stick to them than it was for Churchill. Bush said he doesn't worry, or feel alone, or care if he is unpopular. He has God.

--Sidney Blumenthal, Salon

Hmmmm...John M. Dowd, the same lawyer who ran Pete Rose out of baseball on a rail in part for refusing to cooperate with his investigation into whether he bet on the Cincinnati Reds while he was their manager, is also the lawyer defending Monica Goodling, the DOJ hack who is now refusing to cooperate with Congress' investigation into the firing of several U.S. Attorneys:

Goodling, now on an indefinite leave, most recently served as senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and as Justice's liaison to the White House. Her name appears on several e-mails about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are eager to ask her about those dismissals.

Explaining why she invoked her right against self-incrimination, her lawyer, John M. Dowd, called the investigation "hostile" and said that some committee members "have already reached conclusions."

Funny, that was what Pete Rose said when he was summoned to appear before Bart Giamatti....

Needless to say, Retro is Cool.

Democracy: The surprise isn't that the Democrats were so quick to embrace K-Street after running against Republican corruption in the '06 election. After all, "corruption" is a recurring campaign issue for every political party and ideology; if a party holds onto power long enough, you're always going to find sufficient anecdotal evidence of corruption. What's surprising is how brazen the party has been in abandoning any pretense of reform.

We Can Call It "Drudgegate." Kudos to Media Matters, for breaking this huge story. What a breakthrough for internet journalism; I definitely see a Pulitzer in their future. At least they're not whining about how McCain never gets asked about his "flip-flops."

How vile is he?

Dobson prefers a “real Christian” like sociopathic monster Newt Gingrich, who is probably the vilest person to ever serve in Congress — and that’s saying a lot. Gingrich is such a repulsive amoral scumbag that when he heard Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow had cancer again, he immediately served them both with divorce papers.

--Wonkette

Not surprisingly, Brownie wasn't the only massively underqualified Bushie holding an important position in this Administration. As Digby points out, there are over 150 graduates of "Regent Law School" staffing positions of importance, including Monica Goodling, the senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who now finds herself in hot water over her decision to take the Fifth when she appears before Congress to testify about the U.S. Attorney firings. Regent Law School, in case you didn't know, is a part of the empire of higher evangelical learning run by the Rev. Pat Robertson. Ms. Goodling prepared for the intensive graduate program at Regent by matriculating at Messiah College in Grantham, PA.

W.W.C.D? : An astute take on a very sad week, from one of her eulogists. Also, I saw this when browsing through the 'Tube, which I thought was very apt, considering her passion for pop bands from Oz:



UPDATE [3/28]: Toby Young pays eloquent tribute to Cathy Seipp, here.

Clichegate: Another day, another incredibly trite use of the "-gate" suffix. Oh, to live in a world where writers actually use "creativity" and "imagination" to express the point that a scandal may have occurred !!!

UPDATE [3/28]: As if those cliches weren't bad enough, the same writer has now come up with (swear to Kobe) "Gatesgate," referring, presumably, to Melinda Gates. You'd think that the repetitious and banal use of the suffix would grow tiresome to even the laziest of pundits or bloggers, but apparently not. Everytime you see "-gate" tossed at the end of a word, you're either seeing a writer who's too lazy to do any creative thinking, or someone who, consciously or subconsciously, wishes to minimize the scandal du jour by tying it in with a bunch of other long-forgotten media frenzies. Even worse, applying the word to minor scandals trivializes the original "gate", Watergate, an unpardonable sin at a time when the abuse of power by the current President has become a very real scandal.

UPDATE [3/29]: I give up. F*** it.

More fun on the set of I Heart Huckabees:



This doesn't seem to be quite as blameworthy as the other clip, even though it's being juxtoposed to director's David Russell's violent tantrum. The one thing I've always heard from actors is that shooting a movie isn't a very exciting experience, and can often be monumentally frustrating. Hour after hour of shooting take after take can get on anyone's nerve, and the sort of emotional risks that a good actor has to take aren't something that can be just summoned at will. Tomlin seems to be blowing off steam, an appropriate way of dealing with the inevitable frustration. Russell's tirade, on the other hand, was that of an insecure bully trying to intimidate a woman who had crossed him.

Oh, and one more thing: the reaction of actress Isabelle Huppert during Lily's f-bomb concerta is priceless. It's no wonder she survived Heaven's Gate; nothing can interfere with that woman's meticulous grooming habits !!!

Kevin Drum, a long-time 24 fan, has a counterintuitive take about the show's politics: it's a world where secretive, neo-fascist policing vindicates liberal, dovish political leaders.

Confederacy of Sleazebags: Larry Klayman and Jared Paul Stern, together at last !!! And they're suing Bill and Hillary Clinton (natch !) for being part of a conspiracy to defame him !!!

What Hath Toby Young Wrought? A sociological examination of the Brit expat in New York:

These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren't our brightest and our best—they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow, their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.

--A.A. Gill, in the April 2007 Vanity Fair. When the magazine that historically genuflected at the altar of all-things-British suddenly declares a fatwa against the island, you know the zeitgeist has shifted. No Brit should receive a Green Card to this country unless they're willing to pick crops for two years.

Cathy Seipp, in memorium: This afternoon, the news we've been dreading for almost two years came to pass. She fought cancer tougher than LaMotta fought Robinson.

And when she shall die,
Take her and cut her out in little stars,
And she will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

My post on Cathy Seipp's importance to local bloggers can be found here; it's the best tribute I could possibly give to someone who meant so much to local journalism, and whose impact transcended partisan or ideological lines. I miss her already, and I can only say that Maia will always have a friend from this quarter. She was 49.

UPDATE: LA Observed has a thorough list of tributes from her friends in the blogosphere, here.

It turns out the motion picture industry isn't the most decrepit entertainment medium around. At least that downturn will fluctuate from year to year. As Kevin Drum points out, CD sales are tanking, big time, and the on-line market that has replaced it is in much better position to appeal to consumers than its counterpart with films.

Where my interests collide...the Criminal Bar of London will present a reenactment of "The Trial of Bardell v. Pickwick" at Middle Temple Hall on Sunday, April 1, 2007, featuring a number of luminaries from stage and screen, including, among others, Phoebe Nicholls !!! It costs only ₤50, but that's practically nothing when you consider that it's all for a good cause (helping impoverished law students), and that there are starving kids in China who would kill just to see the Great Phoenician Diva line-read classic Dickens for a couple hours. So those of you from Lambeth, Notting Hill, Winchester, and Suffolk, and other locales that anonymously visit my site each week, seeking info and commentary about England's most criminally underutilized actress, get off your butts and put your money where your interests lie...or if you would like to contribute to helping out an impoverished bankruptcy lawyer, then just click the button on the right-hand side of the blog, just below the "My Space" link.

MLK, Concern Troll? A poster at Daily Kos illuminates why Dr. King's tactics were so successful in the pursuit of liberal goals. [link via Donkee Rising]

I am one of the vast majority of Americans who has no intention of seeing 300 anytime soon, least of all in a movie theatre. I haven't been to a movie since Jesus Is Magic convinced me that Sarah Silverman might be a tad overrated, and I don't see what it is I get for $10 that I can't get with my monthly cable bill, where I don't get overcharged for parking and popcorn. So my critique is based not on the film's merits, but on what I understand its political message to be.

The film, as I understand, is about the Battle of Thermopolae, in which 300 Spartan warriors defended a narrow pass against the onslaught of thousands of soldiers from the Persian empire 2500 years ago. Some see the depiction as an allegory for the present-day war in the Middle East, in which the Spartans are: 1) the progenitors of "the West", defending freedom and democracy from the onslaught of the Persian hordes; or 2) the ancestors of the modern-day insurgents/terrorists, defending their liberty from attack by foreign invadors. Since the Nazis had a hard-on for the Spartans, emulating their policies on eugenics and militarism, it's good to remember that the modern day totalitarian state is every bit the creation of our Western Civilization, so both views might be right.

But there is another tie-in with Nazi ideology that I thought I would mention, and it has to do with the villain of the movie, King Xerxes. It seems strange that this film would be so embraced by neo-cons everywhere, considering that he is described quite differently in that cornerstone of Western Civilization, the Bible. As anyone who has ever attended Sunday School, CCD, or celebrated the Festival of Purim, the same Xerxes who is portrayed in the movie as a monomaniacal god-king, a prancing and swaggering homosexual, is also the enlightened ruler who stopped a conspiracy within his own palace to exterminate the Jews living in the Persian Empire.

One would be hard-pressed to find a foreign ruler who is described as sympathetically in the Bible as Xerxes the Great (or Ahasuerus, to use the Hebrew name) is in the Book of Esther. Not only was his wife one of the great heroines of the Bible, but it is also written that her uncle Mordechai "was next unto king Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted of the multitude of his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to all his seed." Almost certainly, the Coalition of the Willing that advanced with Xerxes onto the plains of Greece, and won the Pyrrhic victory at Thermopolae, included Judeans. No wonder the Nazis identified with Sparta; when things began to go south for the Germans at Stalingrad, it was the Spartan's desperate defense at Thermopolae that Goebbels used to rally the troops.

So why isn't AIPAC denouncing this film? Why is Abe Foxman silent? Here you have a film committing a blood libel on one of the best friends Jews ever had in the ancient world, a global superpower five centuries before the birth of Christ whose alliance (at least according to Biblical legend) with the descendents of Abraham was comparable with that of the United States today, and no one is up in arms over the Jimmy Carteresque portrayal of noble King Xerxes?

A day like any other, on the set of I Heart Huckabees:

Natalie Nelson, thou art avenged !!!

Two of the three Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism (both from the L.A. Times) nominated themselves, beating out the critics who had the official nomination from the paper. [link via LA Observed] But of course, we already knew that all it takes to get "nominated" for a Pulitzer is an application and a $75 fee.

For those of you who plan to drop off the face of the planet the next four days, in deep immersion in college basketball, here's a bit of arcana for you: John McCain's personal brackets. His Final Four are the four Number One seeds, and he picks the higher seed in almost every game. For a conventional pool, that's not a bad strategy, since it assures the player of consistent results throughout the NCAA's, with an almost absolute certainty that at least one of your teams will get to the Final Four. It discounts the first round, when most of the upsets occur, to almost complete insignificance, while boosting the later rounds, when form begins to reassert itself, and number one and two seeds tally the lion's share of points.

In a small pool, then, McCain stands a good chance of finishing in the money, although there has never been a tournament in which all four Number One seeds made it to the Final Four. Even in the sort of mega-pool he's engaging in, he will likely finish in the top half, although with many thousands of people participating, the odds that at least one player will correctly pick all four Final Four teams are almost certain. Some "maverick."

Which is one of the reasons why most sophisticated pools don't operate in that fashion; in order to reflect the wild, random nature of March Madness, a player who picks only the favorites shouldn't be allowed to reap the benefits over those who seek out the upsets that make the event so unique. In the pool which I participate, the first round is apportioned by seeding, not by the number of correct guesses. If you pick a 12-seed to beat a 5, you get 12 points. If you think Kansas is going to squeak by Niagra on Friday, you get one. People who correctly pick upsets benefit, although the real key is nailing the 8-9 and 7-10 games. After the first round, the scoring is proportional and based on successful guess, which is S.O.P. in most pools.

Purgegate ?!? Tapped and Kevin Drum, rolling out the same cliched suffix for use in a serious scandal...show some pride, will you?

Worthwhile Republican Initiative: If you live long enough, eventually a miracle will happen. Of course, you have to go deep into a state legislature in the Midwest to find it, but kudos to Rep. Kim Meltzer for proposing to do away with the idiotic, albeit unenforceable, legal ban on college basketball tournament pools.

Since I began this blog nearly five years ago, I've been wondering when more famous people would take the plunge. I don't mean pundits or journalists, or other people who write for a living, but honest-to-goodness amateurs with nothing but some free time and a desire to share themselves with the outside world. Well, two who have taken the plunge recently are David Byrne, who sporadically updates his site with Digbyesque posts about the war and related matters, and now Curt Schilling, future HOF pitching ace for the Boston Red Sox. Schilling seems to be plunging into the new media full throttle; here's hoping he can maintain this pace over the course of the season, and give his readers some idea what the everyday life is for a baseball player. And if he feels obliged to drop one of his right wing opinions into the mix, I guess that's the price to be paid.

Right now, the focus on the White House's purge of the US Attorneys has been on the sleazy manner in which the firings were handled, and the possibility that it may lead to the cashiering of Attorney General Alfredo Gonzalez. The firings are coming to symbolize the brazen abuse of power by this Administration, and the unchecked arrogance that characterized the first six years of Bush's tenure in office.

But even more important may be the long-term ramifications this scandal will have on the Republican Party. You see, US Attorneys not only serve a very important role within the bureaucracy of the Justice Department, they also hold a very key position in the pipeline for future stars in the judiciary and in the political system. Each of the people who were fired were Republican stalwarts, attorneys who had proven their partisan bona fides in the past. These were lawyers who were being groomed for bigger and better things.

And now, these same people are being told that this Administration, the same cabal that wouldn't fire Rumsfeld or Rice or the numbskulls around Cheney, no matter how stupid or incompetent they were, was using "job performance" as the excuse to terminate their careers at Justice. It isn't just humiliating; it's needlessly insulting, and it's being done to the best and brightest in the Republican Party, the men and women who were going to be the future Cabinet secretaries, federal court judges, and elected officeholders for the GOP. And the people who have the ignomonious distinction of replacing them will hold tainted positions, and accrue none of the benefits of the position. For a party that has been atrophying at its lower ranks the past few years, this scandal is akin to a major league baseball team seeing its farm system wiped out in a plane crash.

Matt Stoller spotlights a potential "Sister Soulja" moment for Barack Obama, allowing him to kill two birds (Al Sharpton and the loonier elements of the blogosphere) with one stone. A twofer like that doesn't come along every day. Sharpton is one of the more toxic political elements in New York politics, and a huge reason why New York City hasn't elected a Democratic mayor since 1989. The netroots are good for energy and money, but are impossible for a serious campaign to manage, as Ned Lamont found out when his campaign was flushed down the toilet after one of his bloggers drew Joe Lieberman in blackface.

And it's not like either constituency is going to vote Republican, or stay home, in 2008. Obama has been particularly good at counterpunching, as Hillary Clinton and John Howard can attest. Responding to an attack by Sharpton or one of the uberbloggers should be like shooting fish in a barrel for the Illinois Senator.

To answer Ezra Klein's question, he's the best actor ever to have a successful political career in the U.S. If you ever saw the "Wise Guy" story cycle he was featured in, you know he'll fit right in with the mainstream of the GOP.

Why not Boy-Girl-Boy-Girl?

Sens. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Susan Collins of Maine are mixing it up at the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

For future hearings, Democrats and Republicans won’t sit on opposite sides of the dais but rather, next to each other — alternating Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican etc.

In a joint statement , Chairman Lieberman, an independent, and ranking Republican Collins, said “In the last election, the voters said they were sick of the partisanship that produces gridlock… So, as a start, instead of sitting on opposite sides of the room like a house divided, we want the American people to see us sitting side by side as our committee members work together make our nation more secure and our government more efficient.”

Of all the things you can say that the last election was about, voter revulsion at gridlock wasn't it. From 2002 to 2006, we didn't have divided government; we had a unitary executive branch that pretty much did whatever it wanted, and an acquiescent legislature that rubberstamped whatever the Bushies put before them. There was no gridlock, and certainly no desire to make policy decisions easier for the party in power to enact. The voters were in no desire to hold hands and sign Kumbaya with current Administration.

The theme of the 2006 elections was the virtue of divided government, and a demand for a more partisan opposition. The voters weren't demanding an end to gridlock; they were voting for its restoration. Bipartisanship, in spite of what many of the mouth breathers on the left and right might suggest, isn't an undesirable goal, since, after all, consensus solutions to problems are the ones most likely to endure. But the 2006 election wasn't about finding a bipartisan solution to, say, the war in Iraq, it was about bringing American boys and girls home from Iraq, pronto.

Doing the Lambeth Walk: Traffic has been a little slow lately, but one advantage to that is I can track who's visiting, and why. One of the more inexplicable patterns has been the frequency of visitors from the Lambeth section of London, a place I've never visited, usually for the same 2004 post. Do I know you? Does all London internet traffic get filtered through Lambeth? Is Lambeth a hotbed of interest concerning the subject of the post? A couple of years ago, I was getting several visits a day from someone at a Norwegian college, which was equally inexplicable; I never wrote about topics relating to Scandinavia, and I'm certain I don't know anyone from that country. Then suddenly, it just stopped, and I never found out why I had such a devoted fan.

I don't want to put my fan(s) in Lambeth on the spot, but I am intrigued. Since I now have a MySpace page, as part of my continuing quest to reach that most vital of all demographic groups for political bloggers, feel free to contact me there, or e-mail me. I won't bite, and I probably won't even laugh at you. We can talk about the recent closure of the rear yard of the Lambeth Town Hall, or the pro-Labour surge in the town hall elections last year, or whether on a typical early evening millions of people do indeed swarm like houseflies round Waterloo Underground.

Is David Irving Next? Remember that convention of Holocaust deniers that took place in Iran last December? You know, the one that included several rabbis, and all the merriment that caused on "The Daily Show"...well, AIPAC, perhaps the most important lobbying group for the state of Israel, is throwing its annual shindig this week, and one of the featured speakers is Pastor John Hagee, an evangelist who blames Jews for the Holocaust, and supports a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran because it will speed up the End of Days.

But he supports Israel. According to Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, “I think there is a role for him. He has earned a certain recognition with the community because of his support for Israel.” Foxman, who has become a shill for far right causes in recent years, went on to tell The Jewish Week that "It’s a friendly platform. I’m sure an overwhelming majority may be pleased with what he says.”

Nuff said....

Hands down, the worst video ever:



It's safe to say his career was never the same after this debacle.

Since we're coming up on the fourth anniversary of the war, I thought this would be a good time to look back at what I wrote the day the war started, at least to see how prescient I was at the time:

D-Hour has passed, and our country is about to go to war. Here are a dozen things we need to keep in mind:

1. Saddam Hussein is bad, and he has bad intentions;

2. Iraq has not attacked us, and is not presently attacking its neighbors;

3. Iraq has not been shown to be involved with the attack on September 11;

4. For the first time in our history, we are attacking a nation that is not engaged in hostilities with us or its neighbors; in fact, we are not even claiming a pretext that they are, as we did with Mexico and Spain in the nineteenth century;

5. There has been no failure in the inspection regime under Resolution 1441 to require that we go to war this instant;

6. The U.S. withheld evidence from the inspectors that might have made discovery of WMD’s possible, but didn’t provide it so as to not minimize the case for going to war;

7. The difference between the relative strength of the US and Iraqi armies is enormous; we are literally going to be tearing the wings off of a fly;

8. Many thousands of civilians will be killed;

9. Most of what we will hear being reported on American television will be untrue, especially in the first few days of conflict; overseas reporting, even Al Jazeera, will be more accurate;

10. No matter how lopsided the battles will be, each soldier and sailor has family back home, who will be worried no end over the fate of their loved ones, EVERY DAY OF THIS WAR;

11. We will discover the full extent of Hussein’s brutality and tyranny when Baghdad is “liberated”;

12. History will not look kindly at us for our prevarications used to justify going to war, for our manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to justify these acts, and for the bloody-minded lust that this Administration has pursued this war.

I am amazed at how well that held up, considering that I don't make any claims to being a foreign policy expert, and especially considering how bad my predictions usually are in those things that I do pretend to have knowledge, like sports. Of those, only number six, with its assumption that there were WMD's in Iraq, seems to have fallen short. And while I correctly predicted the cakewalk our army would have getting to Baghdad, I didn't foresee the size and scope of the subsequent insurgency, possibly because I couldn't believe the Bushies were so completely devoid of competence.

Still, not too shabby....

The idiotic convention of affixing "-gate" to any bad act by a government official (ie. "Traitorgate", "Filegate", etc.) proceeds apace with yet another scandal involving the Bushies.

The Libby Verdict: Guilty on four charges of perjury and making false statements to the Feds. Sullivan and Drum react.

The conventional wisdom that Libby will draw out the appeals until after the 2008 election so he can get a pre-inaugural pardon from George Bush before he leaves office is probably correct, but it hardly matters. Libby doesn't seem like a guy who's going to rat out his superiors anyways, so the prosecutor's ability to get him to turn state's evidence is diminished, a reality Fitzgerald seemed to recognize at his press conference after the verdict. Since the only reason for Libby to lie the way he did in the first place was to protect Dick Cheney, anyone with an IQ in double digits can deduce that this whole controversy resulted from the Veep's desire to cover up his role in the fabrication of pre-war intelligence.

By itself, that's impeachable. We don't need Scooter Libby's testimony in some future criminal case to make that stick. Pardoning Libby will be the final nail in the coffin of the Bush Administration's historical legacy, that of a cabal which stressed certitude in the face of doubt, at the cost of many thousands of lives and, potentially, the greatness of the American experiment.

Charter Schooling: Those who call for privatizing our public educational system might well examine four model schools from back east:

The N.C.A.A. announced Monday that it would no longer accept transcripts from two schools that had sent dozens of talented athletes to high-profile college athletics programs.

Kevin Lennon, the N.C.A.A. vice president for membership services, said that Lutheran Christian Academy in Philadelphia and Prince Avenue Prep in Pickens, S.C., which use curriculum from Accelerated Christian Education, did not have a high enough standard within that curriculum. Neither school was given “model” or “quality” status by the organization, which is why the N.C.A.A. said it would no longer be accepting transcripts from them.

(snip)

Records from American Academy High School in Miami and the now-closed Florida Preparatory Academy in Port Charlotte, Fla., both of which did not respond to repeated N.C.A.A. requests for information, will also not be accepted.

Darryl Schofield, the coach at Lutheran Christian, said that his school had become an unfair target of the N.C.A.A.

“This is ongoing, ridiculous and stupid,” Schofield said of the N.C.A.A.’s decision. “It’s a waste of my time.”

He said he did not know about the latest decision until a reporter showed him the N.C.A.A.’s news release Monday. He said that the school changed locations and that the person at the community center where it used to be was throwing away its mail. Lennon said Lutheran should have informed the N.C.A.A. of the move.

Lutheran Christian Academy and numerous other prep schools came under increased scrutiny last year after investigations by The New York Times showed that athletes were receiving high grades for little or no work. Four players told The Times that Schofield was their only teacher and that they were not required to attend classes.

Nothing brings back memories of school days more than thinking of the community center where your dear alma mater was situated.

The 60's, as we've come to know them, wasn't hippies in tie-dyed shirts and nude fans sliding in the mud at some mega-rock festival at an upstate farm, or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or anti-war demonstrations, or black men in afros and berets demanding to off the pigs.

This was the real 60's, in all its great and terrible beauty:

Romney-Coulter 2008 ?!? Apparently, it's under consideration:


And always remember, "we're not Sunni and Shia here."

Things to be proud of:

I have been called -- my kids are all aware of this -- dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly.

--Sen. James Inhofe [R-OK]. It takes a special quality to surpass Ann Coulter as the most frightening and loathsome figure to speak at the Bundist Rally CPAC convention last weekend. Inhofe continued to channel his inner David Irving before an enthusiastic crowd, calling man-made global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people," and denouncing the Bush Administration's recent decision to list polar bears as an endangered species.

Damn the Swiss !!!

Conservative blogger (and attorney) Patterico demonstrates why you can't judge a blog by the comments it generates, although I doubt he intended to.

I'm proud to be an American....

Matt Welch, who's written the book on what a virulent authoritarian streak John McCain possesses, strikes again. Concerning McCain's support/authorship for the plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, in absolute defiance of public opinion, Welch notes:

The significance of the McCain Plan transcended horse-race politics. It was a microcosm of the Arizona senator’s largely unexamined philosophy about the proper role of the U.S. government. Like almost every past McCain crusade, from fining Big Tobacco to drug-testing athletes to restricting political speech in the name of campaign finance reform, the surge involved an increase in the power of the federal government, particularly in the executive branch. Like many of his reform measures—identifying weapons pork, eliminating congressional airport perks, even banning torture—the escalation had as much to do with appearances (in this case, the appearance of continuing to project U.S. military strength rather than accept “defeat”) as it did with reality. And like the reputation-making actions of his heroes, including his father, his grandfather, and his political idol Teddy Roosevelt, the new Iraq strategy required yet another expansion of American military power to address what is, at least in part, a nonmilitary problem.

In short, McCain would represent a continuance of the Big Government conservatism championed by George Bush, not a new direction.

A good analysis of why the next Republican to be elected President will likely continue shifting governmental policy to the right on abortion and birth control, regardless of whether they're pro-choice (Giuliani), pro-life (McCain), or whatever position happens to be convenient for the time being (Romney). An unwillingness to buck the party's base will probably extend to lower Federal court nominees as well, but the article is less convincing on the subject of the Supreme Court.

It is correct that when Republican Presidents have focused on ideology over competence, they've gotten what they wanted, as the Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas selections indicate. But unlike other judicial nominations, the Supreme Court focuses a great deal more public attention, and the political temptation to court a faction outside the party's base is usually too important to resist. The five previous Republican Presidents each nominated justices who were either liberal (Brennan, Stevens, and Blackmun) or right-centrist (Stewart, O'Connor, Powell, Souter and Kennedy), each of whom played a role in enacting, or reaffirming, Roe v. Wade, and even the current occupant was more than willing to nominate a less-than-ideological pick (Harriet Miers) the last time out. Six of the nine judges who ruled on Roe were GOP appointees, four of them by Nixon, and seven of the nine replacements for those justices were nominated by Republican, anti-abortion Presidents. And yet, Roe still stands, thirty-four years later, sturdy as an oak, and unlikely to be overturned by the Supreme Court anytime soon, regardless of whom President Giuliani or McCain nominate. [link via Tapped]

Play Ball:

Actually, Sash, I’d like to have some porn for me to watch while she sucks my (expletive). I’m into watching two gals together in a movie. Can she have that there?

--Tommy Lasorda, according to the soon-to-be-published memoirs by "Hollywood Madam" Jody Babydol Gibson. Lasorda is denying the entire account.

Atrios' "Wanker of the Day" has long gone from being a biting slam at a perceived enemy, to a backhanded honor at a foe whose words have cut too close to the bone. It's the lefty version of Andrew Sullivan's old "Begala Award" or "Sontag Award," which the Brit would give to honorees back before he discovered the Bushies ran torture camps. In other words, it's an honor to win the damn thing; only pundits and bloggers who won't shill for The Cause get so recognized.

Today, the WOTD went to Richard Cohen, for a post-Oscar column chastising his brother pundits for labeling Al Gore as a prevaricator and exaggerator during his Presidential run in 2000, and all but calling the former Veep a hero for his patience and integrity. What's wrong with that, you may well ask? Well, according to Media Matters, a website whose typical post goes something along the lines of "Giuliani Interviewed by ABC News, Not Asked About Bernard Kerik or His Three Wives," Cohen didn't mention that he too was critical of Gore during the 2000 campaign. Its examples: that he criticized Gore after the first debate for implying that he had visited the site of Texas wildfires with the head of FEMA, when, in fact, he had only visited the state of Texas with an assistant head, and that in two 1999 columns written more than a year before the election, Gore seemed to him to be uncomfortable in his own skin.

To show how exactly wankerific Cohen is, Media Matters went so far as to point out that Cohen had specifically exonerated Gore of the charge of him being a liar, discrediting some of the more bogus charges against the Vice President during that election. But Atrios either ignores that part of the post, or doesn't get this whole "nuance" thing, and gives Cohen his eighth WOTD, many for reasons just as specious and petty (including this column, in which the evil pundit comforts a girl who dropped out of school after failing algebra).

So in the world of Prof. Black, anyone who has ever said anything critical about Al Gore is not only immediately suspect, but a "wanker" to boot. Don't like him picking Joe Lieberman as his Veep? Wanker. Thought his dithering response to the recount in Florida cost him the election? Wanker. Hold the mistaken belief that his stage moaning and mannerisms helped him pull defeat from the jaws of victory in his first debate with Bush? SuperWanker !!!

I believe that Black originally desired that the WOTD Award be cutting and incisive, instead of a cheap stunt to avoid actually posting something thoughtful and substantive, which Kevin Drum or Digby do almost every day. I think a certain laziness creeps in when you run one of the uberblogs, a temptation to just go through the motions and belch out random "Wanker of the Day" or "Heh. Indeed" or even just "Threads," mixed in with a link from Media Matters or a clipping from Glenn Greenwald or Tom Maguire (and to understand the full extent of the falloff in quality, take a look at Eschaton in the week before the onset of hostilities in Iraq, here). You already have the traffic coming in, so why bother giving a rat's ass if what you're doing is elevating the public discourse.

It seems that being tougher than deer jerky on the campaign trail is more important than attending junkets with Tavis Smiley, Cornel West and other blowhards. In a little over two weeks, Obama has obliterated Clinton's lead among African-American voters, halving her overall margin among Democrats.

The good old days, before the blogosphere, back when debate was polite, civil and respectful:



From the coverage of the Democratic Convention, August, 1968.

The fact that NBC is willing to spend $10 million on a reality show concerning Posh Spice's move to Los Angeles is disturbing on so many levels, the least of which is that it will parade before the world some of the lamest parasites and wannabes of my hometown. Why are all the Brits who try to crash Hollywood (or the Big Apple, as Toby Young so deliciously recounted) such pathetic losers? Why can't they all be like Dame Helen? Oh well, I guess the spotlight can also be the best disinfectant....

The sort of advertising In-N-Out couldn't hope to buy:



But no fries with the Double-Double? And is that a bag of Lays next to the sparkling wine? That's a combo that will send even a Queen to an early grave....

According to a blogger who was offered the position before Ms. Marcotte, the Edwards campaign knew exactly who it was they were hiring when they made the decision. That really doesn't speak well of their political acumen.

ALARM !!! ALARM !!! ALARM !!!

MUST CREDIT SMYTHE

ALARM !!! ALARM !!! ALARM !!!

I have it from an unimpeachable source that Babel will win the Oscar for Best Picture. My source is the ultimate insider for this sort of thing. Let's just say that it's as if she's already opened the envelope, if you catch my drift...UPDATE: Never mind. She's telling me she's just guessing, and has no real clue who's going to win. I'm such an idiot for believing her.

Back when variety shows were ubiquitous on American TV, occasionally you would see pairings like this one, between two giants:

I believe this might have been Dylan's debut on network television....

An opinion of a non-Academy voter:

"A lot of the mannerisms were right. But the problem was the walk -- Forest didn't get that. My father strides and his hands would go like a paddle because of his wide shoulders. Whitaker is knock-kneed -- my father was bowlegged."

--Jaffar Amin, son of the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He returned to Uganda in 1990, and now makes a living, swear to Kobe, doing voiceovers for advertisements. My essay on other scions of deposed dictators can be found here.

Rabbi Haggard? The Rude One is on to something, concerning this quote from a Michael Medved op-ed:

Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn’t welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they’d welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright “hot”) most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she’s grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her. (emphasis added)

Besides the offensive bit of racial stereotyping ("love machines of the National Basketball Association"?), Medved seems to have a complete lack of knowledge about what straight men are doing when they take a shower in a public place. They're trying to wash up after a game or work-out, not hoping that some Charlize Theron-lookalike will walk by and give them some complimentary wood while they're soaping up with the boys. Who wants to advertise their shortcomings to the world? It's a question of modesty.

The New York Times is reporting that former Mass. Sen. Edward W. Brooke is still alive. Others who this day yet live include him, her, him, her, him, her, him, her, and him. Him too.

Rocky Roid.

Did you know there's actually a country where the children of the nation's leaders go and fight when their country goes to war? It's called, "The United Kingdom." Kinda blows your mind....

Melissa McEwan, the "other blogger" in l'Affaire Marcotte, has been getting the bum end of the stick in this whole controversy. Unlike Marcotte, she never posted anything that could conceivably be termed extreme or bigoted against the Catholic Church (a point reiterated by that noted lefty blogger, Patterico), and her role in this matter seems to be that she was just another woman whom Tom Donahue and the other bundists of the far right could bully. Her opinions may have been left-liberal, and she may have taken no prisoners on her blog, but surely that cannot be justification for seeking to blackball her from mainstream political activities.

But the post-resignation articles all seem to lump the two of them together, as if her calling the Pope on the Church's recent history of anti-gay persecution, or decrying what she termed the "Christofascist" element of the GOP, was somehow indistinguishable from a blogpost denigrating the Virgin Mary. Death threats, never justifiable no matter how rancid the commentator (right wing or left), are especially odious when targeted against someone who has done nothing to merit any sort of scorn. It doesn't take a Cal Tech grad to figure out that lumping her and Marcotte together may have less to do with what they had written and everything to do with the fact that they were young, talented, and blunt women.

Ladies and gentlement, the ever-credulous Howard Kurtz....

Fox to Air Fake News Show: How will we tell the difference?

And now, the feel-good hit of Spring 2007:

Mensteala: It's hard to watch this video and not feel sorry the guy, no matter how wealthy or famous he is. Like watching Jerry Lewis, or Adam Sandler, or seeing Whoopi Goldberg host the Oscars....

An interesting take on the problems Mitt Romney will have with the GOP base, which have got nothing to do with his flip-flops on abortion or gay rights.

It's not a blanket slam on Catholic dogma, nor a foul-mouthed tirade clothed in self-righteousness, but this is my effort to forever disqualify myself from working on a Presidential campaign:

Nacht und Nebel: A prof from one of the SEC's finest law schools has a modest proposal to solve the Iranian Problem: Death Squads.

Marcotte Resigns: No surprise there. A campaign blog, or any sort of corporate/institutional blog, has to be bland and inoffensive by its very nature. And she was clearly not that. The only other justification to hire her would be if she had a proven ability to manage and format a weblog, something that Kos has almost patented; obviously, if Pandagon was "losing" half of her controversial posts because its archives were busted, then she's not the person to bring in to set up an entirely new website. Having her "resign" after the heat has died down (while keeping the other blogger, who doesn't appear to be guilty of anything other than being anti-Christianist) allows the Edwards camp to claim they put up the good fight against the Giant Fascist Noise Machine without having to worry about losing Pennsylvania or Ohio the next time their spokeswoman decides to mock the Immaculate Conception.

UPDATE [2/13]: And now the other blogger has resigned. Since there was no recent post on her weblog that would justified any further right wing outrage, the proximity of the two resignations is most curious.

Francis Urquhart Dies: Ian Richardson, the star of the one of the greatest black comedies ever to air on television, "House of Cards" (and two fine sequels), passed away over the weekend. Dame Helen Mirren paid tribute to him last night after accepting her BAFTA honor, calling him her "mentor", and tearfully saying that she doubted she would be where she was today without his help early in her career. He also played the treacherous mole opposite Sir Alec Guinness in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", and starred in both the movie and the original theatrical production of Marat/Sade. But he will always be remembered for the line, "You might well think that. I, of course, could not possibly comment," which F.U. would always repeat whenever he was called upon to give an off-the-record (and invariably false) slur upon the reputation of one of his rivals in the "House of Cards" series.

What a start for the Obama Campaign !! First John Howard, now Cornell West, who thought that the election of George Bush in 2000 would be better for black America than Al Gore. All Barack needs now is to get denounced by Tony Blair, and he'll have poodles in three different countries yelping at his heels. [link via Steve Gilliard, who is very disappointed that Obama is trying to win the Presidency, rather than appeal just to black voters, and that he chose to announce his campaign at the home of that noted racist cracker, Abraham Lincoln]

The Order of the Phoenix: Ralph Fiennes, who when last we met had just ended an eleven-year relationship with a 62-year old woman, has apparently joined the Mile-High Club with a 38-year old Qantas stewardess. [link via HuffPost]

OBAMA !!! What's not to like? He was right from the start on the war, he doesn't employ wackjob bloggers whose opinions would have been more at home in some nineteenth century anti-Fenian salon, and his campaign says this, about the empty suit running Australia:

"If Prime Minister Howard truly believes what he says, perhaps his country should find its way to contribute more than just 1,400 troops so some American troops can come home," he said. "It's easy to talk tough when it's not your country or your troops making the sacrifices."

That was in response to John Howard's assertion that if he was "al Qaeda", he would praying be praying for an Obama victory in the first primaries in March, 2008. Howard faces a new election himself later this year.