Butch van Breda Kolff, R.I.P.: The coach and mastermind behind perhaps the darkest moment in Los Angeles Laker history has died at the age of 84. Coaching the Lakers to two NBA Finals appearances in the late-60's, van Breda Kolff was always remembered for allowing his dislike of Wilt Chamberlain interfere with the Lakers' bid to win the 1969 championship.

In brief, the Lakers had lost to the Boston Celtics in five of the previous seven NBA Finals, and had not yet won a title in Los Angeles. With the teams splitting the first six games by winning on their home courts, the aging Celtics came out fired up in the 7th and deciding game of the 1969 Finals, which for the first time was being played in Los Angeles, and took a commanding lead late in the game. At one point losing in the fourth quarter by 17 points, the Lakers had cut the lead in half with less than six minutes to play, when Chamberlain dislocated his knee while rebounding a ball at the defensive end. Trying gamely to play, the Laker center finally limped off the court with 5:15 to play, and van Breda Kolff moved back-up forward Mel Counts into the center position in place of Chamberlain.

Over the next few minutes, Counts played well; it also helped that his Celtics' counterpart, Bill Russell, had five fouls. The Lakers cut the lead to a point, with Counts hitting two free throws and an outside jumber, with just under three minutes to play. Insofar as Chamberlain couldn't hit free throws to save his life, had no outside shot to speak of, and also had five fouls, Counts gave the Lakers a dimension during that rally that they normally didn't have. The Celtics, aging and in foul trouble, seemed spent.

What happened next is the stuff of nightmares to Laker fans, and still enables Celtic boosters to wake up each morning with some serious wood. With under three minutes to play, the Lakers had three straight chances to take the lead, all of which came to naught; Elgin Baylor put up a wild shot, then Jerry West and Keith Erickson had turnovers on consecutive possessions. On each possession, the Lakers' offense was curtailed by the lack of a dominating inside presence. Finally, with just over a minute to play, Don Nelson put up a desperation shot over an outstretched West, which bounced high off the back iron and into the basket, giving Boston a three-point lead. At the other end, Counts got the ball underneath the basket on the next Laker possession, only to have the ball stripped by Russell. After two more free throws, the Celtics lead grew to five points with less than a minute to play, and would eventually reach eight points. In all, the Lakers went six consecutive possessions between points in the final three minutes.

At some murky point during this sequence of events, Chamberlain had either miraculously recovered from his injury, or had decided to suck it up and play, but in any event had informed his coach that he was ready to go back in. van Breda Kolff, who hadn't gotten along with Chamberlain during the season, exercised the same coach's discretion that would get him fired soon afterwards, and told the greatest player in basketball history to sit down, as Counts was playing well in his absence. The Lakers got no closer than two points the rest of the way, and lost for the sixth time in eight years to their hated rival, 108-106.

In none of the accounts that I have seen does it identify when Chamberlain announced he was ready to go back in. Certainly, the Lakers played well for several minutes after Wilt went to the bench, but on their three possessions where they failed to take the lead, the Celtics had clearly adjusted to Counts' presence on the outside. Even with a crippled Chamberlain, the Lakers could have used him to bottle up the Celtics front court, setting up West, Tommy Hawkins or even Counts to have open shots from the outside.

What's even harder to excuse if you're a Lakers fan is that van Breda Kolff didn't see fit to reinsert Chamberlain in the final minute, when his play under the basket might have sparked a last-ditch comeback. The three-point shot was still a decade in the future, so having a good perimeter player stroking from twenty-three feet out wasn't going to make the game any closer than having Wilt put in a finger roll. Even if the Celtics had held on to win, you still want to have the players out on the court that give you the best chance, and even if putting in Wilt would have been tantamount to a Hail Mary pass, at least the fans and players would feel like the team gave it their best shot. Not bringing Wilt back into the game when he asked to go back in, even during desperation time, was clueless.

After Nelson's shot, the Lakers needed their own miracle, and Counts was clearly not going to do it. van Breda Kolff's stubbornness may not have cost the team a title in '69, any more than Bill Buckner's error necessarily cost the Red Sox the '86 World Series, but it had the same impact on the long-suffering fans of the team. He was a very good coach, and he certainly deserved to be remembered for the overachieving teams he coached at the college level (including a Princeton team that made the Final Four in 1965), so it's sad he'll be remembered for a couple of minutes when he wasn't a good coach.

I never knew a man who had better motives...: I suppose next he'll be quoting Richard III....

Atrios somewhat reticently links to this post, which posits that the changes incurred by the 2005 BARF legislation are somehow related to the high rate of foreclosures we're currently seeing. Under the old law, the hypothesis goes, the generous terms by which someone could file Chapter 7 allowed many a homeowner to save his home, receiving a breathing space in which he could stop the forced sale of his property and come current on his mortgage. As someone who loathes the BARF, and who has repeatedly spelled out some of its egregious after-effects, as well as many of its unintended consequences, such as the devastation to the credit card industry caused by the mere passage of the law, it is a tempting position, but one that I just don't buy.

You see, in American bankruptcy law, there are two avenues available for most consumers, Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Choosing either avenue imposes a court order, called a stay, that stops all debt collection activity, including foreclosures and civil lawsuits. In Chapter 7 cases, the consumer files his paperwork listing his assets and debts, as well as his monthly income and expenses, and more than 9 out of 10 times, the court-appointed Trustee will determine, after a public meeting to which creditors are invited, that the debtor has no assets to liquidate. Thereafter, the consumer receives a discharge, forgiving his unsecured debts; the whole process usually takes four months, tops, although the courts in L.A. are still dealing from the huge backlog of cases resulting from YBK in October, 2005.

However, a Chapter 7 does little to protect the consumer from the Big Bad Wolf trying to foreclose, either now or in the golden, pre-BARF era that was so friendly to consumers. The automatic stay provides a temporary reprieve, but secured creditors like mortgage lenders have always been able to take advantage of a remedy under the law, the Motion for Relief. That motion gives the lender the ability to go before the court and ask that the automatic stay be lifted so that foreclosure proceedings (or evictions) may continue.

Filing such motions is what I used to do for a living, and unless the property involved had a huge equity cushion (exceedingly rare in Chapter 7 cases, since the debtor would presumably borrow off the equity first to pay his debts), I always won. In fact, I was expected to have an order signed by the judge and in my client's hands within six weeks of the case being filed; if it was a repeat filer, I would seek an order for the matter to be heard ex parte, so it wasn't unusual for the client to be able to resume the foreclosure process within three weeks of the filing. And that was under the old law.

Both before and after 2005, homeowners who wanted to stop foreclosures and save their homes filed Chapter 13 bankruptcies. The Chapter 13 case is the preferred option of the authors of the new law, in that it imposes a repayment plan, usually over five years, on the debtor. Since the mortgage lender receives payment on its arrearages over the lifetime of the plan, it is protected, and the court won't grant relief from stay allowing it to pursue the foreclosure.

The problem with the new law is that it imposes additional costs on many debtors, particularly non-homeowners, who make above the median average income in their state. It doesn't impede homeowners from saving their investment through the bankruptcy courts, any more than the old law did. And the old law certainly didn't give a serious breathing spell to those homeowners who filed a Chapter 7 to stop a foreclosure. Joe Biden can be blamed for a lot of things, but not the high foreclosure rate.

Is there a genocidal regime or dictator that the ADL won't appease? [link via The Plank]

UPDATE [8/22]: I figured the ADL wasn't going to get away with playing David Irving on the Armenian genocide. Good that they switched course, even though "tantamount to genocide" sounds almost euphemistic, like "almost murder." The ADL long ago forfeited any right to be a gatekeeper for the term.

Can a statement by a press flack that it is a policy never to comment on a particular issue the same thing as "declining to comment" on same? Kevin Roderick explores the philological ramifications.

Tilting at Strawmen: Has anyone argued that bloggers will inevitably replace investigative journalists? Or that bloggers can typically do the same sort of reporting as newspaper reporters? Of course not, so what was the point of this op-ed?

A follow-up on OffermanGate. The Atlantic League, perhaps having reviewed the incident more closely than the national media has, decided to maintain the suspension of Jose Offerman until after the criminal charges against him are resolved. No life ban, not even a season-long suspension. A good article placing the incident in context can be found here.

Electoral College Reform: I think Kaus is right that the proposed initiative to divvy up California's electoral votes is much ado about nothing, but I would like to address the unstated assumption that this sort of thing would be fair and appropriate if done nationwide, as opposed to targeting specific states. The biggest problem with the Electoral College is the imbalance in favor of low-population states, like the Dakotas or Wyoming, which enable the voters in those states to have a disproportionate say in the outcome of the election. The other big problem, which partially counterbalances the first, is that a candidate wins all of the electoral votes in a state, no matter how close his margin of victory.

The proposed "reform" on the June ballot cures the second problem, but exacerbates the first. Kaus correctly points out that gerrymandering has made most House seats non-competitive; in California, the lines were drawn pursuant to a gentlemen's agreement in 2001 to protect both parties' incumbents, freezing into place a significant partisan advantage for the Democrats incurred from the previous redistricting, which was done by a panel of judges. At the time, the Democrats thought they were preserving their party's advantage into the future, not believing that it could be conceivable that they would be able to expand their advantage.

As it turns out, the post-Prop. 187 shift toward the Democrats in California was only just beginning in 2000. Only the incumbent-friendly lines drawn in 2001 have kept the Republican Party from disappearing into marginalization in the Golden State. Thus, the lines in California favor the GOP more than their actual strength would merit, and in a Presidential election, it would take a landslide of historic proportions to give the Democrats more than a fifteen-seat edge in the Electoral College under the proposed reform.

But in a state like Florida or Ohio, where the lines were rejiggered to maximize the dominance of one party, even a close election could result in a lopsided electoral count. It is almost certain that the GOP would win a majority of electors in a close election in Florida, even if Hillary or Barack were to win the state, simply because of how the House districts were drawn last time to favor that party.* It is certainly conceivable that a similar scenario could happen in Ohio, a state where a number of troubled incumbent House members were able to win reelection in 2006 in spite of the toxic political situation for Republicans in that state.

In any event, reducing the influence of the large states by dividing up their electoral votes only increases the power of smaller, more homogenous states. That doesn't seem like much of a reform to me.

*The GOP has a 16-9 edge in the state delegation, in spite of it being the state that perhaps best exemplifies the even divisions in the country following the 2000 election.

Now here's a good way for hitters to reclaim the inside part of the plate. My all-time favorite ballplayer, Jose Offerman, went after a battery with a baseball bat after being hit by a pitch in a minor league baseball game last night. For this act of self-defense, he spent the night in jail. Both pitcher and catcher were recuperating.

I know there's a "code" that tolerates "throwing inside" to a batter, but I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often. Having a 100-mph pitch deliberately thrown at your skull may seem to the outsider as a pitcher's prerogative, but to someone in the heat of battle, that's assault and battery. At least one player, Ray Chapman in 1920, has died because he didn't get out of the way fast enough from a pitch aimed at his head, and two other famous players, Mickey Cochrane and Tony Conigliaro, sustained injuries that led inexorably to their deaths years later. Charging the mound with nothing but your fists seems a disproportionately weak response.

But a baseball bat expands the arms race exponentially. Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal once pounded in the skull of LA Dodger John Roseboro because he thought the catcher had thrown a return pitch to the mound a little too close to his ear. He got off rather easy, with a short suspension and a fine, but the public outcry was so great that a player who was arguably the best pitcher of the 1960's was kept out of Cooperstown for a few years because of the incident. Offerman can expect no such mercy from the predominantly white media or from organized baseball. Expect the home run he hit in his previous at bat to be his last.

UPDATE (8/17): Here's a real time slide show video of the attack. It's not even close to the Marichal attack; Offerman appears to take one aborted swing, connecting with both catcher (who's rushing him from behind) and pitcher, but it looks from the video that he went out hoping to scare the pitcher, and the fact that he only used one hand testifies to his lack of deadly intention. Still, if you point a loaded pistol at someone, you pay the consequences if it goes off.

Flap your wings, Junior Orwells: Ron Rosenbaum asks whether this Stanley Fish op-ed, on the travails of going to Starbucks vis a vis a traditional coffee shop, is the "worst op-ed ever written?" Maybe, but I would guess that honor should be reserved for one of those cheerleading liberal hawk op-eds, circa 2002-3 (like this one), that compared Saddam, Osama, or fill-in-the-blank Islamist up-to-no-gooder with Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany or whatever, which directly led to the ongoing Iraq disaster. Millions of people aren't going to die because Prof. Fish has an aversion to cafe au lait.

Mickey Kaus points to this ugly attack on Mike Huckabee; it's a good indication of why he can never be the Republican nominee. He will never appeal strongly enough to the racist base of the party.

It's safe to say the investigation of L.A.'s Mayor has gone stone cold, if this is any indication. [link via Luke Ford]

Bush's Brain Quits: I'm most unimpressed with the legacy of Karl Rove. His brilliant decision in 2000 to have Bush campaign in New Jersey and California, and not campaign on weekends, at the tail end of that election was meant to show that his boy was confident and coasting, and it was based on polling that showed Bush with a double-digit lead. Bush lost, and would have been a forgotten footnote were it not for the machinations of the Supreme Court. In the wake of 9/11 and a quick "victory" in Iraq, it shouldn't have been difficult to reelect his client, especially with a liberal Massachusetts Democrat as his opponent, but Bush almost lost that race as well. Considering that since 1952, electing Republicans as President has been the default choice of the electorate, it's hard to be impressed with his legacy.

Moreover, the Republican Party under his watch is now the weakest it has been since Watergate. The party is hemorhaging seats in Congress and at the state level, largely because of Rove's deliberate tactic of playing to the base, which has become increasingly extreme (and irrelevant). A major, potentially enormous political realignment has begun that will favor Democrats for perhaps a generation, much of it the result of the shortsighted, dunderheaded tactics of the man the President nicknamed "Turdblossom." As long as Americans study politics, they will note the hubris shown by the man who predicted a Republican victory in the 2006 election with the line "I'm looking at 68 polls a week for candidates for the US House and US Senate, and Governor and you may be looking at 4-5 public polls a week that talk attitudes nationally...You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I'm entitled to THE math." Right now, "THE math" shows Republican minorities in both houses of Congress, and no Republican presidential candidate beating Hillary Clinton.

And of course, his role in outing Valerie Plame made his very existence within the Bush White House toxic. The Plame Affair generated enormous heat within the blogosphere, with lefty bloggers suddenly appreciating the sanctity of preserving CIA secrecy, and righties obsessed with irrelevant tangents about Amb. Wilson's bona fides. But to the public, the real scandal was the cold-blooded manner with which the Bush Administration attempted to deal with a critic, potentially putting a covert agent's life (as well as the lives of the assets she dealt with) at risk. Rove's involvement in the outing of Ms. Wilson effectively proved that the action had met with the approval of the President, and further plunged his client's approval ratings into the Nixonian toilet.

Perhaps Josh Marshall has it right when he speculates, "[W]ith the recent news of cutbacks on funding of human intelligence in the intel budget, there's the possibility that there were no more CIA agents whose cover could be blown and he decided to move on to greener pastures."

UPDATE: Kevin Drum agrees, and passes along a devastating anecdote about the Bush-Rove team at work.

For the first time in nearly two years, I ventured into a cinema. The movie that lured me out of my cockoon was Michael Moore's latest attack on the American Way of Life, SiCKO. It is, without a doubt, his best work to date, and having found that Moore's docs don't work as well on the small screen as they do in front of a live audience, I'm glad I spent the twelve bucks to see the matinee showing in Pasadena. When his critics are left to debating whether the U.S. has a better health care system than Cuba, or that our relatively high infant mortality rate or low life expectancy aren't necessarily the most important factors, you can tell he has the best of the argument.

But I have a personal reason for backing Moore on this one. I just saw my late grandmother's hospital bill for a five-day stay after she fell in May. The extent of her treatment was to stitch up her face, and to give her liquids for dehydration. Neither the doctors nor the staff diagnosed that she had suffered a stroke; that was only determined after they sent her home, and we had to take her to a real hospital, Providence-St. Joseph's.

For the ludicrously small amount of treatment and attention she received, she was billed $45,000.

Nice Tie: Markos Moulitsas gets some props from an unlikely source in the blogosphere....

Random Thoughts concerning sexism in the lefty blogosphere:

1. By and large, political bloggers generate 90% of the publicity, but get only 10% of the traffic, in the blogosphere.

2. There is no female blogger, or female-centered blog, on the left that has anywhere near the traffic or the influence of Michelle Malkin, who has two sites in the Technorati 100. Arianna Huffington's blog may be bigger, but the fact that she lends her name to a site does not change the male-dominated world of the lefty blogosphere.

3. Much of the success of the lefty blogosphere in the last election cycle stems from the fact that it was an excellent tool for fundraising, organizing, and publicizing. When the entire government is run by the other side, and the Fourth Estate seems little more than a mouthpiece for the organs of power, an angry, fighting populism is the most effective way to rally the opposition. Bloggers who have the testosterone flowing are more likely going to get traffic and influence debate than bloggers who are more studious and calm in their approach.

4. That sort of attitude occurs more naturally in men than it does in women. Female anger manifests itself in a different way than male anger does; when female bloggers attempt to ape the style of an Atrios or a Kos, they tend to badly misfire, as the John Edwards campaign learned to its regret a few months back. To quote Garance Franke-Ruta, "[I]f you're an angry man you're righteous. If you're an angry woman, you're crazy or a bitch." When the Democrats take over after the 2008 election, that sort of testosterone-laden anger won't be as pivotal, and female bloggers on the left will gain more influence and relevance.

5. While there are a few female bloggers who are ensconced among the Queen Beez of the lefty blogosphere, their influence and importance tend to be a fraction of their patrons at Daily Kos, MyDD or TPM (which, contrary to what Jane Hamsher says, is a blog, and not a direct rival of CNN). Little Green Firedogs, Feministing and Pandagon are popular sites, but tend to be more in the nature of novelty acts than blogs which set the agenda (Ned Lamont got his ass kicked, remember, and Kobe Bryant and the Duke Lacrosse players were ultimately freed).

6. Digby has the best political blog, right or left, in the blogosphere. TalkLeft is the best issue-oriented blog. Period. Neither site is run by a man. There are plenty of good blogs out there that are written by women, even good political blogs. But it's pointless to pretend that the lefty blogosphere isn't afflicted by the same problems as the rest of society, no more than major league baseball or the performing arts, to name two predominantly white, male institutions, are.

What we all need when we're down:

Like the Laffer Curve and the West Coast Offense, it was originated on a cocktail napkin !!

Headline of the Day: Of interest to polished pols and those who work the pole....

This isn't exactly the Birth of Metal. Something was lost between Idea and Execution:

Tillman's Legacy: I haven't bothered to weigh in on the ongoing feud between certain right wing bloggers and the New Republic, since it was hard to know who to root for, but Josh Marshall hits it right on the head:

Beauchamp makes his charges. The US Army allegedly investigates and finds the highly embarrassing charges to be false. But no information will be released about which of his charges were false, how they were false or how they were determined to be false.

They then punish Beauchamp by preventing him from having any communication with the civilian world. And if that's not enough, an unnamed military source tells the Standard that Beauchamp has undergone a successful self-criticism session and has recanted everything. But an Army spokesman tells TNR that he's not aware of any confession or recantation.

We can at least be thankful that the matter is being handled with such transparency.

Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales. He wouldn't be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic. But it's hard not to have some suspicion that the Army has put itself in charge of investigating charges which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the Army; that it has provided itself a full exoneration through an investigation, the details of which it will not divulge; and it has chosen to use as its exclusive conduit for disseminating information about the case, The Weekly Standard, a publication which can at best be described as a charged partisan in the public controversy about the case.

This hardly inspires much confidence.

Like the Tillman Affair, we made need a Congressional investigation to figure out who's telling the truth. Considering that the Weekly Standard's principal source has been a former gay prostitute, a fact which they failed to disclose, I'm betting on TNR.

To no one's surprise, the TV station that employs the "reporter" who's been sleeping with the Mayor has seen its ratings skyrocket. When you consider that Srta. Salinas had already been taken off the air, it cannot be said that Telemundo's credibility has been harmed among the only group that matters: the viewers. [link via HuffPost]

This is the sort of legal cause people that inspires people like myself to go to law school....

Prof. Kleiman examines the current fallout from the collapse of the real estate market, and states a rather obvious point, which is that Congress should revisit the 2005 BARF legislation to make it easier for delinquent homeowners to obtain bankruptcy relief. The first place to start would be to modify or annul 11 U.S.C. §1328(f), which forbids filers from obtaining a Chapter 13 discharge if they had received a Chapter 7 discharge in the previous four years (a so-called "Chapter 20"), or another Chapter 13 discharge within the previous two years. Or at least that's what it appears to say; the whole measure seems to have been drafted by the Regent U. Law School after a weekend kegger, and the courts have pretty much thrown their hands into the air trying to figure it out.

Chapter 13s are the preferred alternative for debtors who wish to keep their homes, while paying off the arrearage every month over a 3-5 year period. The standard bankruptcy, under Chapter 7, is geared toward protecting those who are current on secured loans (like houses and cars) but delinquent on unsecured debts (ie., credit cards). Section 1328(f) was designed to thwart those who had defaulted on everything except their mortgage from obtaining bankruptcy relief; a family with high medical debts or huge arrearages on their credit cards could no longer give priority to keeping their home over their unsecured debts, then filing again if their financial difficulties continued to the point that they fell behind on their home. With foreclosures spinning out of control, Congress will have to do something to save the mortgage industry, and the draconian features of the BARF legislation aren't helping.

Three reasons why the attempt by GOP attorneys to redistribute California's electoral votes from a winner-take-all system to one based on the capture of Congressional districts is overblown:

1. The 2008 Presidential election will not, in all likelihood, be that close. The last ten Democratic wins (going back to Wilson) did not require all of California's votes to reach 270; in fact, two of the winners (JFK and Carter) didn't even win California. Close national elections tend to be the exception, 2000 and 2004 aside, rather than the rule, and the massive unpopularity of the President and the Republican brand indicate that the country will see a Democratic landslide next year. As in 1992 and 1996, expect to see the networks call the election for Hillary or Barack before the polls close in California.

2. Passage of the initiative in California in June, 2008 will probably lead to a flood of other initiatives in Republican-leaning states to impose the same law before the November elections. Losses incurred in the Golden State can easily be made up by passing the same law in Texas or Florida. If the Democrats continue to control the nation's state legislatures after 2010, expect to see similar laws get enacted everywhere, along with some intricately gerrymandered districts drawn with an eye to 2012.

3. The Democrats will have to spend money to defeat such an initiative, if it manages to reach the ballot. That's good, especially for Democrats. Any initiative that faces any sort of progressive opposition is usually doomed to fail, and anything that sparks partisan interest by the Democratic Party will lead to more voters being registered and more activity to spur political interest. A higher turnout will mean more voters in November, and possibly a pick-up of several Congressional seats.

Making It: This is what happens when one loses the Lean and Hungry Look. A scene from YearlyKos:

Not that anyone didn't know this already on some level, but it really was striking to get the visual of yesterday's gate crashers quite literally mingling with the dread establishment at a cocktail party. The question that nobody seems to know the answer to, though, is whether the revolution ended because the revolutionaries won, or because they sold out? The boring, but probably boring-because-accurate, answer is that it's a little of both.

Won what, exactly?

Now is the winter of our discontent, baby:

It's not just the U.S. that's seeing its housing market crater. Home foreclosures are up 30% in the United Kingdom, according to the BBC.

What does not destroy me...: The Villaraigosa-Salinas story dies with a whimper. She is now the most well-known reporter in the city, and is clearly headed for bigger things than Spanish-language TV. And the Mayor can now sweep this scandal into the ether, and carry on as before.

It's easy to see why Hillary hates Obama. Indeed, it's easy to see why the lefty blogosphere seems to hold him with such contempt. There is a fearlessness about Barack Obama, an unwillingness to fellate the Establishment, whether it be the party base or the Queen Beez who are meeting in Chicago this weekend, that reminds progressives of the last Democratic President. Clinton, remember, was from the conservative wing of the party, and signed a bill that all but ended welfare, and supported a free trade agreement that was a valentine to the wealthy, and maintained a balanced budget. His health care plan, which was one of his few liberal maneuvers in office, failed spectacularly.

And yet progressives loved him every step of the way, while conservative Democrats never trusted him, never had his back, and always acted the role of a Fifth Column. We knew that when the chips were down, Clinton was on our side, precisely because he would fight hard for the battles that really counted to liberals, even if the battles were mainly defensive in nature over his last six years in office. Far from alienating the base, his "Sista Soldja" moments solidified our support, because it showed that he respected us enough not to mince words.

More importantly, he had the right enemies. Conservatives hated him, as did that contingent of lefties, usually found on the pages of The Nation or at meetings of the Green Party, whose power comes from their ability to sabotage progressive causes in the interest of ideological purity. When Clinton lied under oath, it was progressives that stood by him, turning what would ordinarily have been an offense that justified his removal from office into a rallying cry. We knew that Clinton told the truth about the things that really matter, even if he risked losing our votes in the process.

I have a feeling that Sen. Obama can inspire the same loyalty.

It seems hard to believe today, but when I first starting blogging five years ago, this guy was The Enemy. Andrew Sullivan was the reason why many of us started blogging in the first place, if only to shut up his smug English face. Come to think of it, it's not as if he's changed his views; his damascene moment came after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, when he realized the Bushies were false prophets. Whatever the reason, his blog is still as sharp and passionate as ever, a rare feat for a medium that encourages popular bloggers to dumb down their content, and make more strident their ideology, in order to reach larger audiences.

But the French love Jerry Lewis: "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip", that much unloved and unwatched critical disaster, is getting rave reviews in, of all places, Great Britain.

More than a quarter century ago, I was attending high school with a short, stumpy kid several grades behind me named Matt "Sex Dwarf" Weiner*. Even then, he had a wicked sense of humor and a sharp mind, and it was obvious that either great things were going to happen to him, or we were going to read of him getting into a shootout with federal agents at some polygamous cult in Idaho. He ended up going to college back east, then to SC Film, and the last time I saw him he was getting cheated out of a return date as champion on "Jeopardy."

After a decade or so of toiling in the trenches in Hollywood, including a stint on a sitcom that my sister worked on, Matthew Weiner ended up writing for some much beloved shows, then getting a job as a glorified gofer for David Chase, for which he received some justified props. Which, in turn, has led to this: his very own show, "Mad Men", on AMC Channel. It's not an understatement to say that it's the best new show on cable since both "The Shield" and "The Wire" debuted in 2002. It recaptures a not-so-distant moment in American history, in a way that doesn't condescend to its audience, and like most good television nowadays, it follows the MoneyBall principal of featuring unknown but talented character actors instead of "names." So watch it when it comes on, TiVo it, and watch it again. Then buy the DVD in four months.

There was clearly something in the water back at Harvard High twenty-five years, from a fountain which I did not partake....

*Also, the younger brother of the subject of this post.

One of the few TV shows in the 70's that played live, non-pre-recorded, non-lipsynced music was the one hosted by the Tom Snyder, who died yesterday. Here is a clip featuring my favorite band from high school, the Only One That Really Mattered:

I'm afraid the subtlety of this went completely over Mr. Frey's head.

FredoWatch: Dishonest, or just plain dumb? It's a question Bush observers have asked for quite awhile now:

The accusation that Gonzales has been deceptive in his public remarks has erupted this summer into a full-blown political crisis for the Bush administration, as the beleaguered attorney general struggles repeatedly to explain to Congress the removal of a batch of U.S. attorneys, the wiretapping program and other actions.

In each case, Gonzales has appeared to lawmakers to be shielding uncomfortable facts about the Bush administration's conduct on sensitive matters. A series of misstatements and omissions has come to define his tenure at the helm of the Justice Department and is the central reason that lawmakers in both parties have been trying for months to push him out of his job.

Yet controversy over Gonzales's candor about George W. Bush's conduct or policies has actually dogged him for more than a decade, since he worked for Bush in Texas.

Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities.

From today's Washington Post. I'm going to go with dishonest on this one. If there's one thing you learn while practicing law, it's that you put everything in writing. That way, if there's ever a dispute later on, you won't get caught making a misstatement of fact to a judge, or have your testimony discredited by someone who has the evidence. Gonzalez isn't just a lying corrupt hack charged with helming the nation's chief law enforcement agency; he is, more unforgivably, incompetent.

A crossroads: Up until this week, I have been skeptical of calls for the impeachment of the President. I felt that the system had been abused by the GOP during the second term of President Clinton, and still feel that Congress should be loath to overturn the results of a national election. Without substantial bipartisan support, impeachment seemed a frivolous pursuit, a masturbatory gesture without substance.

Impeaching the Vice President has seemed to be the wiser course; Dick Cheney is ever more unpopular than George Bush, has abused his power (which is even more galling, since the Constitution does not grant him any power to abuse), led a shadow government which combined ideological cupidity in pursuit of destructive ends with an unforgivable reliance on an incompetent cabal, and blatantly obstructed justice during the Valerie Plame investigation. Besides, even Republicans in Congress have come to realize what a cancer Cheney is, and the temptation to permit the President to choose his replacement before the 2008 election might swing the necessary members of the minority to make his removal a possibility.

Impeaching George Bush is another thing entirely. Democrats, remembering how badly the 1998 impeachment debacle backfired on the GOP (which included the loss of sufficient seats in the Senate to give the Democrats a majority in 2001), have been understandably reluctant to do anything which might rally the public around an historically unpopular President, so even the most rudimentary steps required to begin an impeachment inquiry have been avoided so far.

That must end. Now.

Congress must go on record and reclaim its historical prerogatives, both as a check on abusive executive branch authority, and as the voice of the people in challenging an aggressive tyrant. It must be the position of the Democratic leadership in the House that an impeachment inquiry commence immediately, against both the President and Vice President. This must not be a partisan endeavor; Republicans in Congress who see this as a "power grab" by the Democrats should appeased, either by having the current Congressional leadership stepping aside from the Presidential succession in favor of the Secretary of State, or by electing a Republican Speaker on the eve of a removal vote in the Senate.

Certainly, it should already be clear to enough members of the GOP that the same powers and the same abuses that this Administration has exercised can also be wielded by Democrats. If nothing is done now, it may be too late to reign in the Presidency two years hence, whether that position is held by Hillary or Mitt, Thompson or Obama. And as anyone who has studied government and public policy can tell you, liberal policies favoring an expanded government tend to be more permanent. The same means used to stonewall inquiry into Cheney's energy taskforce can also be utilized in favor of national health care, or making tax rates more progressive.

Another blogger put it even more plainer today:

Though other events in recent months and years have had graver consequences in themselves, I'm not sure I've seen a more open, casual or brazen display of the attitude that the body of rules which our whole system is built on just don't apply to this White House.

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn't apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we're moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I'm less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of 'normal politics' is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.

--Josh Marshall

Say what you will about Roberts and Alito, the fact that Abu Gonzo was on the short list of Supreme Court nominees, but was thwarted only because the Far Right didn't think he was conservative enough is a testament to the notion that God protects fools, drunks, children, and the United States of America.

While we're on the issue of bankruptcy, and the ramifications of the 2005 legislation, here's an interesting way to neuter its negative impact: slash the budget for the entity that's supposed to determine whether a bankruptcy was filed in good faith.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act (BARF) was a provision that created a presumption that debtors who made over the medium income for a state were filing the case in bad faith if they chose Chapter 7 relief. That presumption could be overcome if the debtor were to show that after taking his monthly expenses into account, he would not have sufficient funds to repay at least ten percent of his unsecured debts over a five year period under a Chapter 13 plan. In reality, the presumption is almost always overcome, in large part because debtors who make just over the medium can show that their reasonable monthly expenses easily exceed their gross income, while many of those who make well over the medium have always filed under Chapters 11 or 13.

But it is, nonetheless, a hassle for debtors, who are charged a higher amount by their attorneys (such as me) for the burden of dealing with the U.S. Trustee's office, which has the mandate under the new law to raise the presumption whenever appropriate. That includes analyzing and preparing the schedules filed with the court, demanding further supporting documentation (in many cases, that entails credit card receipts going back a year), and filing motions to dismiss with the court.

This past week, the House Judiciary Committee sent a shot through the bows of the credit industry by slashing the funds available for the UST to enforce the act, stating

The Committee is concerned that excessive resources are being expended on efforts by the United States Trustee Program to dismiss cases for insignificant filing defects (thereby creating added burdens on the court and debtors associated with refilings); on the unnecessary use of U.S. Trustee personnel to participate in creditors' meetings that are already handled and conducted by private trustees; and on making burdensome requests of debtors to provide documentation that has no material effect on the outcome of bankruptcy cases. Such actions by the U.S. Trustee Program are making the bankruptcy process more costly and therefore less available for those who need it. The Committee directs the U.S. Trustees to immediately examine these problems and report back two months after enactment of this Act on efforts to remedy them as soon as possible.

Without funding, the Trustee will have to drastically reduce its investigation of debtors who are above the statewide median, making the controversial provision in the new law a practical nullity. Although I expect much of the funds to be restored, thanks in no small part to a certain powerful Senate Democrat (Biden, D-Visa), this is the first step towards overturning the noxious law. There is most definitely a new sheriff in town.

Three bits of miscellany, for your review: Countrywide Mortgage, one of the nation's largest prime lenders for homes, saw its profits fall by a third in the last quarter, with one out of twenty-two loans now being in default; in Southern California, a record number of foreclosures occurred in the second quarter of 2007, with 17,408 homes being lost, an 800% increase over last year; and bankruptcy filings have more than doubled in the Central District of California so far in 2007.

Of course, bankruptcy filings in 2006 were at historic lows, in the aftermath of YBK and the passage of the new law, and the current totals are still well off the figures from the pre-BARF era. But in some areas of the country, the collapse of the real estate bubble is sparking a renewed rush to the bankruptcy courthouse. Locally, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties are the new hubs of the debt relief bar, as those two rapidly expanding centers of exurban population growth witness a Perfect Storm: an oversupply of housing combined with an accelerating rate of defaults in mortgages, together with a sharp collapse in the value of homes which makes refinancing impossible. Anyone who refinanced since 2002, and/or has an adjustable rate loan, the only thing to do is pray.

For some reason, the British refer to the type of thing that gets Lindsey Lohen into trouble every couple of months as "drink-driving." I'm assuming it's because the penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI), and driving while intoxicated (DWI) aren't distinguishable over there, so there's no need to make the assumption that the person behind the wheel was drunk. If that's not the case, then it must be one of those linguistic idiosyncracies, like dropping the definite article when referencing visits "to hospital."

Adventures in Babysitting:



Today, of course, it's the sort of thing that got R.Kelly into trouble....

The Constant Gardener: An excellent New Republic article, on why a blowhard like Joseph Wilson serves his country better than a mere diplomat, such as Colin Powell:

Just as the denouement of the Plame case was dominating the news earlier this month, another former diplomat revealed that he had felt his own grave doubts about Iraq around the time of Wilson's trip to Niger. This much more celebrated Washington veteran, though, kept his qualms off the record. Thus it was newsworthy when Colin Powell revealed at the Aspen Ideas Festival that he'd counseled President Bush against the conflict. "I tried to avoid this war," Powell said. "I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers."

Had he not hewed to the behavioral standards of the Washington elite, Powell might have called attention to his dissent back when it counted. He might have resigned in a high-profile huff, taken to the airwaves to play up war's dangers, written a self-aggrandizing tome that made him look like the government's last honest man. He could have optioned a feature film in which the upstanding ex-General faces down the Cheney cabal. Perhaps he'd have been photographed chatting up J-Lo about the script, or been quoted calling Rumsfeld a "scumbag." The sideshow might have penetrated the consciousness of a general public that was even then lining up for Freedom Fries and making death threats to the Dixie Chicks.

But he didn't--and the results, in spilled blood and wasted treasure, diminished national reputation and paralyzed national politics, are still with us. Alas, even Powell's reputation hasn't been saved by his choice. He's one of the few people in the world who might have stopped the Iraq train wreck; instead, he's just an ex-secretary of State who confers decorously with fellow has-beens in Aspen. There's a reason a nobody like Joe Wilson is the one pitching his story to Hollywood: The blowhard, it turns out, is the one who mattered.

It goes without saying that you should read the whole thing, although I would hope that when this story goes to film, they can come up with a better star than Jennifer Lopez.

What a way to start a morning. Congrats and salutations to my wee sister, Cat Smith, who awoke to find herself an Emmy Nominee, which, unlike being a "Pulitzer Nominee," is something that has to be earned from your peers. It's for Outstanding Art Direction (Single-Camera Show), so you probably won't see her accepting her long-overdue honors with the rest of the show business phonies; they hold the technical ceremony on a separate night. But it's nice just the same, if she wins she gets to hold the same trophy as Gandalfini and Falco, and it was the only nomination for her show (Shark), from which she has already departed for greener pastures (HBO). Rock On !!!

They Are 'a Changin: After this video, he was transfered out of Fresno by Roger Mahony. We never found out what was in the basket:



I doubt there was ever a time when the above video didn't creep out a lot of people....

Appropos of this week, three different opinions concerning The Boy Who Lived.

David Beckham, injury-prone? Often unable to earn his paycheck due to nagging ailments, especially at critical moments? Who knew?

The Legend of Gagger Vance: Now, this is a nasty headline....

Live from the Octogon: It's not William F. Buckley threatening to punch out Gore Vidal, but this morning's battle between Senators Webb and Graham on MTP was about the best thing I saw all weekend.

I'd be interested to hear what prosecutors and defense attorneys think of this, and especially whether or not it's true that blacks are being effectively kept off juries in the post-OJ era. Voir dire has always had the potential of being a real poison to our criminal justice system, as it squelches the possibility of having a jury of true peers empaneled at trial. Having sat through two days of jury selection earlier this year, only to be sent home at the end, I can say that a lot of the dismissals of prospective jurors were arbitrary, at least to the untrained eye, and probably did little to assure either the defendant or the People their right to a fair trial. What results isn't a fair and impartial jury, but a jury that has been gamed by the lawyers to produce an unfair result.

Those biases of prospective jurors that work in favor of or against the accused (or any party in a civil action, for that matter) are not necessarily inconsistent with getting a fair and accurate result. The random selection of twelve+ people to sit on a jury, with the exclusion only of those who are acquainted with the defendant or the witnesses, those who may have a pecuniary interest in the outcome, and those who have an avowed prejudice, should be the goal, not to have a jury that reflects some demographic ideal chosen by a jury consultant.

Glenn Greenwald finds that the low approval numbers from Congress come from a very surprising source: liberal Democrats who feel the body has been too passive in going after the President.

Sorry, Mr. Nyhan, but after all the stonewalling, lies, and claims of "executive privilege," the burden of proof over any accusation is on George Bush, not Josh Marshall. There are things the President can do and say in this instance that would indicate he was never involved in the leaking of a covert CIA agent's name, and that, in both word and deed, he opposed the actions of that cabal of executive office staffers who conspired to out Valerie Plame. He has not done so. Do the math.

As sentient human beings, we are not obligated to adhere to the same standards of proof on this issue that a juror would. We don't need proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Just a hunch will do, and when our gut has told us in the past that the Bushies were up to no good, it was almost always correct.

I think you'll agree; this is gassy:

The Return of the Fisher King: D-Fish is back with the Lakers.

One of the most unbelievable comebacks in rock history is at hand: Roky Erickson (of 13th Floor Elevators fame) is touring again, and will play his hometown of Austin this Friday, which is his 60th birthday. He earlier played the Coachella Festival last February. Here's a vintage clip of the man who "invented" acid rock:

But Are They Real? The paper of record in the City of Angels botches another big one.

Obstruction of Justice? Harriet Miers' likely non-appearance before Congress tomorrow, at the behest of the White House, may provide both the legal rationale and the political motivation to begin impeachment proceedings against the President and Vice President. The public already backs removing Cheney from office, and it wouldn't be hard to convince a third of the GOP contingent in the Senate to abandon him; I wonder if this open defiance of a subpoena will break the damn concerning Bush as well.

Indiginous People of Peace: A lot of people are having fun with this ridiculous Michael Fumento post, complaining about how Hollywood doesn't scare up enough wartime bigotry they way it did in the 40's. In particular, his observation that in the recent Die Hard sequel, the FBI ally of John McLane "looks decidedly Arabic," is generating quite a bit of scorn from those whose anti-Islamafascism is decidedly on the muted side.

In fact, the character he is referring to, "Bowman," is played by Cliff Curtis, a thirty-nine year old actor from New Zealand. Curtis has done several major American films, but is best known for his work in movies like Whale Rider, The Piano, and Once Were Warriors. That's right: Curtis is from that hotbed of revolutionary jihad, the noble defenders of the Caliphate, the Maoris. Never mind the chador or the burqa, maybe we should outlaw the haka. Lomu Akbar !!!

UPDATE: Fumento's response is even lamer. He's no racist, he claims, because:

1. How my saying he looked Arabic has anything to do with racism is unexplained.
2. Arabs are Caucasian. That's my race.
3. The actor is an aborigine descendant, hence his dark skin. He actually PLAYED an Arab in the movie Three Kings.

If Arabs are white like him and I, and the actor in question is a dark-skinned Maori, how does that make the character look "decidedly Arabic"?

Three of the smarter lights of the blogosphere, Susie Madrak, James Joyner, and Marc Danziger, debate the best way to make blogging something more than a rich man's hobby. Danziger, I think, has the better of the argument; until we figure out a way to allow the individual blogger to get a piece of the action the Queen Beez of the blogosphere are getting, regardless of ideology, it is fruitless expecting assistance to come from ideologically sympathetic cohorts.

I suspect this is going to be a recurring issue, what with three major bloggers (Cathy Seipp, Steve Gilliard and now Jim Capozzola) dying in the past three months of natural causes, all before reaching their fiftieth birthday. Most successful bloggers are able to devote the time and hours necessary to pimping their site and reaching a large audience without having to worry about the mundane folly of "making a living." That is because most bloggers fall into one of a few categories, which I list in order of their non-precariousness: wealthy people with a lot of free time on their hands; lawyers; people whose job it is to be near a computer terminal all day; college professors and students; people who get paid to write for a living; and, most precarious of all, political activists, both actual and wannabe.

When political blogging first started to make headway in our culture, the major players were disproportionately from the world of journalism, academia and computers. Blogging supplemented their real world jobs, and if financial insecurity began to rear its ugly head, their on-line hobby complemented what they did for a living. Eventually, when the ease of creating your own website combined with the narcissistic pleasure of having your opinions thrust on the world became apparent to more and more, the blogosphere began to include greater numbers of people, like myself, who loved to write and had either the free time or the inclination to devote several hours a day to their blog. Some of us had the money to subsidize this hobby, but many did not.

Increasingly, perhaps inspired by the success of Daily Kos and MyDD, we are seeing more and more bloggers emerge from the latter category of would-be political activists. Madrak's complaint, as I see it, is that people who work their asses off getting Democrats elected to office should reap some of the material benefits of that success, and that blog readers should be less passive when it comes to helping the scribes who toil away for hours fighting for the better tomorrow. To those bloggers, their website isn't a hobby, it's their calling, and it is difficult to appreciate the amount of time that goes into creating a high-traffic blog.

It is an unfortunate reality that the very power of the blogosphere, that it includes so many different and disparate voices, is the one thing that will keep the Susie Madraks of the world impoverished, at least for the time being. None of us, not Kos nor Prof. Black nor Ms. Madrak nor Digby, nor, especially, myself, is irreplaceable. We may each have a unique voice, but the blogosphere as a whole generates hundreds of new "unique voices" each day, and any political entity, whether it be the Democratic Party or Move On, can always find a different Unique Voice to raise funds or encourage activism online. Since we are fungible commodities, we aren't marketable to them. Our supply greatly exceeds their demand.

So the only solution is not ideological, but structural. Until bloggers can find a way to profit from the Long Tail (and until a "Long Tail" actually emerges from the wake of the Queen Beez at the top, like Kos and Instapundit), blogging will remain an activity for hobbyists with lots of time on their hands, and for those would-be activists with not a second to spare.

More good stuff from The Terrorist's Dictionary:

commute - verb
To correct the misapplication of sentencing guidelines to the ruling class.

And from earlier this month:

oppo research - noun
Abbr. "Opposition research." Training for civil service.

Peace, love and...your video of the week:

The Story the past few days in Los Angeles has been the revelation that our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, has been carrying on an affair out of wedlock with a local TV reporter, Mirthala Salinas. California being a state in which being a marital miscreant is not only not a barrier to high elected office, but practically a necessary credential (ie., Reagan, Unruh, Feinstein, Schwarzenegger, and the last two mayors of San Francisco, just to name a few), it doesn’t appear likely that this will hinder Villaraigosa’s long-term political ambitions.

But a more telling question is whether “sex scandals” have ever been as crippling to a politician as has been assumed. We needn’t look at recent examples involving Gov. Schwarzenegger and President Clinton to indicate the public’s tolerance for a potential leader’s betrayal of his marital vows; even in the 19th Century, the public was willing to set aside rumor and conjecture in electing men to the highest office. Thomas Jefferson’s alleged relationship with a slave, Sally Hemings, was not something dug up by recent scholars: it was first aired publicly in 1802, and although Jefferson never publicly denied the charge, he easily won reelection two years later. Andrew Jackson won two terms as President, even though he was involved in a bigamous relationship with his wife, a fact the voters were well aware of (as well as the fact that he had killed a man in a dual over that fact) when he ran for office. Most famously, Grover Cleveland twice won election to the Presidency after it had become known that he had fathered a child out of wedlock.

For a time, it was thought that divorce would prove to be debilitating to a politician’s career, after Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller fell short in their bids to be President. But considering that Stevenson’s best region in his two defeats to Eisenhower was the Bible Belt, and that Rockefeller’s defeats in 1964 and 1968 had more to do with his being unwilling (and unable) to court his party’s base on a host of other issues, that factor was overstated even then. It is safe to say that Ronald Reagan’s divorce and subsequent remarriage clearly didn’t upset his party’s base, and even as the Rove Machine was throwing every bit of garbage at John Kerry last time, the fact that he had been divorced did not play a perceptible role in the last election.

Nor is there any evidence to suggest, as the LA Times editorial page did last week, that Democrats tend to be judged more harshly by the voters than Republicans. Besides Bill Clinton, who won terms as President in spite of almost continuous frenzied speculation concerning whom he was sleeping with, and whose approval ratings went up every time a new allegation was made, other Democrats, including Barney Franks and the late Gerry Studds, have also been able to weather the media storm even when the allegations concern homosexuality. By itself, sexual indiscretions by male politicians have never been anything but background noise, important only to those people who didn’t like the politician in the first place.

Even the examples the Times raised only prove the rule. Gary Hart’s popularity went through the roof after it was revealed that a reporter tailed him while investigating his private life; had he stayed in the race, he would probably have been the Democratic nominee in 1988. Henry Cisneros survived the initial revelation of his affair with a staffer in 1989, and was strong enough politically to get confirmed as Clinton’s first Secretary of H.U.D.. His troubles happened not because of an affair, but because he lied to FBI agents years later about the amount of hush money he had paid the former mistress. And Gary Condit’s troubles stemmed not from the fact that he had an affair with Chandra Levy, but from the fact that he many had suspected him of being her killer.

More to the point, it can well be argued that far from hurting political careers, the perception that a male politician is getting some on the side may well be beneficial, particularly for liberal Democrats, as long as the proper pieties are spoken and the acts of contrition seem genuine. Nothing reinforces the perception of the Alpha Male more than the belief that the dude in question is a Sex Machine, and when a political leader whose public principles include compassion for the underclass and support for women’s rights is also perceived as being a ruthless Don Juan to the ladies, any undercurrents that he might not be “man” enough for the job dissipate. And should the media see fit to expose that aspect of his character, the public will invariably rally around the politician, defending his right to privacy, while subconsciously cheering him on. For a liberal Democrat, it's a no-lose situation, a fact that the Mayor probably knew when he preemptively announced his adulterous relationship this week.

When Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at a 1962 fundraiser, there probably wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t have some idea that the two were an item, and the later revelations about JFK’s betrayal of his marital vows do not seem to have appreciably damaged his public standing, where he remains one of our most popular Presidents in history. If Villaraigosa goes down in flames, it won’t be because he’s been sleeping with beautiful TV reporters, but because some other scandal gets him first.

A perspective on the Libby commutation:

Keep in mind that Scooter Libby would undoubtedly have served his time at a minimum security facility. I have visited the federal minimum security prison at Lompoc, California, and while it’s not a “country club,” it’s not what most people think of when they think of “prison,” either. Most of the prison is outside. There are no walls or fences; you could simply walk out of prison if you wished. (Prisoners don’t, typically, because the consequences of getting caught include a transfer to the maximum security facility.) Inmates play softball, milk cows, and sleep in dormitory-style accomodations. I’m not saying it looks like a fun life, because it doesn’t. But it’s not 23 hours a day locked in a jail cell with someone named Bubba.

In California, misdemeanor defendants face mandatory jail time for repeat offenses of driving on a suspended license — one of the lowest-level crimes on the books. And they go to L.A. County Jail — a far less pleasant place than minimum security federal prison.

Paris Hilton went to jail. Scooter Libby couldn’t serve even one day?

--Patterico

When I first started blogging (a little over five years ago), there weren't a lot of ideological cohorts of mine doing this newfangled medium, so what few of us there were had to take great pains to get noticed, network, etc. The first person who ever saw fit to contact me and offer encouraging words was a blogger from back east named Jim Capozzola, whose blog, The Rittenhouse Review, was an early fave. In particular, I remember that when Blogger began putting rather tacky-looking ads at the top, he made a small contribution toward removing it, a decent, generous act by someone who never met me, done at a time when I considered getting 40 visitors a day to be an avalanche.

If you wrote something he liked, he would link to you, and plug you for a week. If you praised something he wrote, he would e-mail the most profuse thank you note by the end of the day. He had an impeccable sense of fairness and decency, was wicked funny, and had a vast catalog of interests, so it was quite a loss when he started blogging less and less over the past few years. About a month ago, I e-mailed him, asking how he was doing, wondering if like so many other early bloggers, he was distancing himself from the monster the blogosphere had become.

Today comes word that Jim Capozzola passed away last night. As it turns out, I wasn't the only person touched by his generosity of spirit; Susie Madrak, who lives in the same city (Philadelphia), also had her Blogger ad removed, courtesy of the Baron of Rittenhouse Square, and has a detailed obit of her friend, here.

It must be obvious by now that the judicial branch of government is powerless to rein in this Adminstration. With the exception of his father, no President in a century has pardoned fewer people in office* than this one; no two-term President has granted as few clemency actions since Thomas Jefferson, who presided over a country about a twentieth its current size. Yet like his father, when he finally decides to wield one of the few powers for which the Constitution actually does give him absolute authority, he doles it out to his cronies and loyalists, not to the deserving.

If there was any doubt that these guys could give a rat's ass about upholding the law, the events of today should put it to rest. Congress must either initiate impeachment proceedings, at the very least against Dick Cheney, or it should formally pass a resolution saying that it doesn't intend to do a goddamn thing about executive branch lawlessness.

*And that one was James Garfield, who was assasinated only four months into his term.

Nothing gets me in a karaoke mood more than this, my all-time favorite song:

WANKERS !!! Heh. Indeed.

It wouldn't be a baseball season at Smythe's World without at least one reference to the whereabouts of my all-time favorite player, Jose Offerman. This year, it's Long Island, where he has returned to the league which gave him succor during the 2003 and 2006 seasons, the Atlantic League, His teammates on the Ducks include Carl "Jurassic" Everett, Pete Rose Jr., Donovan Osbourne, Edgardo Alphonso, and other former alums of the Show. He's hitting a healthy .317 and four home runs for his division-leading team (to put that number in context, Rose is hitting .360 with six homers, Everett .284 with 10 knocks, and Alphonso an anemic .264 with three home runs). Hey, it's baseball, so don't knock it.

For a jawdropping example of Rudy Giuliani's complete unfitness for the White House, check out this passage from a recent interview, concerning the "surge":

And you would give Petraeus all the time he needs?

Sure, if I thought he was right. I had a similar, on a lesser scale, issue with the police department or the fire department or whatever. If No. 1, that's General Petraeus's advice; if No. 2, you believe it's the right evaluation of the situation, which I guess the administration is going to get some separate views on this--which is a good thing--but if they come to the conclusion that he does need a year or two more, and it makes sense to invest in that, then the political part of that comes second, and that's what you have to explain to the American people.

"...or whatever"? [link via Josh Marshall]

Boom. Discovering the joys of deep thinking, a blogger goes beyond the vapidity of "Wankers" and "Wheeeeeee !!!," in commenting on this morning's non-story about a car-bomb attempt in Great Britain:

My main beef remains that much of the cable news media reacts to this nonsense like a fifty year old guy on Viagra or Cialis--they pop major wood. And the same warnings are appropriate--an erection lasting more than four hours may be harmful. Amen.

--Atrios. That's probably the best analogy I've heard for the cable news phenomenum of providing saturation coverage of the non-story, whether it be "terrorist plots" or "kidnapped teens." Is there any better description for the CNN/FoxNews treatment of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan than that they "pop major wood" when those teen vixens appear, or that such stories can become harmful to the public after four hours of exposure? Anyways, read the whole thing....

Now that the immigration bill is dead, it's time to engage in some post-mortems. As both Kos and Tim from Balloon Juice note, the debate was, from a political standpoint, an unqualified blessing for the Democratic Party. Its contingent in the Senate got to take the high road, mainly supporting the compromise, but with enough defectors opposing the bill on non-xenophobic grounds to scuttle any chance of overcoming a cloture vote. And there's no reason a bill with as many unpleasant compromises as this needed to be passed this year, when the prospects for an even better bill await in 2009.

Republicans, on the other hand, felt the full wrath of the talk radio wingnuts, who aren't going to easily forget the fact that their leaders in the Senate actually showed compassion to a bunch of Mezkins, but will get not any benefit from Latino voters, who now see the party as too captivated by some of the uglier elements in our society. Texas and Florida, two states that have been the bulwark of the Republican majority since 1972, have large populations of native Spanish speakers, and the loss of either state will doom the party to a permanent minority.

As you can see, my week-long, Gentile-version of Shiva has ended, and I have returned to my post. Thanks to all of those who sent their thoughts, including the commenters below, but particularly people like Mike from Berkeley, Matilda from London, and a whole bunch of others too numerous to mention. Just as I was blessed by my grandma, so too am I blessed by having some of the most wonderful readers on the planet.

Shouldn't the headline to this story be not "White House Does Contortions to Defend Cheney Privilege Claim," but instead "White House Refuses to Issue Unqualified Support for Cheney." When a press flack for the White House says repeatedly that she "will not opine" on his argument that he's part of neither the executive nor legislative (or is it both executive and legistative) branch, that's obviously not the same thing as saying that the President backs his Veep; in fact, it's awfully close to what Ron Ziegler was saying publicly about Nixon's position on the criminal charges against Spiro Agnew.

And apparently, I'm not the only one who caught these signals....

I have never known a day in my life without my grandmother, Clara Alice Robinson. Every child who is blessed with a grandparent knows the unique joy that relationship brings. An older, loving figure you can put on a pedestal without any of the fears or anxieties you have with your parents; love and affection without discipline or question. In my life, “Grandma” was always that person.

I have lived in a house with her, or in a house she owned, for most of my life. When I was four, my parents were going through some hard times, and she and her late husband, Jim Robinson, invited me and my siblings to live with them until things got sorted out. One year became two, then four, and so on, until the next thing we knew, we were under their roof for more than twenty years, long enough for my mom and dad to send me and my two sisters and brother to college (and me to law school). And for much of that time, our household also included her mother (my great-grandmother), as well as the family of her other daughter, after they moved here from Wigan.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that she taught me how to read, or to add, or gave me my passion for current events and for American history. I have a lot of teachers to thank for that, as well as my mom and dad. But Grandma was always there to read me a book when I was little, or to help me count to a hundred, or what was the correct pronunciation of “Czechoslovakia” when I was browsing the encyclopedia when I was six. Every night, without fail, she would pour me a bowl of cereal before I went to bed; that went on ‘til I was about 16. To this day, the best reason I’ve ever been able to come up with for having children of my own is to expose them to this great, sweet lady.

She had a sharp wit, and until recently, did not look or act anywhere close to her age, which was 92. She watched "The Price Is Right" and "Young and the Restless" each morning, and any Grand Slam event in pro tennis, but other than that, she was a CNN junkie, and had an opinion about everything. She never got over the fact that the people of her home state elected an Austrian bodybuilder to be their chief executive; she was still amazed than an actor could get elected President.

During WWII, she had worked in a factory on the home front, a genuine Rosie the Riveter. She never tired of telling me the story about how her father, an immigrant from England (by way of Edmonton, Alberta, where she was born), ran afoul of the KKK when they were marching in the mid-1920’s, refusing to doff his hat at the American flag they carried when they paraded by. He had taught her the lessons she would later teach her daughters, and then her grandchildren: that prejudice is a fool’s game, and we should take people as they come, not as we wish them to be.

Her idiosyncrasies were legendary in our family. She never learned to drive a car. She hated being photographed, which was especially odd since she wasn’t a bad-looking woman even at the end. She ate sparingly, and every day would down at least one hefty-sized bourbon and ginger ale; let’s just say she preferred her bourbon dry.

Two years ago, she fell at her house, suffering a cracked knee cap, and I don’t think she was ever the same physically. She began using a walker to go everywhere, and after awhile, a wheelchair, and a lot of the enthusiasm she had for life suffered. She could still perk up when my nephew (now almost four) came by to visit, and she adored her pet dachshund/Chihuahua hybrid, “JR” (named after my granddad), but mostly, she just sat, meditating on her long life, and probably, those loved ones who had passed on before her. Regardless, she always had time for visitors, and her big heart ensured them that they would always have a welcome place in our home.

In mid-April, when I was over at her house, she fell face first in the kitchen. We took her to the local hospital, where they stitched her up, but the toll had weakened her. What we didn’t realize at the time was that she had suffered a stroke. When she continued to seem lethargic and unresponsive after she returned home, we booked her into a hospital bed at Providence-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, where the doctors’ diagnosis turned out to be our worst fears.

For the last four weeks, she battled, showing a reservoir of physical strength we didn’t imagine she possessed as various tubes and oxygen masks were tried on, in an effort to rehabilitate her strength. Slowly, she came back to us, in spite of what must have seemed to her like a torture right out of the Inquisition. Always, her repeated goal was for us to take her home, and on Sunday, the doctors told us that the chances for her were good; that she would be moved to the rehab unit, and arrangements could be made to bring her home shortly. Even in that false spring, it was clear that her time at the hospital had taken a great deal out of her, and she would never be that same person whose self-deprecating wit and rambunctious laughter brightened the lives of all around her.

Early this morning, she took her leave. Her last hours were spent surrounded by her family, in the comforting bed of her home. When she returned for the last time, her eyes seemed to sparkle, as if she knew she was finally going to get some peace and quiet.

I suppose in the traditional obit, it would mention she was a widow who was survived by two daughters, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren (and another one on the way), as well as numerous other nieces, great-nephews and what-not. But like so many other people whose names never make it into a newspaper at the end of her life, she touched so many other people, too numerous to count.

She will be missed. I know there will be times of joy in my life, to go along with this day of sadness. But it strains me to think about how not having her with me, in the present, will temper any happiness. It won’t be the same without her.

Clara Alice Robinson (1915-2007).

The Fourth Estate: Not the press, according to the Vice President, but himself. When he's trying to avoid public disclosure requirements, he claims he's not part of the executive branch, but when he's trying to cover up kickbacks received by his "Energy Task Force," it's Executive Privilege all the way, baby.

This should not be considered an endorsement of her campaign (it's early yet), but this is amusing on so many levels....

The Path to Hell: From declassified documents at the National Security Archive:

However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?

--Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (12/2/2002) making a funny concerning a recommendation that more coercive interrogation techniques, such as forcing prisoners into "stress positions," ie., standing for long periods of time (see p.6, section 4(d)), be permitted for military personnel.

The memo itself is full of legal weasel words, like "specific intent," to justify circumventing longstanding Constitutional denunciations of torture and cruel and unusual punishment, not to mention international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory, including the Geneva Conventions. Remember, this memo predates the invasion of Iraq by four months, so any doubts that Abu Ghraib was somehow beyond the pale of American policy should be squelched. As far as reacting to what this government has done, the ticking time bomb went off a long time ago. [link via Andrew Sullivan]

In these politically correct times, it is a shame we are deprived of seeing pop groups with goose-stepping back-up vocalists:



Speaking of which, whatever happened to Ken Layne & the Corvids?

The Trial of Tony Blair: Well, I saw it, and I can't say I was overwhelmed. The actors, particularly the Blogmuse, were terrific (saying "Phoebe Nicholls was superb" is like saying "water is wet," or "the San Antonio Spurs are spirit-crushingly dull"), but the story itself left a lot to be desired. If you intend to make the case that Blair, Bush, Cheney et al., should be held accountable before a legal tribunal for the mendacity in which they took their countries to war, a case which I wholeheartedly endorse, it might make more sense not to make your "villain" the only person in the movie who acts out of a sense of principal and conviction, nor to invest everyone who advocates putting him on trial as motivated only by cynicism. I suppose the filmmakers might respond by saying that the only way a fairy tale notion that a Western leader could actually face what has traditionally been "victor's justice" is for his erstwhile allies to believe that political expediency leaves them with no other choice, but it doesn't do the cause of international law any good when its advocates are portrayed as a bunch of conniving a-holes, and the process itself as little more than a formality before a guilty verdict is imposed.

I also had the impression that a lot of the film had been cut out for its American debut, on BBC America. Like ESPN Classic, BBC America is a cable channel that is inexplicably bad; other than its news broadcasts in the early morning, and the occasional showings of "Little Britain," its programming leaves a lot to be desired. I have the impression that PBS gets dibs on all the really good programs from the U.K., while BBC America gets stuck with reruns of "Footballers' Wives," "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" or what it aired tonight, which ironically wasn't even shown on the BBC in Great Britain, but was instead on the cable off-shoot of Channel Four, a competing network. If BBC America is an attempt to convince Americans that the vast majority of British television is stale and schlocky fare, it is succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams.