Yeah, I know, tomorrow is the day I reach the number of Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson, et al., that is to say, 44. With that comes the bleak notion that in eight years, my life will be half-over. So unhappy....

"Hey Faggot Stupid": A day like any other in Neoconland. I'm sorry, but I read something like this, and the first thing I think about is whether it's author is going to be found to have a "wide stance."

Right from the Start: Kevin Drum points out the obvious flaw to Sen. Obama's campaign strategy of highlighting his opposition to the 2002 Iraq Resolution:

Maybe it's unfair, but being "right" five years ago just doesn't seem to be a winning pitch. In a way, that doesn't surprise me. Most people react negatively to blowhards who are always reminding their friends about how smart they were on some previous occasion, and maybe that's how this sounds to a lot of people. Especially people who themselves might have supported the war back in 2002 and don't really appreciate being reminded about it.

I don't know. I'm just guessing here. But bragging about your good judgment might be a very different thing than bragging about a concrete achievement. On this score, Hillary Clinton's decision to cosponsor legislation preventing military operations against Iran without congressional approval seems pretty smart.

This really goes without saying. It's a frustrating thing for lefty bloggers to have been proven right about going to war in Iraq, only to have the same people whose counsel got us into the mess in the first place remain the "acceptable" voices about what to do now.

But in politics, it's entirely understandable why that should be so. The public backed the President's position the first time around. They have now come to realize they were sold a bill of goods, and they want someone to reverse the policy, but the fact that someone vociferously opposed said policy at the outset doesn't make them any more credible now. If you're a voter, a candidate who tells you that he, like you, supported going to war five years ago, but has now come to see the error of his ways, and that the policy needs to be changed, is simply going to have more influence than the smarty-pants who just wants to say "I told you so."

Your very special musical moment of the day:

Having fooled around for a bit on both MySpace and Facebook, I can say that Toby Young's analysis on the "U v. Non-U" traits of both social networks is dead on:

I’ve been a member of both MySpace and Facebook for at least two years and while MySpace is populated by a vast array of hip, alternative types (disc jockeys, musicians, skateboarders), Facebook users are almost exclusively upper-middle-class professionals and/or their children. It’s the internet equivalent of U and Non-U.

If anything, this divide is even more pronounced in the UK because, as a nation, we’re so class-conscious. The great thing about Facebook is that it offers people an almost limitless number of ways to advertise their superior social standing — something that U-types are particularly keen on in my experience. I don’t simply mean you can post a picture of yourself standing next to a celebrity — though, God knows, we’ve all done that — or even that you can advertise your membership of U-sounding groups, such as ‘I’d rather be hunting’. (There’s even one called ‘I say loo not toilet’.) No, I’m talking about the ‘update your status’ button that enables you to tell all your friends exactly what you’re doing at any given moment. It is this feature, more than anything else, that allows Facebook users to flaunt just how successful they are.

(snip)

For a Facebook user, the ultimate confirmation that you’ve arrived is if someone else tries to impersonate you on the site. I had no idea how widespread this practice was until I applied to become Facebook friends with ‘Harold Pinter’, ‘Daniel Craig’ and ‘Angelina Jolie’ — and they all said yes.*

Personally, I've always found MySpace to be more interesting, and not just for the creative and genuinely hip manner in which spam finds itself to my humble site on a routine basis. Maybe it's just the blogger in me, but I enjoy having a forum to unapolegetically display my inner geek to the universe, and MySpace is perfect for that. Perhaps that's why bands and artists of all types love it so much; being "private" is the opposite of being creative, and exposing yourself (so to speak) to a world outside your circle of friends is liberating.

*Ed.-Also a problem on MySpace; it never ceases to amaze how low a level of celebrity it takes to generate a bogus site.

If there's anything sadder than Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS (which, from the technical aspect of contract law, may not be entirely meritless, particularly if representations were made to Rather about future employment), it's the pathetic defense of the report about George Bush's "service" in the Air National Guard that inexorably led to his ouster at the network. For some lefty bloggers, the bogus documents are what global warming and/or WMD's are to the right, a claim that must never be conceded to the other side, in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary. Truth is always the first casualty of war.

It is true that the documents highlighted on the 2004 60 Minutes II report have never been "proven" to be forgeries. No eyewitness has come forward to claim that they witnessed a third party drafting the letters on a Dell Computer, nor has anyone admitted to having been the forger. The only evidence that exists that the documents were forged is circumstantial. In that respect, saying that the forgery was unproven is like saying O.J.'s guilt in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman is "unproven." After all, nobody saw him do it, a jury hearing the case in a criminal court acquitted him, and he claims he's still looking for the real killer. The blood of the victims in his car, on his clothing, and at his house is nothing more than the kerning and the raised font of the TANG letters.

Of course, there are still wingnuts on the right who insist that the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" weren't similarly discredited, who insist that the multiple contemporaneous accounts of John Kerry's bravery in Vietnam were less credible than the memories of middle-aged men, warped by partisanship and anger, three decades after the fact. The desire to believe the absolute worst in your enemies is a very human one, and is unaffected by one's opinion on providing universal health coverage or supporting preemptive wars. It is so much easier to stick to one's guns to the bitter end.

But in the end, I prefer the truth. In this case, the truth is that the documents in question were almost certainly forgeries. That doesn't mean that George Bush fully performed the terms of his service to the Air National Guard, or that Robert Bullock, the Kerry for President campaign, or Karl Rove were behind the forgeries, or that everything Dan Rather or Mary Mapes ever reported on is discredited. And it shouldn't have any bearing on whether Rather's lawsuit against his former employer has any merit, since it is based on representations made after the validity of the documents had come into question.

It simply means that the juiciest portion of the infamous broadcast back in the late summer of 2004 was based on fraudulent evidence, evidence that would never have been broadcast had CBS News performed adequate due diligence. These were not counterfeit documents, reproduced copies of genuine letters, "fake but accurate" evidence, like a medieval monk's careful reproduction of an ancient text that he couldn't read. If it is the duty of a progressive to speak truth to power, to be a critic and opponent of injustice, then the tactics of a partisan hack cannot be followed.

Tip for the Track: Always bet on Bodacious Tatas....

Perhaps the most famous boxing TV broadcast in history:



It probably got pushed back in the morning paper, though, since it occurred on the same day the Supreme Court announced the Roe v. Wade decision, the North and South Vietnamese publicly released the terms of a peace treaty temporarily ending the war, and LBJ died.

Figures: Move-On's lame-o ad attacking Gen. Petraueus was plagiarized...from Rush Limbaugh. And as Marc Cooper points out, the entire purpose of the ad was apparently not to raise public awareness, but filthy lucre instead.

UPDATE: And of course one fund-raising scam deserves another [courtesy of TPM]

One Morning at Berchtesgaden:

President Bush and Karl Rove sat listening to Norman Podhoretz for roughly 45 minutes at the White House as the patriarch of neoconservatism argued that the United States should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The meeting was not on the president’s public schedule.

Rove was silent throughout, though he took notes. The president listened diligently, Podhoretz said as he recounted the conversation months later, but he “didn’t tip his hand.”

“I did say to [the president], that people ask: Why are you spending all this time negotiating sanctions? Time is passing. I said, my friend [Robert] Kagan wrote a column which he said you were giving ‘futility its chance.’

And both he and Karl Rove burst out laughing.

“It struck me,” Podhoretz added, “that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, ‘No, no, it’s not futile, there’s a very good chance.’ ”

From The Politico, 9-24-2007.

Losing the War:

It's not often mentioned, but the rest of the world does not evaluate all international interactions from a starting premise that America is right and its motivations pure. We actually have to convince them of that, particularly in the post-Iraq era. And we're failing. We're abetting Ahmadinejad's attempts to project a hugely disingenuous version of himself through our megaphone. Without us, he's in trouble: He's domestically unpopular, and fundamentally without a platform. With our opposition and apparent hatred for Tehran, he's Iran's champion against America, and he's outwitting us in the court of world opinion.

--Ezra Klein

Needless to say, any Presidency that can transform Hugo Chavez from an egocentric nickel-and-dime hustler into an internationally beloved populist shouldn't have any problems making a Holocaust-denying whack job like Ahmadinejad into a world-historic figure. Well played, fellas.

In the middle of another banal attack on "Bush-enabling" Democrat Dianne Feinstein, comes this rather sleazy attack by Glenn Greenwald:

Additionally, Feinstein is a 74-year-old divorced Jewish woman currently on her third husband, and it is thus extremely unlikely that she harbors any hopes of running in the future on a national ticket.

One would think by the thrust of that jab that the senior Senator from California was a political version of Zsa Zsa Gabor, or the Democratic version of Rudy Giuliani. In fact, Feinstein has been married to the same man now for 27 years. Her previous husband was married to her for sixteen years, until he died of colon cancer. The one divorce she had was nearly fifty years ago, hardly the marital record to make Liz Taylor blush.

In any event, it's hard to see why Greenwald is so hysterical about Senator Feinstein, since it's not as if she's ever pretended to be a tribune for the underclass or a champion of progressive values. When she was Mayor of Frisco many years ago, a leftist group tried to recall her at the polls (oddly enough, it was over her support of gun control laws), and it was hard to see much of a difference between the candidates when she challenged Pete Wilson for governor in 1990 (she lost, barely) or Michael Huffington for the Senate (she won that one). She's never campaigned as a liberal, so it should hardly be shocking that she doesn't always vote that way.

Back when rock and roll wasn't a niche music, and was still spoken of in the present tense, this is how performers entertained us:

To no one's surprise, the arbitration panel hearing Floyd Landis' appeal of the drug "testing" that stripped him of the official designation as 2006 Tour de France champion upheld the ruling today, by a 2-1 margin.

Reading between the lines of the ruling, it's clear the panelists were deeply uncomfortable with the standards of evidence in use by the French lab, even agreeing with the cycling champ that the initial positive test that Landis "failed" was not credible. The whole ruling reads like one of those Rehnquist Court decisions upholding the death penalty, even though the defendant can be shown to be innocent, the police had planted evidence, etc., on the grounds that said evidence was never argued before the trial court. And the controversy concerning Greg LaMond and the crank phone call, which was the highlight of the prosecution's case-in-chief, received the minimal consideration that it deserved.

Anyways, kudos to Landis for fighting the good fight, and to Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times for exposing the whole sordid business of the drug testing racket to the light of day. This may well turn out to be the opening salvo in a much larger war, like the Curt Flood case, that the athletes shall win in the long run.

More on the Belichick Tapes, here. There's no doubt the $500,000 fine was deserved after this story.

With the filibuster being the GOP weapon of choice in the Senate, this is probably a good time to put its abolition on the agenda for the next Congress. On paper, it shouldn't be difficult, since a bare majority of the Senate votes on its rules before it ever convenes, and the filibuster has traditionally been a conservatising influence on legislation. I know there are some with sugar-plum fantasies that the Democrats will pick up 6+ seats in 2008, even nine seats if Republicans continue to remain satisfied with the bang-up job their doing in Iraq, but more likely there still won't be enough votes to overcome Republican obstructionism when the issue is, say, healthcare or getting a progressive judiciary confirmed. We have to start thinking about what our agenda is going to be in post-Bush era on the morrow, and not just pretend that getting more Democrats elected is the End Game.

Now here's a worthy netroots target for 2008: Max Baucus. As the New Republic blogs over his decision to deny Congressional representation to the voters of D.C.:

(Baucus') explanation for his vote against DC receiving a vote in the House of Representatives (with Utah receiving one as well to maintain presumed partisan balance), is really one for the ages:

Baucus said in a written statement that he opposed the bill because Montana has only one House vote. "If we were to expand the House, Montana's voice would become less influential," he said.

Now, my back-of-the-envelope calculation--and I hope readers will feel free to correct it if it's wrong--finds that Montana's single House vote currently makes up 0.2299 percent of the total House vote. If the House were expanded from 435 members to 437, Montana's share would drop to 0.2288 percent. Yes, Baucus felt obligated to vote against any federal representation for residents of the District of Columbia, because it would reduce the relative clout of his states' residents (in the House only, the Senate would be unaffected) by one-thousandth of one percent.

Contrary to popular netroots mythology, Montana is not that red a state, and has not even historically been a particularly red state. All but two of the Senators it has elected in its history have been Democrats, it voted for Clinton in 1992 (and almost went for Dukakis in 1988), and routinely has been the most liberal of the Rocky Mountain states, although Colorado has probably passed it for that distinction in recent years. Tester and Schweitzer have shown that a progressive Democrat can win there today, so there's no need for the rest of us to assume that Baucus is the best we can get out of Big Sky.* [link via Matt Yglesias)

*Baucus has always been a Luxury Box Democrat, dating back to his first election to the Senate, when he defeated an incumbent, Paul Hatfield, over his support for the Panama Canal Treaty the previous year.

Angry Young Man: The guy who got tasered at the John Kerry Q&A the other day was, how should I gently put this, a blogger-in-training.

Shorter Roger L. Simon:

O.J. Made Me Want to Nuke Iran.

And of course, props to Mr. Beard for perfecting the format. When I have more time, I'll post about how the assasination and funeral of Princess Diana ("How Dodi Changed My Life") shaped my political ideology.

One area where Atrios has been consistently prescient is the emerging housing bubble, and what should be done about it. Here, he links to a dialogue about a potential legislative fix to the 1978 bankruptcy law, which was drafted long before adjustable rate mortgages became de rigueur among homeowners, that's well worth reading. My understanding is that it concerns the power of the bankruptcy court to modify loans in the Chapter 13 context, but I suppose Congress could also extend the practice to Chapter 7 cases as well, provided the debtor is current on the mortgage at the time of filing. The 2005 BARF act made the practice more difficult as well, so that law will need to be revisited as well if Congress really hopes to make a dent in the problem.