HEEEAAAAALLLLL !!!! Thirty years ago, no Sunday at the Smith Household was complete without a late night visit with the good Reverend, and it appears that not only is he still alive, but that this career has outlived his former imitator....

Back from a weekend getaway in Capitola with my college chums, and I'm greated with this little gem of civility, from the folks at Fox News:

MUNICH !!!!

Lost in the discussion of Obama's troubles wooing the white uneducated in Appalachia has been his success in wooing what could be called "Hegel Republicans." Clearly, he's making up the "blue collar" votes he's losing somewhere, since he continues to have a healthy lead over McCain nationwide, and I suspect that there are a fair share of conservatives out there whose damascene experience was the Iraq War. Needless to say, in this election cycle, the public perceives the support of Nebraska's senior senator a lot more positively than Connecticut's junior senator.

EMK: This diagnosis is one that is very familiar to my family, since it was a brain tumor that led to the death of my father, the first Steven Smith, ten years ago. Over the course of a month in early-1997, he had begun acting very erratically, at least from what we knew of his personality. His speech patterns had become more rushed, his actions seemed to take on a greater sense of urgency and intensity, and his usual mild-mannered demeanor had dissipated.

One day in March, he just dropped off the radar for a couple of hours, and we spent a horrifying afternoon trying to figure out what happened to him. Finally, we received a call from a Highway Patrolman, who informed us that he had been taken to UCLA Medical after suffering a seizure driving northbound on the 405. It turned out that after meeting with another attorney in the South Bay area, he had driven aimlessly for awhile, sideswapping another car without stopping, before finally getting on the San Diego Freeway, where he eventually careened into the center divider. The CHIPs thought he was drunk, at first, but it soon became apparent that something else was wrong.

Crashing his car in the vicinity of Westwood turned out to be one of the few breaks my father got over the next year and a half. Several days later, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, a metastization of the melanoma he had from nine years earlier. UCLA Medical Center has one of the top cancer research departments on the planet, and considering the initial diagnosis that he had about six months to live, undergoing one of their experimental regiments seemed like the way to go. Believing he was a part of something bigger than himself was one of the things that kept him going for the next year and a half, and my family got to spend more time with him as a result of the innovative treatment he endured. It was painful, nonetheless, and I recall being asked by my dad if I knew where he could get some cannibus, which was ironic, since I've pretty much eschewed drugs my whole life thanks to his draconian anti-drug policies.

He also found another reason to live, at the office. He became determined to keep his position as a Chapter 7 Trustee, and he discovered that the Americans with Disabilities Act* gave him certain protections that could not be denied by the Justice Department. The fact that he his speech had been altered and his reflexes less quick were not excuses to deprive him of a job that he loved. And after eight years of divorce, he found the time to remarry our mother; it was one of life's little oddities that my parents seemed to get closer after they got divorced than while they were married.

In the end, though, it wasn't enough. In August, 1998, he began to fade, frustratingly unable to communicate what was on his still-vibrant mind. He returned to UCLA, and they confirmed what we had feared, that the cancer had returned, and was inoperable. The only thing left to do was to wait for the inevitable, which finally occurred on October 11, 1998, during the fourth game of the NLCS.

*He even went so far as to write a letter to George H.W. Bush, thanking him for signing the ADA into law, while admitting he had never voted for him and that he had even said some cross things about the President during that administration. The first President Bush handwrote a very nice and classy response.

Sorry for the lack of content lately. When I first started blogging six years ago, it was around the same time I hung up my office shingle for the first time. There wasn't a lot of work for awhile, and blogging was simply a way to kill time at the office between cases. I had always fantasized about being a pundit, and this gave me a way to pontificate to my hearts content, especially about issues on which I had opinions but little expertise.

Most of the other people who had taken up this hobby were conservative, hawkish, and otherwise indistinguishable, even to the point that it was assumed that "warblogging" was the de facto language of the new medium, so being a lefty blogger in the spring of '02 allowed me to stand out from the crowd. I have always been grateful to the people who, in spite of never having met me, still saw fit to write me and give encouragement about something I said at this site.

But my target audience was always my immediate circle of friends, and I think once I realized that most of my readers were either other bloggers, or were people who read hundreds of blogs a day, much of the fun went out of it. In the early days I used to write about a night at the pub with my pals, or the joys of eating a Dodger Dog at the Stadium, with a lot of sports recaps from the night before. Political opinions were much less frequent.

Now, it's been mainly politics, and I'm bored. Some time ago, I realized my voice was not an indispensible one in the blogosphere, that I could just save myself a lot of time and link to whatever Kevin Drum or Matthew Yglesias posted today, rather than trying to come up with anything original, and it would still encompass whatever it was I felt needed to be said (except for Yglesias' occasional [Jonah] Goldbergian-takes on basketball, a sport about which he knows precious little).

Not getting much in the way of links was also a killer. Blogging, like journalism as a whole, shares many of the same characteristics as high school, with cliques of popular kids, nerds, jocks and goths segregating themselves. I suppose it's human nature; we want to be with people like ourselves, and we can be quite ruthless when it comes to blowing off former buddies who turned out to be not as popular as we would have liked. The social gatherings that I used to enjoy, that were such a vital part of the joy of blogging, have now vanished, or at least as far as I am a part of same.

However, ennui cannot explain the dearth of recent postings. The collapse of the housing market, combined with the convoluted nature of the 2005 BARF Act, has made this an extraordinary time to be a bankruptcy lawyer, and my practice is not unaffected. Whereas I used to blog about as often as I generated billable hours, I am now working at full capacity, seven days a week. For the past three weeks, I have not left the office until 8 p.m. every week night, while putting in half-days on Saturday and Sunday. If I can help someone save their house, or at least extend their stay for a year, it's far more satisfying than anything I might write about here.

Of course, hard times can't last forever, and eventually the caseload at my office will return to the lethargic mean that is the life of any bankruptcy lawyer during a Democratic Presidency. It is my intention that once the economy starts to soar in the Obama Administration, and I am forced to scrounge for work again, my blog will focus on the very unique life that is mine, and not on the humdrum, banal goings-on inside the Beltway.

Food for Thought: Supreme Court justices and Mid-East entanglements aside, the mid-term election of 2010 is arguably more important than the Obama-McCain race this year. Those elections will determine who gets to draw the lines in most states for the next reapportionment, something which would give the Democratic Party long-term hegemony in Congress.

This could be further underlined if the party does well in the congressional elections this year, as seems likely even if McCain should win.* Since the party out of the White House tends to gain seats in mid-term elections, the Democratic Party would not only add to what is becoming a sizable majority in the House, but could even further marginalize the GOP in the Senate, where they would have to defend 19 of the 33 seats.

On the other hand, an Obama victory in November would put the Republicans in a more advantageous situation in 2010. It is not difficult to imagine that the new President's honeymoon would not be much longer than Clinton's was in 1993. A repeat of the 1994 debacle for the party would enable the Republicans to regain control of the state capitals, and with it the power to gerrymander the Democrats out of power in the House.

*Having an unsuccessful candidate at the top of the ticket is not always a death knell for the party. Presidential coattails were nearly non-existent in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996. In 2000, the Democratic Party actually gained four seats in the Senate while Bush was "winning" his first term. Going back even further, the Party picked up a pair of Senate seats in 1972, including knocking off four Republican incumbents, with George McGovern as the nominee; the ability of the man at the top to bring in new voters, then and now, seems to trump all other considerations.

A rhetorical gambit almost as profoundly futile as Godwin's Law is the Law of Appeasement: anytime someone feels the need to compare one's opponent to Neville Chamberlain, and/or to analogize the art of diplomacy with "appeasement," there really isn't much left to discuss. As it turns out, most people who appeal to the Law of Appeasement have no idea what "appeasement" is, why (or even, if) it led to World War II, or how, as a policy, it differs from, say, the US policy towards China since 1972, or the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1989, or even the British policy towards the United States between 1815 and 1917. They just know that hashing out differences with an enemy leads inexorably to the Final Solution and 9/11.

The "lessons of Iraq" will surely become the counterpoint to "Munich" in future debates on foreign policy....

Drum and Yglesias try to make sense out of why the home field (or, in this case, court) edge is much greater in basketball than it is in other sports. Unlike football, where the reigning Super Bowl champion had a .500 home record last season, the likely NBA winner will likely have a much better record at home than on the road.

The usual explanations get trotted out (the benefits of a friendly crowd, intimidated refs), but those seem to be common to all spectator sports. Ice hockey, for example, is played in similar arenas (often the same arenas), but the home ice advantage is slight, and hockey refs play a much more important role in determining the outcome of the game than their hoops counterparts.

And as far as accruing the benefits of the home crowd are concerned, then why don't college teams maintain the same edge when they play at a local, but not home, arena, as often happens during post-season play. Indiana U. has a much greater home court advantage when they play in Bloomington than when the play a few miles away at the Hoosierdome, even though the RCA is a much larger venue, and can thus hold more of their fans. And of course, other sports have loud, boisterous crowds, too.

My hypothesis is that depth perception is paramount in a game like basketball. The more you have a read on where the basket really is vis a vis the stands, the better chance you have of making shots. Since basketball is a sport of 12-2 runs, the more opportunities you have to make such runs, the higher likelihood your team has to win.

Hollywood's O.B.P.: I don't quite understand why no one in Hollywood has been smart enough to incorporate the principles of MoneyBall into film and TV production. Well, I take that back. Having read several weeks of Allison Hope Weiner's dispatches on the Pellicano Trial, I can see why the "star" mentality has, in spite of all the evidence that it does nothing to improve a film's bottom line, managed to take on nearly sacrosanct status in the "industry": the people who get hired to run studios don't exactly come from the top of the class from the Ivy League. A-students don't greenlight Speed Racer or Jumper, or spend years in court trying to put Napster out of business.

But you would figure at least one studio exec would figure out there are very, very few performers who can actually make a difference at the box office, and there are very, very many people with a SAG card out there who can do as good a job at a tenth of the cost. How many more bombs will George Clooney or Tom Cruise or Uma Thurmon detonate before someone realizes that the conglomerate's shareholders would get more value from Jon Hamm, to pick just one example? And it isn't simply the flops that produce the biggest wastes of money; does anyone believe that Gwyneth Paltrow, in her riveting portrayal of the "blonde sidekick" to the real star of the film, drew a single person to the multiplex to see Iron Man, or at least one more than would have gone if her role had been inhabited by Rebecca Romijn or Amber Valletta?

I suspect Hollywood is at the same stage that baseball was in back in the 1980's, when people like Bill James and Pete Palmer were just starting to attract a readership around the startling idea that the men who ran ballclubs didn't know what they were doing. On the diamond, it was the belief that batting average was the most important indicator of talent; in Hollywood, it's the equally stupid dogma that how famous a star is the determiner of how profitable a TV series or movie will be.

The suits who run TV networks already seem to have caught on to that. There are a great deal more networks than there are studios to divide the money, thanks to cable, and the willingness of the people who have run HBO and FX, to name two examples, to take risks on shows which initially feature no-name talents has produced extraordinary results. But film has been much slower to grasp the new reality. The next person to run Paramount or Sony who figures out that the type of movies that make a ton of money aren't star vehicles anyways, and that the cost of doing business will go way, way down once it is understood that screenacting talent is not a rare or limited resource, will revolutionize the business more than Louis Mayer.

I suppose we all have our critics, but this one's a bitch.

Jeremiah Who? Obama may have timed this surge in the polls just perfectly....

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Kevin Drum has a contest. FWIW, my money is on MoDo....

How is it exactly that in the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, America still has colonies?

Kevin Drum, on the "power" of the blogosphere:

If the respective left and right blogospheres had any real say in things, would we be looking at a McCain vs. Obama contest in November? Or McCain vs. Hillary? We would not. It would be Giuliani vs. Edwards, or maybe Romney vs. Dodd. The blogosphere is good at raising modest sums of money, and it likewise plays a modest role at the congressional level, but its influence on the national stage appears to be pretty close to nil. That was true in 2004, when Kerry won the Democratic nomination, and it appears to still be true four years later.

I think that's about right. Obama didn't really excite any of the Kool Kidz on the left until Super Tuesday; Edwards was the candidate who made the most conscientious effort to woo bloggers during the run-up to Iowa. And I'm not aware of any popular conservative blogger who backed McCain; even now, most of them are more anti-Obama than enthusiastic backers of the presumptive Republican nominee.

However, there is more to the netroots than just the blogs at the top of the Technorati 100. Even if bloggers like Kos were slow to warm to Obama, other bloggers were much more enthusiastic; even if their daily hits were a fraction of Daily Kos or Atrios, their combined totals were more impressive. Obama has been the most effective in raising funds over the internet, in large part because he pursued a "long tail" strategy concerning the blogosphere.

Today is the Fifth Anniversary of the "end" of major hostilities in Iraq.

One of the beneficiaries of the President's stimulus plan: credit card companies. The IRS announced today that those $600 checks being mailed out this month will be considered property of the estate in all bankruptcies filed after the rebate was signed into law by President Bush.

A point well-taken, over at Volokh:

Friendship is not necessarily based on someone's political views, no matter how goofy or even hateful, especially if the person is not sticking their views in your face all of the time. It is also appropriate not to be friends with someone whose political views you abhore, especially if they are flamboyant about it. But whether someone holds mainstream political views is not the basis on which acquaintances are built. If you have a sincere affection for someone built up over many years, you tend to forgive their occasional lunacies. Especially if it is a person who you came to respect, admire, and befriend many years before, perhaps when that person was not nuts. To me, I don't necessarily see it as a flaw in Obama that he hasn't made a big show of denouncing Wright or Ayers until he was forced to. I do think that he probably is fed up with Wright from the standpoint that he has tried to treat Wright with the respect that he sees owed to a longstanding pastor who is now making a public embarrassment of himself. He has tried to be patient with Wright in hopes that Wright would sober up, but instead Wright just keeps pouring it on, at which point Obama says "enough." So it seems reasonable to me that Obama has been largely sincere through this whole process, first in trying to give Wright an opportunity to clean up his act but then to say "enough" when Wright refused to do so.

As I said, Obama seems like quite a decent guy. I'm not going to vote for him because of his policy views but he still seems like a decent guy. He has a lot of tolerance for nutty political views, but anyone who hangs around academia or any political movement will certainly have friend and acquaintances who have nutty political views. If you are a basically decent and compassionate person you try to look for the best in people and work with everyone, not throw aside friends just because you don't agree with their political views. Moreover, if you have a friend who has idiotic political views you don't run around adding to his embarrassment making a public spectacle out of denouncing those views, but instead I would think that you would hope that the guy would wisen up.

Amen to that. The writer, Prof. Zywicki, makes clear he isn't going to be casting a ballot for Sen. Obama, but does a nice job putting the whole issue into context. Read the whole thing.

Obama's Mulligan: Damn if he isn't the most gifted political figure of my lifetime. There's been a little criticism, mainly coming from white conservatives who weren't going to vote for a black man for the Presidency anyway, but the reaction this afternoon couldn't have plotted any better. He gets the best of both worlds: he gets to make the unselfish, non-political speech on race in Philly last month, refusing to knife his friend, and when his friend, in turn, shows his gratitude by throwing him under the bus (John Cole has a better analogy, here), he gets to play the aggrieved victim, spelling out exactly where he and Rev. Wright differ. From now on, all the You-Tube videos of Wright damning America or acting the buffoon won't define this issue; today's denunciation will.

A "Sista Souljah" moment that's better than the original, since this took courage. Anyone who doesn't hold McCain to the same standard with Hagee is a racist.

When Mariah Carey passed the King last month on the Billboard list of most number one songs, I was intrigued, since I hadn't heard of any of her hits. This writer in Slate tries to come up with some reasons as to why she's as culturally significant as Elvis or the Beatles, but when the top reasons include her vocal influence on "American Idol" contestants (another show I've never watched) and her mid-90's rivalry with Whitney Houston (which the writer facetiously compares with Biggie v. 2Pac), it's a losing argument. To use a sports analogy, she is to pop music what Larry Holmes, the 1980's N.Y. Islanders, the Bulls of the 90's were to their sports: bland, uninteresting champions that dominated when the competition was weak and the sport was dull.