Not exactly the romantic coupling I'm dying to see on the giant screen....

Exhibit 1 concering the decline of blogging: Jemele Hill. Not the fact that she blogged that rooting for the Celtics was like being sympathetic to Hitler. But that her employer, ESPN, suspended her for that banality.

Let me put this as simply and succinctly as possible: any blog that is run under the aegis of a newspaper, magazine, opinion journal or any other journalistic organ of Big Business is a compromised piece of shit. It's not even a blog, really; it's an inauthentic, corporatized version, a fauxblog. Once a blogger allows a third party to pay his salary and provide him with a larger megaphone to reach the audience, he is allowing that party to limit where he can go, or what opinions he can express. In short, he is not a blogger, he's a company man, giving a pitch.

A good blogger can never be afraid of offending others, of embarassing himself, or of revealing his true nature to the reader. If the reader doesn't like it, there are plenty of other bloggers out there to make him comfortable. What ESPN and some easily offended Bostonians don't seem to understand is that real sports fans have opinions like Ms. Hill's, and a good sports blogger is going to express those opinions in an unfiltered manner. By putting limits on what a blogger can think or say, ESPN is basically announcing that those employees who don't get suspended are safe and inoffensive hacks.

And no, I don't believe that rooting for the Celtics is like believing Hitler was a victim, or that the Soviets should have won the Cold War. I wish Ms. Hill had shown a little more originality in that regard, since 90% of all bad blogging combines Nazi analogies with accusations of deceit by the other side. And everyone knows that pulling for the Celtics is like saying you'd vote for Robert Mugabe....

I really have to wonder which Finals Matt Yglesias has been watching. In many respects, the 2008 Finals have been as one-sided as the 2007 Finals, which the Spurs won in four. The big difference was the Celtics' atrocious performance in Game 3, where both Pierce and Garnett were MIA the entire game, and Boston still had the lead entering the final quarter. There was also the Lakers' comeback in Game 2, in which they almost overcame a 24-point deficit in the final seven minutes. But the difference between the two comebacks is telling: the Lakers' run in the 4th quarter of the second game was sparked by a smaller lineup forcing turnovers against a complacent Celtics team that had yet to be challenged, while the Celtics' comeback on Thursday reflected a return to the normalcy of the way the other five games (both regular season games were routs, notwithstanding the participation of Andrew Bynum) between the teams were played.

To believe that the Lakers have a realistic chance to overcome a 3-1 deficit, with two of the games to be played in Boston, is to assume that somehow that dynamic is going to miraculously change, and that the Lakers will, for the first time this season, play like they belong on the same court with the Celtics. They don't, and we shouldn't pretend that Boston's struggle to get past Atlanta one month ago is in anyway germane to this point. The Lakers should consider themselves lucky not to have been swept.

Shorter Dennis Prager: When I was a boy, we'd never think of electing a schvartza President.

Two differing takes on the Lakers-Celtics rivalry, here and here. Concerning the first article, one of the things that made the mid-80's match-ups so memorable was the thinly-veiled racial animus between the followers of the two teams. In that more beknighted age, stereotyping was much more casual; sportwriters could get away with the extolling the "blue collar," "lunch-bucket" approach that the "heady" Celtics utilized against the "athletic," "talented" Lakers. White stars like McHale and Bird were assumed to be great "clutch" players, and conversely, if the Lakers lost, the hoary stereotype of black athletes "choking" in big games was resurrected.

It went both ways: in spite of having a black coach and one of the finest traditions in integrating sports this side of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Celtics became the team African-Americans loved to hate. In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee has a white yuppie who is moving into the neighborhood wear a Celtics jersey, a not so subtle way of suggesting that the gentrifying character was a racist. A hardy perennial of sports pages at the time was the article on African-Americans in Boston, openly rooting against the local team and in favor of the Lakers or Pistons. But since the mainstream media of the time was so overwhelmingly white, it was the Celtics who were celebrated, and the Lakers who were made to play the villains.

And it wasn't just the Lakers; in the '86 Finals, a white Celtic benchwarmer cheapshotted Ralph Sampson in Game 5, leading to a melee that got the Rocket center ejected, and for years after was vilified for fighting a white player. Zeke finally called bullshit on all that after a tough Eastern Conference Finals in 1987, just a month after Al Campanis had gone on Nightline and stretched the envelope for what could be considered acceptable racial stereotyping, and a heated debate on the subject resulted. You still see a semblance of that stereotyping, but I have the impression that reporters are now more careful about the terms they use to describe the ability of top players.

What with the foreclosure crisis keeping me at the office seven days a week, I haven't had much time to contribute any pearls of wisdom to the goings-on along the campaign trail, but I suppose if there was actually any suspense left in who would be my party's nominee, I would have found the time. But the Obama-Clinton battle has been over for four weeks, since he blew her out of the water in the Tar Heel State, and I could frankly give a rat's ass as to how the party apportions delegates from two states that had fake elections last January, or the nomination preferences of people from an American colony.

And, it seems, I'm not the only person who sees Clinton's strange kabuki ritual in pretending there's still a race going on as just a wee bit boring. From an on-line chat with Washington Post political reporter Paul Kane:

Washington: Looking at the most recent Rasmussen daily polls, I see that Hillary manages a tie today against McCain, but Barack is down by five points to McCain. What piqued my interest was that while Hillary had a "highly unfavorable" rating of 32 percent (i.e., as I see it, people who never will vote for her) Barack was at 35 percent. On Jan. 30, as we entered primary season's main show, Barack's "highly unfavorables" were 20 percent and Clinton's were 35 percent. Is this something superdelegates may be watching?

Paul Kane: I've spent the past several months talking to as many super-delegates as any reporter in America, I'd guess, since I cover on a day-to-day basis about 280 of them here on Capitol Hill.

I hate saying this, because all the Clinton people are going to flip
out and say, You're biased, you're biased, you're biased. So go ahead and flip out if you want, but the simple basic truth is that the super-delegates stopped paying attention to the Clinton-Obama race about a couple days after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

They've stopped paying attention to the primary, and instead they're
focused on an Obama-McCain matchup in November. That's the basic, simple, definitive reality that has happened in this race. The "undecided" super-delegates at this moment are not going to "decide" any time soon, because to them the race is over, they're just waiting for Clinton to drop out.

And later:

Centreville, Va.: I was surprised and disappointed that The Post did not seem to address the Gallup poll yesterday which seemed to say Hillary Clinton had somewhat of an advantage over Barack Obama in the so-called swing states. The news of that poll was bandied about all day on the political blogs, and I have to say the Obama supporters seemed to be getting the worst of it. (Or is it "worse" with only two candidates in the poll?)

Paul Kane: Again, don't yell at me because I'm only the messenger here. But the super-delegates have moved on, they're no longer looking at how Hillary Clinton fares in battleground states against McCain. This is very hard for Clinton supporters to hear, I'm sorry, but the super-delegates are not paying attention to your candidate anymore. These head-to-head matchup polls (Clinton v. McCain, Obama v. McCain) are not having the impact on people's thinking anymore.

Mr. Kane also doesn't seem to think much of the Green Party or Ralph Nader, for that matter (link via Kos and AmericaBlog). I suspect that if Obama were getting trounced by McCain, while Clinton had a clear lead, such things might be getting more play, but right now the relative differences between the two in national surveys are insignificant, statistical noise that seasoned pols have learned to tune out.

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?