Andrew Sullivan, on the "Aragula Card":

For all McCain's personal qualities, we're learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions - how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda's new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? - we are debating people's cultural insecurities and food choices.

I suspect that McCain's recent improvement in the polls has come at a cost: the perception that he was a different type of Republican politician, one who campaigned with a sense of honor and integrity, is gone. Something like this happened in the summer of 1980, when Jimmy Carter overturned a double-digit lead by Ronald Reagan to pull even in the polls, by going hard negative against his opponent. That turned out to be a short-term palliative: once the American people were reminded of how crappy the economy was, and discovered that Ronald Reagan wasn't as much of an ogre as he had been portrayed by Carter, the jig was up. But it did make that race closer for most of the campaign than it had any right to be.

UPDATE: And one of Senator McCain's more famous contributors agrees.

One of the scummier sidelights to the Presidential campaign has been the whispering campaign against former candidate John Edwards. Sex scandals have always been a favorite way to target political figures who threaten the status quo, from Charles Parnell to Martin Luther King, so it shouldn't surprise that John Edwards has been the focus of one such fatwa. Mickey Kaus has hyped this story since it began (in fact, I think he might have actually dreamt this one up by his lonesome), and hasn't stopped since, even after Edwards dropped out of the race in February. Since Kaus hates Democrats, and liberal Democrats especially, his prudishness may blind him to the fact that sex scandals, so long as they involve two consenting adults engaged in legal activity, don't actually do much to derail the political fortunes of progressive pols (in fact, it's money scandals that usually derail the good guys; having a mistress is disproportionately harmful to conservative pols).

Much of the original dirt came from Ann Coulter, who attempted to float the meme that the former Senator from North Carolina was a "faggot." Needless to say, when NaziPundit speaks, few listen, and the Edwards-as-a-closeted-gay-candidate rumor didn't catch fire. Subsequent efforts to nickname the candidate the "Breck Girl" were confined to the habitats of her homophobic ilk, and like the "Barack Hussein Osama" meme, was considered to be part of that dark corner of the political sphere that viewed Jesse Helms as a "patriot," and used the word "illegal" as a noun and "jew" as a verb.

Then, some months ago, Mickey Kaus began hyping the rumor that Edwards had an affair with a staffer. The story was denied by all concerned, and seemed to have died a natural death until last week, when the National Enquirer "broke" the story that the former candidate had visited said staffer at an hotel in Los Angeles, along with several other parties. Frustrated that most of the organs of the "MSM" did not pass along the story, unfiltered from a source known for making up stories whole cloth, to the masses, Kaus began targeting his favorite bete noire, the Los Angeles Times.

This morning, Kaus chose to publish an e-mail sent by the LA Times internet supremo, Tony Pierce, which broached the controversy in the following manner:

In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don't-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I've excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce's email address]:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. ...

It's hard to guess what's more pathetic: Kaus' obsession with the private life of a former political office seeker, or Kaus' disingenuous summary of Pierce's e-mail. To put it simply, an editor instructing his minions that the Times would prefer that they not use their unmediated blogspace to comment on a story in which the only source is one of the few American publications that actually loses defamation actions brought by public figures, is not the same thing as a newspaper "forbidding" or "banning" discussion of same. Since Kaus admits that another Times blogger went ahead and wrote about the controversy anyway, it can hardly be said that Tony Pierce "silenced" anybody.

I guess it must have been a slow day on the immigrant-bashing front. Pierce is one of the true gentlemen of the blogosphere, a nice, friendly mensch who is as good to his friends as he is generous to strangers, as I found out the first night I met him. It is thanks to Pierce that the Times has one of the liveliest blogging sections of any major newspaper; that he chose to remind his staff that the obligations of posting at one of the country's most important newspapers means being careful with the facts is a tribute to his journalistic integrity, and should not be used to settle old scores. Whatever the reason for his hatred of John Edwards (Kaus later cruelly derides the Senator's wife, who suffers from terminal cancer, as "Saint Elizabeth"), he should leave good people out of it.

Those of us who support the legal recognition of gay marriage can be cautiously optimistic from this poll, which shows the initiative to outlaw such ceremonies already trailing by a significant margin. The Field Poll, which conducted the survey, has an uncommonly eerie track record of accuracy in California, and historically, ballot initiatives are much like golfers who find themselves trailing Tiger Woods going into the final day of a major: they are doomed to defeat.

Just on the off chance he wins, I've been torn by whether Obama should begin the process of assuring that a debacle like the last eight years never happens again by creating an American version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or simply deporting Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, and their enablers in the punditocracy to the Hague. Here, Andrew Sullivan eloquently lays out the case for the latter option:

These people knew full well what they were doing; there is a growing documentary record of their criminality; and their own "subjective views" that they were only doing it to save the state are what every war criminal has always claimed. Yoo's memo, drawing on Serbian fascist precedents, cannot conceivably be understood as anything but a candid backing for torture. The man has said he'd be fine if the president crushed the testicles of a terror suspect's child to get a confession, true or not.

Rumsfeld's own hand-writing is on a memo fiddling with techniques devised by the Gestapo. And what does Stu think Cheney meant by "the dark side", for Pete's sake? That we know these people, that they are part of the Washington elite, even friends, should not render us indifferent to the most basic principles of decency and the rule of law.

Cheney and Addington and Bush actively, relentlessly and surreptitiously broke the law, rescinded the Geneva Conventions, approved memos that are laughable hack work in retrospect, used false confessions procured by torture as rationales to go to war, and destroyed the moral reputation of the US, the honor of the armed services and the rule of law. They are immensely powerful, privileged, wealthy men. And they are war criminals, under the strictest interpretation of that term. They have shifted blame on the lowest of the low, while fixing the system to protect them from accountability.

America doesn't pardon war criminals. It prosecutes and, in the past, has even executed them for the same techniques that Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney endorsed.

BTW, the "Stu" referenced above is Stuart Taylor, a writer who first came to prominence with his fatwa against former President Clinton, when lying under oath about an affair was considered an impeachable offense. No doubt, Taylor can ably perform the role of defense attorney in Belgium.

Kudos to the Washington Post for re-running this 2001 piece by, of all people, David Broder, on the true legacy of the late Jesse Helms. One should be respectful of the friends and family members of the deceased Senator during their time of mourning, and still not shirk the truth, that for most of his public life, Jesse Helms was a blight on American politics, a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot, a man whose politics may finally be getting their final repudiation by the voters in this election.

The fact that he was an unwavering foe of the Soviet Empire gets no credit at this end, no more than I would give Franco or Duvalier or Pinochet such credit; his anti-Communism was based not on a love of freedom and civil liberties, but on his belief that Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and other stalwarts of the fight to end apartheid on this planet were Communists too. That he became more humane at the end of his life has more to do with Bono than any core principles he held. Having lived much of his life in the public sphere, it does a disservice to Helms not to acknowledge the accuracy of what the New Yorker said about him at the time of retirement:

But Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism.

The math may be difficult to follow, but at least as it concerns the movies of 2007, there was a direct correlation between successful box office and good reviews, according to Slate.

For those people who, like myself, so enjoyed taking the California Bar Exam that we just had to do it a second time, this documentary is for you.

Guess which Presidential candidate was right from the start on Robert Mugabe.

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?

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.

Since the good Rev. Wright seems content on not letting his fifteen minutes expire, Barack Obama has been given a pretty sweet opportunity to go public with his position that, no, he doesn't believe AIDS was cooked up in some lab to kill blacks, and that the semi-crazy egotist who we've seen babbling for the last couple of days is not the same person who brought him to God, no more than the Pope who drowsed his way during the pedophilia scandals of the final years of his pontificate was the same John Paul II who brought the Soviet Union to its knees.

Obama's thoughtfulness, his ability to explain nuance, is the prime reason he is the presumptive nominee, and why he continues to lead McCain in most polls. To be given a chance to first give a speech putting Wright in the context of American race relations, and then a few weeks later to distance himself from some of the loonier conspiratorial ravings of the black pulpit, is better than your routine mulligan; it's a chance to dominate the agenda through the end of the primaries.

Newsweek has a new poll out showing both Obama and Clinton maintaining a three-point lead over McCain; a month and a half ago, before the controversies involving Rev. Wright and assorted members of the Weathermen, and before Senator Clinton began her "kitchen sink" strategy, Obama had a one-point lead over the presumptive Republican nominee. Other polls, including Rasmussen and Gallup, show essentially the same thing: there has been no change in the polls, and even a slight gain for Obama, over the last eight weeks. As long as McCain continues to shill for the Bush Administration's disastrous policies in the Middle East and the economy, the Democrats could nominate Michael Vick and win in November.

Finally, an explanation of the Isiah Thomas Era in New York that makes sense....

You're doin' a heckuva job, Saunders: Allison Hope Weiner lets the Federal Government have it with both barrels for its handling of the Pellicano Trial, here. Apparently, no one in the Bush Justice Department ever deigned to figure out whether one of the defendants had really filed bankruptcy (a copy of the forged petition can be found here), or if their star impeachment witness might herself be a scam artist:

And so, on Monday, the court noted that the witness will return and she will consider whether to declare a mistrial. It's really incredible that after six years of investigation, the government managed to call a witness to impeach a defendant's testimony without checking that witness' criminal history. Mr. Hummel has said repeatedly that his client denied having filed a fraudulent bankruptcy application. He said it five years ago when Mr. Arneson first spoke with the government and he said it before Mr. Saunders proceeded to seriously delve into the issue on cross-examination in his effort to prove to the jury that Mr. Arneson was a liar. And, despite all the times that Mr. Arneson insisted that the signature on the document was forged, the government refused to investigate his claims. Frankly, it makes one wonder what else they forgot or didn't bother to investigate.

Is it possible that there is all kinds of other evidence that the government overlooked in their desire to prosecute these few, rather insignificant Pellicano associates who were so down on the ladder that they scored truly pathetic financial benefits from their alleged criminal activity? Is it possible that in questioning Mr. Pellicano's clients, the government didn't bother to really ask them really hard questions because the government was focused on charging this truly bottom rung of Pellicano associates and not any of Mr. Pellicano's powerful and influential clients? And given what's happened with this prosecution, can you blame them? Did the government really even want to charge Mr. Pellicano's wealthy clients given their deep pockets and endless resources? Did they go after people like Mr. Arneson and Mr. Kachikian and even Mr. Turner because it was easier? And if so, can you even imagine what's going to happen in the courtroom when Mr. Saunders and Mr. Lally finally prosecute Mr. Christensen and they face off against a defendant with not only deep pockets, but an arsenal of attorneys ready and able to research any legal issue at a moment's notice? Even with over thirty tapes of Mr. Christensen chatting away with Mr. Pellicano about wiretapping Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, you've still got to wonder how that one is going to play out given what happened today.

Read the whole thing, and while you're at it, read some of Ms. Weiner's prior posts from the courtroom about the trial, which really should be placed in a time capsule for the way they account for the entire above-the-law mentality that exists in Hollywood.

Working Class Heroes: From this morning's local paper of record:

Some analysts question whether Democrats need to make big inroads among blue-collar voters. Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said that Clinton's focus on the working class is a distraction, because Republicans tend to win among such voters.

Democrats John F. Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 lost with that group by more than 20 points, he said. Even former President Clinton did not win among white men. "Obama doesn't have to win the working class," said Richards, referring to white voters without college educations. "He just has to cut Democrats' losses."

And this, from a 2006 article in the liberal American Prospect:

The key weakness of the progressive coalition can be summarized easily: very weak support among white working class voters (defined here as whites without a four-year college degree). These voters, who are overwhelmingly of moderate to low income and, by definition, of modest credentials, should see their aspirations linked tightly to the political fate of the progressive movement. But they don't.

Leaving aside the truthiness of the above passages, I've noticed that definitions of "working class" or "blue collar" used by the punditocracy in this country have tended to be based not on what a person does (ie., "work") but on what they didn't do (ie., attend college, or earn a degree, for that matter). There are a few high-paying jobs (baseball player, supermodel, etc.) for which a college education is superfluous, while many union jobs either require a college degree (like teaching) or some amount of post-high school continuing education; in neither instance does this new definition of "working class" seem to fit. Are we to surmise that those terms have now become euphemisms of a sort, a way that the media and pols can condescend to the less-educated without actually calling them "stupid"?

Clinton Wins PA: By rounding off, an illusion of a ten-point win is created, but the real margin is 9.32%(54.66%-45.34%). The difference right now between a "double-digit", decisive victory for Clinton and a mere single-digit, superficially close moral victory for Obama (after rounding down) is less than 3,800 votes, out of more than 2.3 million votes cast.

UPDATE [4/24/]: With all the votes counted, the actual margin of victory ended up being 9.1%. Had a mere 1,200 votes switched, her margin would have sank below 9%, and after rounding down, the headlines would have been that she won by "8%."

I wonder if Hillary Clinton realizes that even if her rival for the nomination was to announce that he had engaged in a threesome on 9/11 with Louis Farrakhan and Bernardine Dohrn, and that henceforth he would refer to the white working class as the "potato-eating lumpenproletariat," she still isn't going to be the nominee. There's a slim chance the SuperDelegates might put the kibosh on Obama's bid for the nomination (after all, we tend to forget that Obama needs an actual majority; if enough Supers vote for George Clooney or Tiger Woods, they can tie the Convention up forever). But even if they screw Barack, Hillary isn't going to be the beneficiary. She's finished.

If we could all be so gracious when we err:

If you want to know if anyone is reading your stories, make sure you insert a mistake about George Washington.

Oh, if only I could claim it was all a ploy by Calendar editors to gauge readership. But when I wrote in Saturday's story about HBO that George Washington stepped down from the presidency after serving only one term, it was just a stupid, blind error, the sort that leaves you smiting your forehead, literally and repeatedly, the moment it is pointed out to you.

For the six or seven people living in the Los Angeles Basin who did not e-mail to correct me, he served two terms, not one. And my daddy was a history teacher! Ever since the first e-mail hit my box (on Friday afternoon, about two seconds after the story went up on the website), I have been bathed in hot shame. But I want to thank you, well, most of you, for the gentle tone you took -- most clever subject line award goes to: Is a TV Critic Smarter Than a 5th Grader? -- though I certainly deserved all those incredulous exclamation marks as well. And yes, I did go to college. Graduated even.

Also, for the record, we entertainment writers are held just as accountable for flubbed historical references as any other journalist. The correction runs today online and in tomorrow's print edition, and I will try to comfort myself with the knowledge that a good, strong dose of humility is always good for the soul. Especially the soul of a critic.

My criticism Saturday was aimed more at the Times for letting that howler through than it was at poor Ms. McNamara. We all make mistakes, and, unlike President Bush, I certainly do not pretend omniscience about what I do not know. But a good newspaper (unlike a blog) is supposed to have people whose job it is to catch that sort of thing, and having a staff with diverse interests and backgrounds should mean that someone who knows how many terms Washington served is around to catch such mistakes.

Kaus goes the fanshen route, here, and admits that he might also have latent tendencies towards snobbery. From his argument, I don't see how any political advocacy could ever be separated from the tendencies he criticizes: we engage either in "Vulgar Marxism," where people only act in the political sphere based on their perceived self-interest; or "social inequality-based snobbery," where you attempt to convince others that you have a more refined view of what their actual self-interest is than they do.

American History X: From this morning's LA Times, in an article about the resurgence of HBO:

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term.

ARGH !!! ARGH !!! ARGH !!!

Sweet Jesus that's amazing. George Washington served two terms. Period. It's in the history books. It's also in Wikipedia. Moreover, his second term is even alluded to in the aforereferenced Adams miniseries: for example, Abigail has to convince PigVomit at one point that despite his somewhat truculent reservations, he should continue to serve as Vice President in Washington's second term. Serving two terms is one of the things Washington is famous for.

It's enough to make a lefty sympathetic to Patterico. Does the fact-checker at the Times have to regularly drink water out of the toilet or lose their back teeth from subsisting on a diet of rocks to get that job?

UPDATE [4/20]: A classy correction by the writer, here.

The tone is sometimes off-putting (I could do without the "Stupid/Evil" ratio), but the creator of Alicublog has a pretty good run-down of the Far Right blogosphere. An example:

MICHELLE MALKIN (michellemalkin.com)

ORIENTATION: Nativist

TONE: Very, very angry

FUN FACT: In 2004, attacked Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox and her protégée, Washington call girl Jessica Cutler, as "the female Beavis and Butt-head" and "skanks"; was thereafter subjected to years of mercilessly mockery by Wonkette scribes, including doctored photos of Malkin frolicking in a bikini, which were strenuously debunked by her ("updated: tracking the source of the bogus Flickr photos . . .
Wonkette editors demonstrate further malice . . .").

CANDIDATE: None—McCain's too liberal

STUPID/EVIL RATIO: 97/3

HISTORY: In the early '90s, reporter and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Daily News; later wrote for the Seattle Times, became a Fox News commentator, and joined Creators Syndicate, which currently distributes her columns. Has published books about the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II (pro), illegal immigration, and "Liberals Gone Wild" (both con). Columns have focused on culture-war subjects ("Voices From the Womb") from a more-right-wing-than-thou
perspective (e.g., citing "President Bush's cave-in on government funding of embryonic stem-cell research"). Illegal immigrants get special attention, as do nefarious nonwhite Americans, be they of Asian ("Asian-Americans milking 9-11"), Arab ("myth of the Muslim hate crime epidemic"), or African ("Sept. 11 brought home the lesson that vile ideas have bloody consequences—no matter how 'daggone funky' they may sound to mush-headed music critics") descent. Began blogging in
2004, mainly bringing Internet-response speed to the usual subjects, plus a few new tropes, including frequent accusations of "dhimmitude" against parties insufficiently hostile toward Muslims, including YouTube ("JihadTube").

MODUS OPERANDI: Parses news feverishly for offenses to her worldview. Has been enraged by the D.C. networking group Professionals in the City (for holding an event at the Cuban embassy), Jessica Alba (for "making pro-assimilation remarks"), and Google (for bias in news-site affiliate selection, logos, and search results). Doesn't spare conservative outlets ("P.C. at the Washington Times") or the Republican Party ("Is the GOP Lost?") when they run afoul of her on doctrinal matters, especially regarding immigration. Attacks
McCain on this subject, often without the benefit of hyphens ("I don't want another George W. Bush open borders type in the White House").

WHAT TO EXPECT: Barring a dramatic reversal on immigration by McCain, will wash her hands of the whole election and concentrate on everyday liberal- and foreigner-bashing.

(link via Winds of Change, who apparently believe that Obama is trailing McCain in the polls)

I don't care what Obama says, chronic unemployment and regional economic emasculation cannot excuse this sort of thing...so far, the polls aren't showing much of an impact, which shouldn't be surprising. First, the overwhelming majority of voters pretty much have decided on who they will support, and something that is perceived as a slip of the tongue isn't going to weigh as heavy as, say, getting out of Iraq or what to do about four dollar gas.

But more importantly, I don't think the "elitist" label really hurts Obama, the same way it has hurt other Democrats in the past. Perhaps the biggest personal attribute Obama is selling is his intelligence; after eight years of a failed Presidency helmed by someone widely perceived to be dumber than a bag of hammers, having a candidate who speaks in complete sentences and who actually seems to think about what he's saying may be precisely what swing voters are demanding. After Katrina, Iraq and the real estate bubble, why not give the A-students a chance to run things for once?

Moreover, Mickey Kaus may be on to something when he says that Clinton and McCain may be making a huge mistake by focusing too much on the "bitter." Voters are angry, and over the last thirty years neither party has offered the voters Obama was addressing much in the way of policies that would actually improve their lives. That may be why The Speech last month resonated so deeply: rather than doing the politically expedient thing, which was to throw his friend overboard, he used the opportunity to recast the debate as one about how race continues to affect our perceptions. Voters didn't see a politician treating them with condescension; they saw an intelligent person speak to them as adults, put their feelings into words, and define a problem we would all rather avoid talking about in an honest fashion. It was most unexpected, which may be why they are willing to cut Obama some slack here.

Did you know that you have a better chance of being killed in a terrorist attack than you have of seeing a good movie that opens in more than 2000 theatres? Well, not exactly, but the inverse relationship between movie quality and Hollywood release strategies is explored, here.

Tony Pierce, on why we should go to the Olympics:

although i believe in making it tough for a torch to get from one end of frisco to another, i dont believe in not going to olympic events out of protest.

i believe in having jesse owens go to nazi germany to win gold right there in front of hitler and his beliefs about the master race.

i believe in going to mexico city and raising the black power salute while they play the star spangled banner

i believe in beating the russians with kids because yes al michaels i believe in miracles

and miracles dont happen unless you play the game.

A number of points should be made about any decision to boycott. First, there is absolutely no reason for the President to attend the opening ceremonies. President Ford didn't attend the opening ceremonies in Montreal, nor did LBJ go to Mexico City. And those Olympics were held next door, so to speak, not halfway around the globe. Neither tradition nor necessity requires George Bush to make a trip that did he didn't make four years earlier.

Second, the rationale for boycotting the Games was the same now as it was when they were originally awarded to China, in 2001. I don't think it can be plausibly argued that things are worse now in China than they were back then. The IOC had reason to know what it was getting into when it made the selection, and it seems unfair to punish the athletes at this late date.

Third, the notion that Olympic boycotts accomplish nothing is one that is belied by history. The boycott of the '76 Games by African nations upset by New Zealand's defiance of an international anti-Apartheid blockade thrust that issue into the public spotlight, ensuring that future friendly contacts with South Africa would be fraught with risk. The boycott of the Moscow games by the U.S. was arguably the most constructive act in opposing Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan (obviously, it finishes ahead of "arming the Taliban"), and minimized the propaganda value that full attendance at those games would have had for that regime. It was also a very popular move at home, a way of signalling our anger over the Soviet invasion without shedding blood.

Conversely, the non-boycott of the '36 Games in Berlin should now be seen in the context of other decisions made by Western political leaders not to challenge the rising Nazi tide. The notion that Jesse Owens "discredited" Aryan supremacy reminds me of that great Peter Cook line about the importance of the Weimar cabarets in stopping the rise of Hitler and preventing World War II. Owens did indeed win four gold medals in the center of Nazi Germany, Joe Louis did destroy Max Schmelling in less than two minutes, and yet Hitler still managed to nearly destroy civilization. Since Leni Riefenstahl found the time to make a propaganda film about the games anyway (even including the stories of Owens and other black athletes in the version shown internationally), it's safe to say that Hitler, who didn't like sports to begin with, wasn't challenged in any way by the occasional victories of "non-Aryan" athletes at his games. It's hard to see how not boycotting the '36 Olympics made the world a safer or more humane place.

Egghead, heal thyself.... Concerning the anvil-tongued remarks of Senator Obama on the connection between chronic unemployment and various pathologies of small-town white Pennsylvanians, Mickey Kaus requests that Obama should:

Rather than trying to spin his way out, wouldn't it be better for Obama to forthrightly admit his identity? Let's have a national dialogue about egghead condescension!

Fair enough, I say. Liberals have had a bad habit of explaining away such things in the past as rooted in the negative environment of the subject, and it ends up giving us a tone deafness to issues like crime. Chronic unemployment should no more be an excuse for anti-immigrant sentiments than it is for gang violence.

But no sooner does he make that sensible point, then Kaus lobs this back at his readers:

Ann Coulter is reading Obama's autobiography and comes up with a not-implausible interpretation of the famous Racist Grandma incident:

As recounted in Obama's autobiography, the only evidence that his grandmother feared black men comes from Obama's good-for-nothing, chronically unemployed white grandfather, who accuses Grandma of racism as his third excuse not to get dressed and drive her to work.

Obama's full quote about his grandmother, above, described her as "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." So Coulter's excuse, which Kaus finds "not-implausible," for grandma having palpitations everytime a black man walked by, or for her using the word "jew" as a verb, was the behavior of her unemployed husband? Sounds like "egghead condescension" to me....

Don't Snitch-- Sue !!! Anthony Pellicano is not the only high-profile case being heard in the Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A. The courthouse also plays host to the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Suge Knight, former hip-hop empressario who is now attempting a comeback on reality TV:



He also has several pokers in his double-toothpicks filing, such as a lawsuit against Kanye West for allowing someone to shoot him (and steal a 15 carrot diamond earring) at West's pre-MTV Music Awards party in 2005.* A copy of the complaint can be reviewed, here.

Among the highlights: that Kanye West negligently ignored the possibility that the East Coast-West Coast feud would flare up at the party, and that the identity of some of the guests "...were known not to be friendly to Mr. Knight," and thus negligently failed to pat down and do complete metal detection searches on the guests. As a result, an innocent victim of all this feuding, Mr. Knight, was nearly killed. Not surprisingly, the former Death Row Records honcho has "no idea" who did this to him, just as he had "no idea" who whacked Tupac. But thanks to civil discovery, he now has the opportunity to find witnesses who will snitch out the perp.

*The party in question took place on August 28, 2005, one day before Hurricane Katrina would give Kanye West a chance for more mainstream exposure.

John McCain sure knows how to sweet-talk the ladies....

On the subject of the Clintons' wealth, Kevin Drum notes "Have we ever asked this about any previous presidential candidate? Reagan? Bush Sr.? Bush Jr.? Kerry? (Actually, that's a genuine question. Have we?) ."

To answer his question, the issue about whence came the candidate's money played a major role concerning LBJ, who was a millionaire in spite of never having worked a job (besides brief careers as a school teacher and elevator operator) outside of the public sphere; Nixon, whose ties to Howard Hughes played a major role in the 1960 campaign (after having earlier dealt with a similar controversy involving a black & white cocker spaniel named Checkers); and to a lesser extent, Reagan, whose affluence stemmed from his rather hazy relationship with people like Henry Salvatori and Alfred Bloomingdale. Each had to overcome questions as to the somewhat dubious nature of their wealth before winning the Presidency, so we don't have to resort to Somerbian paranoia about media double standards here.

heckle [vt.]: to annoy or harass (a speaker) by interrupting with questions or taunts.

Can anyone seriously view this clip and say that the girl in question is "heckling" Senator McCain? Back in '82, I was Milton Friedman give a lecture at the college I was attending at the time (Reed College), and the event consisted almost entirely of students lobbing verbal grenades at the stage, and Friedman batting them back as if it was badminton. I saw Jeane Kirkpatrick give a lecture in '83 at CAL where she literally had to abandon her speech due to student taunts. Now, that was heckling.... [link via Digby]

Nicholas Kristof has been on a roll in the New York Times recently, with several astute columns on race, gender and how they impact the 2008 election. On the subject of the controversial Rev. Wright, he wrote:

It’s true that conspiracy theories are a bane of the African-American community. Perhaps partly as a legacy of slavery, Tuskegee and Jim Crow, many blacks are convinced that crack cocaine was a government plot to harm African-Americans and that the levees in New Orleans were deliberately opened to destroy black neighborhoods.

White readers expressed shock (and a hint of smugness) at these delusions, but the sad reality is that conspiracy theories and irrationality aren’t a black problem. They are an American problem.

These days, whites may not believe in a government plot to spread AIDS, but they do entertain the equally malevolent theory that the United States government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. A Ohio University poll in 2006 found that 36 percent of Americans believed that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.

Then there’s this embarrassing fact about the United States in the 21st century: Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each.

(snip)

Only one American in 10 understands radiation, and only one in three has an idea of what DNA does. One in five does know that the Sun orbits the Earth ...oh, oops.

“America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,” Susan Jacoby argues in a new book, “The Age of American Unreason.” She blames a culture of “infotainment,” sound bites, fundamentalist religion and ideological rigidity for impairing thoughtful debate about national policies.

Ecce Homo !!!

Of course, ignorance is not necessarily the basis for conspiratorial thinking, nor do conservatives have a monopoly on the subject; besides the numerous wackjobs who continue to support the Kennedy and King assasination industries, you still encounter people who believe the 2004 election resulted from computer hacking, who assert that the Reagan campaign in 1980 made a side-deal with the Ayatollah on the hostages just before the election, and who insist that the documents Dan Rather shilled for concerning Bush's absence from Guard duty in 1972 were authentic. There are good reasons for believing in each of the above, just as it is not unreasonable to believe that AIDS and crack cocaine are part of a racist plot. It isn't ignorance so much as it is an unwillingness to apply reason to those subjects that fuels conspiracy thinking.

Smile: In which the worlds of a college hoops phenom and a musical genius intersect.

The only problem I have with this map is that doesn't include the region south of the Mason-Dixon line in the new "United States." Also, the Pacific Coast should be a part of the commonwealth directly to the north.

UPDATE: The Anchor Baby wins.

Code Pink: Mickey Kaus nails Stanley Crouch and Christopher Hitchens on some rather unsubtle sexist language in some recent attacks on Hillary Clinton.

Shorter Kos: None of the problems the Democratic Party is having with the potential disenfranchisement of the voters of Florida and Michigan would be happening if Howard Dean was still the party chairman.

The Speech[Pt. 3]: Obama's oratory appears to have paid off big-time, according to the polls:

More than eight-in-ten supporters of Obama (84%) who have heard about the controversy over Wright's sermons say he has done an excellent or good job of dealing with the situation. Reactions from Clinton supporters, and Republicans, are on balance negative; however, 43% of Clinton voters and a third of Republican voters who have heard about the affair express positive opinions about Obama's handling of the situation.

The survey finds that, in general, Obama has a highly favorable image among Democratic voters, including white Democrats. But while Obama's personal image is more favorable than Clinton's, certain social beliefs and attitudes among older, white, working-class Democratic voters are associated with his lower levels of support among this group.

In particular, white Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama are much more likely than those who have favorable opinions of him to say that equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far; they also are more likely to disapprove of interracial dating, and are more concerned about the threat that immigrants may pose to American values. In addition, nearly a quarter of white Democrats (23%) who hold a negative view of Obama believe he is a Muslim.

The same poll, done by the Pew Foundation, shows him increasing his lead over Hillary Clinton and maintaining a steady margin over John McCain. The road to the White House is still bumpy for the Senator, as the last paragraph shows, and as I discovered when I appeared at a 341A Meeting of Creditors in a bankruptcy I was handling on Friday.

While my client and I were waiting to be called in by the Chapter 13 Trustee, I overheard another attorney tell his African-American client that he couldn't vote for Obama, since he had heard from an unimpeachable source that one of his "best friends" was a former member of the Weather Underground who continued to support terrorism. The person he was no doubt referring to, William Ayres, is a "best friend" of the Senator's in the same sense that someone whom you met once more than ten years ago, or who once contributed the grand total of $200 to a past campaign, is your "best friend." Whispering campaigns concerning Obama's religious and political leanings are going to play an increasing role the closer we get to November, so it's incumbent on the presumptive nominee to be as aggressive in batting back each attack as he was on the issue of Rev. Wright.

With due deference to Mr. Frey, here's a clip of one of the funniest satirists of the 1960's, Tom Lehrer:

Lions and lambs, sleeping together:

The very morning that she came to the Trib, our editorial page raised questions about her campaign and criticized her on several other scores.

Reading that, a lesser politician -- one less self-assured, less informed on domestic and foreign issues, less confident of her positions -- might well have canceled the interview right then and there.

Sen. Clinton came to the Trib anyway and, for 90 minutes, answered questions.

Her meeting and her remarks during it changed my mind about her.

Walking into our conference room, not knowing what to expect (or even, perhaps, expecting the worst), took courage and confidence. Not many politicians have political or personal courage today, so it was refreshing to see her exhibit both.

Sen. Clinton also exhibited an impressive command of many of today's most pressing domestic and international issues. Her answers were thoughtful, well-stated, and often dead-on.

--Richard Mellon Scaife, erstwhile leader of the VRWC, on Hillary Clinton, today. His reference to "a lesser politician" is perhaps a swipe at the current holder of the Presidency. [link via TPM]

Quickie NCAA Trivia: Name the last 16-seed to win a game at the men's NCAA basketball tournament. While you're guessing, here's a rare live recording of a song that Bob Dylan wrote but did not release until well after this band covered it:



Cheers.

Travels With Sinbad: Turns out Hillary had a good explanation....

The Speech [Pt.2]: Of all the passages that have received attention from last week's speech, none have generated more discussion, or controversy, than these:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

(snip)

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The latter portion emphasized above, the reference to his beloved grandmother, was the portion that moved me the most, almost to tears. It reminded me of people in my own family, people that I loved, who said callous and insensitive things about people of other races and ethnicities. It brought to mind friends, people who have been generous and kind to me, but whose opinions on occasion have been narrowminded and extreme. It's no wonder that The Speech seemed to overwhelm writers as disparate as Andrew Sullivan and Peggy Noonan. Even a lapsed Catholic like myself has deeply engraved in his psyche that adage best-suited for our morally complex world: "love the sinner, hate the sin." It was a Christian speech, in the most positive sense of the word.

But it's also the portion that has made Obama's critics and foes the most uncomfortable. How dare he draw a moral equivalence between his aging pastor and his octogenarian grandmother, they say. Or, on the other hand, they argue that there's nothing wrong with a white woman muttering cringeworthy "racial or ethnic stereotypes" to her young, black grandson, whether they be about African Americans, Jews, Chicanos or any other non-white group. In fact, more than a few quite disingenuously omitted the last portion (about the racial and ethnic stereotype utterances) in order to stack the deck against Obama, changing the context of the speech.

It's clear that the same portion of The Speech that I found so moving made others protest a little too much. We cannot have an honest dialogue about race in this country unless we are willing to shine the spotlight on ourselves, and our own engrained beliefs. For a woman to subconsciously fear a black man who passed her on the street may well be grounded in a rational fear of crime, but it's also based on the same belief system that in the youth of Obama's grandmother forced African Americans to drink from different fountains and to be redlined from suburban neighborhoods.

It's the nightmare vision preached by the Dixiecrats of yore: if given freedom, black men will rape white women and steal your wallets. It should sound just as ugly coming from Barack's grandmother as it does coming from a James Eastland or a Norman Podheretz. But it was also a sentiment shared not long ago by Jesse Jackson, a fear of young black men, of street gangs and drive-by shootings. Without recognizing both facets, one can't begin to have an understanding of the issue.

In the end, no one ever believes that the stereotypes we possess of others are bogus. There is always some way to rationalize, to believe that while others are irrational bigots, we argue in good faith. The easiest thing for those who don't want to have our prejudices challenged is to caricature, to say that Obama "threw his grandmother under a bus," to use the right's favorite cliche, or that he drew a false "moral equivalence" between the two sets of prejudice, to use the odious stalinoid phrase most favored by those who wish to stifle any debate (since, after all, nothing can ever truly be the "moral equivalent" of anything else).

It is to his credit that Obama chose the examples he did to illustrate the dilemma. Had he ditched his pastor, as some have suggested, and only repudiated the paranoia of some African-American pulpits, it might have played better among swing voters in Ohio and Florida and what-not. But The Speech would not have moved anyone, and it have been just another cheap "Sista Souljah" moment, an attempt by a pol to play to the middle. Sometimes, it's "the middle" that's the problem, and by evenhandedly addressing the issue, rather than skirting it, he nailed his landing.

The Pot Calls the Kettle: Is there anyone with less credibility in attacking Barack Obama for his relationship with his pastor than Christopher "David Irving is not just a fascist historian, he's a great historian of Fascism" Hitchens? I suppose if Rev. Wright had denied the Holocaust, Hitch would have been right on board...after all, wasn't it Hitchens who asserted just four months ago that Hanukkah "celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness"?

Last Week: I took last week off, for the most part. Every year, I take a break during the four days that comprise the first two rounds of the NCAA Tourney, and this year, I had two major deadlines at work that had to be completed at the beginning of the week, so no blogging got done. That meant perhaps the most discussed speech by an American politician in my lifetime was not covered on this blog, and my two cents weren't added to the national debate. I suck.

Looking back, it's clear The Speech was an unqualified benefit to Obama's candidacy, at least in the short term. After a campaign where he didn't seem to be doing much to challenge the American voter, beyond the fact that his very existence is a "challenge" to the majority, and where his strategy seems to be mainly focused on running out the clock and winning on points, Thomas Dewey-style, in his battle for the nomination, for him to give a speech on the Great National Issue which exposed him on many different levels to future attacks was ballsy. The momentum in favor of Hillary Clinton which was manifesting itself in sizable leads in Pennsylvania appears to have waned. He is the presumptive nominee again.

The Speech also accomplished another important step, one that could have caused long-term bleeding in the Fall: it innoculated him from any subsequent revelation concerning the controversial statements of his pastor. You may recall that the big to-do in the days just preceding the Speech was whether he had been in attendance when Rev. Wright had made one of his more controversial statements. It turned out he'd been in Miami at the time, but the use of YouTube would have made it inevitable that speculation over his attendance at other gatherings where Rev. Wright had let fly with one of his stemwinders would have harmed his campaign.

Admitting he had been in the audience on other occasions where his pastor had made controversial statements that he disagreed with lessens the impact that such speculation will have. And if it's a question about whether it's appropriate for Senator Obama to have a minister who is also a sharp critic of America, the same question would have to be asked of some of the religious leaders who are close to Senator McCain, such as John Hagee. It is undeniably racist to have one standard that punishes a black politician for belonging to a congregation led by an angry jeremiah, and not one that subjects white conservative politicians to the same standard for associating with gay-bashing extremists who see the current war in the Middle East as a precursor to the extermination of all non-Christians.

Obama's gift, in his eloquent sermon last week, was to allow us to put all of our own relationships into context. If it is racist to judge Obama, and certain black churches, by one standard and McCain and white fundamentalists by another, it is also incumbent on liberals to accord the same dignity to people like Hagee and Robertson, to look beyond the words and deeds we find objectionable and to attempt to see why it is others are inpired by them. In sum, we should give the same benefit to those we violently disagree with that we give to those we love whose sentiments are equally objectionable to us. For those of us who had become skeptical of Obama as an "engine of change," last week gave us a refreshing chance to reappraise his candidacy, and in a way favorable to him.