This is just a rumor, but John Kerry and John Edwards, appearing as "The Nerk Twins," are going to do a quick set between tonight's showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Reefer Madness at the West Theater in Barberton, Ohio.

Vanity Fair's James Wolcott, the It's Pat! of media mavens, has managed to make cyberspace a little smaller by starting his own blog, properly titled "Everyone Likes the Smell of His Own Brain Farts" but more prosaically called James Wolcott. Here's Wooly's steel-trap take on the GOP convention:

My clinical evaluation. I don't know if Bush is going to lose the election. But I think he thinks he's going to lose. His eyes were lifeless, devoid of spark. His smiles were forced, his expressions of gratitude for the audience applause more of a mechanical pause than a transference of energy from him to the crowd and back again. When the camera cut to the audience they were doing their orchestrated bit, holding up those dopey signs, but there wasn't the ebullience you saw among the Democrats. Bush seemed to know this speech simply didn't have it, and he didn't have it in him to put it over.

More, including props to Anthony Trollope, Jean Negulesco, and Fred Sanford, here.

The Boston Globe quotes Bush aide Andy Card on the president's attitude to his subjects:

''It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child," Card said. ''I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children."

A Young Republican explains why she doesn't plan to enlist in the military:

"Frankly, I want to be a politician. I'd like to survive to see that."

A while back, some officials in Texas decided to sue the Dallas Observer for libel because it didn't label a satire as a satire. Today the state Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the plaintiffs didn't have a case.

After Tim Cavanaugh, it was the New York Times' turn yesterday to make a case for Lebanese democracy under the Syrian protectorate. It's perhaps a trifle late (the Syrians have been in Lebanon for 28 years), but certainly not too late. The Times piece also went further and mentioned Lebanon's importance as a relatively democratic outpost (when the Syrians leave us be, and our politicians check their ambitions) in a mostly dictatorial Middle East. Many of us here in Beirut have been making that case for some time, and with the UN Security Council passing a historic resolution yesterday calling for all "foreign forces" (hear Syria) to leave Lebanon, we might finally have gotten a hearing.

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad has blundered splendidly. He may have studied ophthalmology, but he was blind as a rock on this one. He succeeded, by insisting on extending Emile Lahoud's mandate (Lahoud is Lebanon's remarkably shameless president) despite warnings not to do so from the U.S. and France, in internationalizing the Syrian-Lebanese relationship. Bashar's father always made sure that was one mistake he didn't make. Thank heavens, the son is cut from different cloth.

And what's going on here? Across the square from my house, workers have erected a four-story-high portrait of Lahoud, momentarily allowing us to observe, like Gulliver in Brobdingnag (with some poetic license): "His skin appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored, when I saw him near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher. And hairs hanging from it thicker than pack-threads…" Banners have been put up (apparently on the initiative of the intelligence services, but also probably the Interior Ministry, controlled by Lahoud's son-in-law) hailing the great man, and speakers have been blaring patriotic songs from the square. Even as I'm typing a fireworks display has started. The feigned joy touches no one, but is typical of regimes that must manufacture support for fear of seeing the vast emptiness of the real thing.

I can hear a baby crying…

Charles Paul Freund grabs his walking stick and takes a tour of Old D.C.

Jacob Sullum says GOP isn't the solution to the problem; GOP is the problem.

We knew Bill Clinton was an attention hog, but this, quad bypass on the old ticker?

Al Gore is one unlucky sumbitch, almost as bad as the positively cursed John Kerry.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders has an interesting column about differences between the Dems and GOP when it comes to what might be called internal integrity:

A New York Times/CBS News poll in July found that three-quarters of Democratic voters and 86 percent of Boston delegates opposed the war in Iraq. Yet both John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq in 2002.

The same poll found that 19 percent of GOP voters and 3 percent of GOP delegates oppose the war. Those delegates are in harmony with Bush and Veep Dick Cheney, even if 51 percent of all voters polled oppose the war.

That's the central difference between the GOP and the Democrats: The Democrats were willing to -- no, they chose to, by nominating Kerry --sell out their core issue in order to beat George W. Bush.

Whole thing here.

Despite Bush's apparent climb in recent polls (it's also assumed that, unlike Kerry after the Democratic convention, he'll get a true bounce from the GOP convention), it's obviously way too early to declare the race. But Saunders is right to suggest that a party that nominates a candidate at odds with its core beliefs is a party in trouble. This helps to explain weak and inconsistent messaging on the part of the Democrats. And it also suggests John Kerry may need to become more vocally anti-war in Iraq to mollify the Democratic base--a tactic that will only lend more weight to the flip-flop millstone around his neck.

This is pretty funny, if only because it's not immediately clear who the ultimate target is: Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth.

NORML notes that Alaska's Court of Appeals is following through on the logic of its 2003 ruling that residents of the state still have a right to possess up to four ounces of marijuana in the home, despite a 1990 ballot initiative that ostensibly recriminalized such possession. In a decision issued last week, the court threw out a search warrant that resulted in a man's arrest for marijuana cultivation because the police did not have probable cause to believe that more than four ounces were involved. The court held that "a judicial officer should not issue a warrant to search a person’s home for evidence of marijuana possession unless the State’s warrant application establishes probable cause to believe that the person’s possession of marijuana exceeds the scope of the possession that is constitutionally protected under Ravin," the 1975 Alaska Supreme Court decision that said pot possession in the home was protected by the state constitution's privacy clause.

Larry King interviews bin Laden.

Speaking at midnight last night in Springfield, Ohio, John Kerry channeled the ghost of Buckeye State late-night movie hosts such as Columbus' Fritz the Night Owl and Cleveland's The Ghoul to wail about his treatment at the hands of the GOP:

"For the past week, they have attacked my patriotism and even my fitness to serve as commander in chief," Kerry told thousands here at a midnight rally shortly after Bush accepted the Republican nomination for a second term and questioned Kerry's support for combat troops in Iraq.

"Well, here is my answer to them," Kerry said to cheers. "I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and who misled America into Iraq."

Whole account here.

To be sure, Kerry's got a lot of ammunition if he wants to attack the Bush administration's head honchos regarding duty in Vietnam: Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and others went out of their way to avoid the shooting there.

But to the extent he does that, he's literally fighting the last war (actually, a couple of wars ago). Worse still, he's kickstarting more discussion of his anti-war activism, which is the real motivator of the Swift Boats Veterans for Truth and a topic that's yet to be aired fully--and when it is, it ain't going to be flattering to a guy who wants to be commander-in-chief. Kerry has presented an extraordinarily confusing picture of a warrior-president: a war hero who made his entry into public life by challenging the war that made him a hero. Forget the legitimacy or illegitimacy of any of the charges about his medals, etc--at its core, his identity on this score is fundamentally ambiguous.

As important, when he turns his attention to Iraq, he's got a program that's completely muddled: What's the first thing he'll do if he's elected? Will he send more troops or less? Under U.N. control or U.S.? (This isn't to say Bush's next step is any clearer--but such is the privilege of incumbency that he can talk about staying the course, or even removing troops, without eliciting the same response.)

From a pure p.r. strategy POV, Kerry's midnight madness rally was a stroke of stupidity. If he wanted to go to show his brass balls, he should have held the conference at 12 noon yesterday, pointedly breaking with the traditional silence of candidates during their counterparts' conventions to answer the "unprecedented" attacks on his character, etc. That would have made the evening news before Bush spoke and might have put a little spine in the flip-flopper image that the GOP tattooed into the brains of all 10 Americans who actually watched the TV coverage of the RNC. Certainly Kerry had a free pass to do so after Zell Miller's spiel.

Instead, Kerry, who is increasingly looking like the Bad-luck Schleprock of presidential contenders, got pushed off the morning news shows today by the Russian school hostage crisis and a weakened Hurricane Frances. And with the U.S. Open heating up, it might be another week before he makes it back into the papers.

Reuters account here.

Background on the larger, and long-lived conflict here. This one's not ending any time soon.

Cathy Young has a hard time taking Stephen E. Rhoads' Taking Sex Differences Seriously seriously.

Ron Bailey finds out Howard Jones was right: No-one is to blame.

Dennis Hastert has responded to the charge that he smeared George Soros by suggesting he was on the take from drug cartels. From his letter to Soros:

...you have funded organizations such as The Drug Policy Foundation, The Open Society, The Lendesmith [sic] Center, the Andean Council of Coca Leaf Producers, and several ballot initiatives across the country to decriminalize illegal drug use. Promoting drug use, in my view, will lead to more lives lost and more tragedy for our children. I think this approach is simply wrong.

These were the drug groups that I referred to in my comments on the Fox News Sunday program. Chris Wallace said, "drug cartels." I did not.

Let's review the transcript:

WALLACE: You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?

HASTERT: I'm saying I don't know where groups--could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know. The fact is we don't know where this money comes from.

It is indeed Wallace who introduced the phrase "drug cartel." But Hastert does not reply, "No, that's not what I meant." He says "we don't know."

That's not the only thing that's disingenuous about Hastert's letter. As Jack Shafer notes in Slate, the "drug groups" Hastert cites "are beneficiaries of Soros wealth: He's given them money. In the program transcript, Hastert is clearly asking about the source of Soros' money for his political and social campaigns, and then he asks the leading question, is it from 'overseas or from drug groups'?"

Shafer adds that the Speaker isn't the first person to accuse Soros of being a narcotics kingpin. Apparently, the charge has been drifting around LaRoucheville for years.

[Thanks to reader Adam Scavone for the tip.]

Libya, of all places, has been in the throes of celebrity fan culture. A young singer named Ayman al-Aathar has won this year's Superstar competition, a variation on American multi-week talent contests that in its two years has become a major TV event in the Arab world.

The BBC reports that during the contest, posters of the singer were displayed throughout the capital. When al-Aathar and his last remaining competitor, a Palestinian singer, visited Libya to promote the final program, they were met at the airport by crowds of excited fans. Yet more swarms of fans surrounded the hotel where they stayed, and al-Aathar was met by autograph seekers wherever he went.

Even Gaddafi greeted the two singers, though he was concerned "that such events were distracting people from the on-going conflicts in Iraq and the Palestinian territories." The BBC notes that "This is the first time that Libyans have expressed a keen interest in an area that deviates from the norms of the country's traditional and conservative lifestyle."

The Palestinian finalist, Ammar Hassan, also faced political objections to his popularity. "Some militants," reported the Beeb, "have frowned on what they see as frivolous activity and the singer had been criticized at the local mosque. But his father said: 'To each his own. Some fight for Palestine. My son sings for Palestine.'" Much of the Arab world's high culture has been subject to restriction within politically acceptable limits on the theory that nothing should be allowed to distract people from the Arabist agenda. It's noteworthy that in the Arab world, as elsewhere, it is low, "vulgar" culture that is out of political control.

Superstar is a Lebanese program that starts with a large number of contestants, and relies on audience reaction to determine whether singers stay or go. It is one of the most popular entertainment shows on Arabic-language TV; 3.2 million votes were reportedly cast in the show's final week. Many votes are cast at Internet cafes, and apparently Libyan café operators required their customers to vote for al-Aathar. On the other hand, a Palestinian computer whiz created a program that allowed Ammar Hassan's fans to cast multiple votes for his cause.

Last year's Superstar competition erupted in a studio riot when Lebanese favorite Melhem Zein was eliminated amid accusations of conspiracy. (Zein is currently enjoying a big hit with a strange, dreamy video that features sequences suggesting bondage.) Some of the social implications of the exploding Arab pop video scene are considered here.

This defies satire.

[Via Liberty & Power.]

Lynne Stewart, the lefty lawyer at the center of this story from our June issue, is doing her bestest to lose her case in the court of public opinion. Stewart is currently out on bail, awaiting trial "for allegedly helping a convicted terrorist leader direct jihad operations from inside a federal prison."

Here's a snippet from an interview with her in the hyper-lefty Monthly Review:

I’m such a strange amalgam of old-line things and new-line things. I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution. The CIA pays a thousand people and cuts them loose, and they will undermine any revolution in the name of freedom of speech.

On the other hand, I do believe in a free marketplace of ideas. I have a big problem with government repressing that kind of exchange...

Whole thing here, via The Machinery of Night via Volokh Conspiracy.

From the Washington Times:

Terrorism convictions in Detroit cited last year by Attorney General John Ashcroft as proof that the government's war on terrorism was working should be dismissed, according to the Justice Department, which now says prosecutors erred in bringing the nation's first post-September 11 case....

In a 60-page memo, the Justice Department said this week that the prosecution was filled with a "pattern of mistakes and oversights" that warranted dismissal of the convictions. An internal Justice probe found evidence prosecutors failed to turn over before trial.

"In its best light, the record would show the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence ... and created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist," the Justice memo said.

The case involved an alleged "sleeper cell" of Moroccan terrorists living in the United States. Whole thing here.

Finally, the national security question of the age sees the light of day.

Nuclear proliferation, primarily Iran's pursuit of nukes and Israel's reaction to that but also what happens in Pakistan, is pretty much the whole strategic ballgame at this point.

BTW, there's a typo in the grafs on the Mujahedeen Khalq. It should read pressure on Iran, not Iraq.

Tariq Ramadan, the controversal Swiss scholar whose visa to teach at Notre Dame was revoked recently, states his case in the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. Read 'em and see what you think.

Call me cynical, but I've always thought the Kobe Bryant case turned on a few poorly understood realities. The first is timing.

A warrant for Bryant's arrest is issued over the Fourth of July holiday, a classic dead-zone where the legal folk are "out-of-pocket." Recall the murmurs of discontent that the Eagle County sheriff did this without first consulting with the prosecutor's office.

I maintain that had a prosecutor been in the loop early on, they would've covertly triggered the standard civil-settlement, hush-hush payoff deal that is routine, yet top-secret, when johnsons of the rich and famous get a little too frisky.

Instead, once Kobe was arrested Eagle County District Attorney Mark Hurlbert really had no choice but to charge Kobe with rape. Elected sheriffs in rural place like Eagle County can have enormous influence on a community. That is another basic reality that is often overlooked. Hurlbert would've had to be completely comfortable with telling the world his local sheriff was, in effect, a rube to decline to bring charges after Kobe's arrest.

Accordingly, even if Hurlbert found the case less than air-tight and his complaining witness bed-bug crazy, he had little choice but to slog ahead. Until now, when his witness has reportedly bailed on him.

Back to you sheriff.