Is George Bush the worst President ever, or merely a run-of-the-mill bad President? I'm in the former camp...it's hard to put anything in the "plus column" with Shrub. His popularity is at historic lows, and that's without any of the normal factors, such as high unemployment, runaway inflation and/or a prolonged string of criminal indictments, that normally cause that particular phenomenum.

His competition for that title centers on the men who held the office before the Civil War, most notably James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, but also including pretty much everyone who held the office, besides Lincoln, between Andrew Jackson and Chester Arthur. Pierce and Buchanan(who, incidentally, may have been the best-qualified man ever to hold the position) were Northern Democrats who pretty much fronted for the slavocracy, and did nothing to stop the South's drift towards intransigence on the slavery issue. Buchanan, in particular, endorsed the Dred Scott decision, tried to admit Kansas into the Union as a slave state, and attempted to run Stephen Douglas out of the party for his apostacy on that issue. Although, truth be told, the final outcome of the Civil War led to some very good results, it was a damn close thing that the country wasn't forever destroyed by his incompetence.

However, Pierce and Buchanan were leading a country that was, at the time, a militarily insignificant backwater. The position they held was not as powerful as it would become, and their ineptitude only affected a few million people. The whole notion of a national economy, that a decision made in Washington could impact farm prices in Minnesota, was still a generation away. Congress was still the dominant branch of government (the opposition party, the Whigs, even believed that a President could not veto an act of Congress unless he found it to be unconstitutional), so much of the blame for what resulted in the 1860's has to lie there. The notion that we could maintain a large peacetime army was one that most of the country, abolitionist and slaveholder alike, would have blanched at in the 1850's, and a national law enforcement entity, something that could have been used to arrest and prosecute seccessionist traitors, was not on the table.

Bush, on the other hand, is not merely the President; he's the World's Most Powerful Man. His decisions affect billions of people, in the most remote areas of the planet. Today, the Presidency is the supreme branch, and where, as here, the same party controls both branches, it is the Congress that is the rubber stamp. He inherited a strong economy, low unemployment, a budget surplus, and a nation that was at peace with other nations. And unlike his two immediate predecessors, he was given an opportunity that gave him almost universal backing from his own people less that eight months into his Presidency, as well as support from nations, both friendly and hostile.

It is safe to say that six years into this Administration, Bush has thrown all of that away. It's not just the fact that so much of what he touches has turned to shit in front of our eyes, it's that much of what he's done badly isn't even on the radar screen yet, so no one's paying attention, at least until the day another Katrina hits, and we have to stare dumbly at our TV sets and mutter, who are these morons? Will it be the economy tanking in 2007, because of high credit card debt, or the collapse of the Housing Bubble? Or will it be the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Maybe the foreign countries that have been financing our deficits will decide there are better investments elsewhere? With this President, most likely it will be all that, and much more besides....

What with the NCAA Tournament underway, I'm not going to be spending much time here the next few days, but my two cents on the Feingold Resolution is that it is appropriate, certainly more so than the whiny calls for impeachment, where a President has knowingly violated the law, as is the case here. Far from acting rashly, the junior Senator from Wisconsin's announcement over the weekend was long overdue. It is not simply a matter of acting like an "opposition party" for Democrats, it's defending the rule of law, a prerogative that should be of equal concern to Republican Senators who are perhaps tired of being rubber stamps for an Administration that has compiled some of the worst public approval ratings since the Carter Presidency.

And frankly, I don't give a rat's ass if this hurts the Democratic Party this November. Contrary to the opium fantasies at other websites, the Party is not going to win back control of the Senate this year. There, I've said it. The House, maybe, particularly if the President's numbers don't improve, but the Senate, nope. It's not going to happen. We're not going to net six seats, and we're not going to impeach the President's sorry ass.

That's why I'm bored with the argument that we need to rally behind the Party, as if the Democratic Party was some holy vessel, inviolate and pure, in which we can invest our hopes. It isn't; it's a loose confederation of hacks and interest groups, and means different things in different areas of the country. If the Democrats controlled the Senate, I wouldn't have a second's hesitation to assert that Roberts and Alito would still be on the Supreme Court, and we still would be fighting a losing war in Iraq. And the President would still be running roughshod over the Constititution.

So don't ask me to lift a finger to support Bob Casey. Or pretend that having Mary Landrieu chair some committee is going to matter a whit, as opposed to Pat Roberts. Liberals need to look at the problems of the day and come up with solutions, not obsess with the irrelevant intricacies of partisan politics during an era in which we are in the minority. Hopefully, the Feingold Resolution will allow us to see that the road back to power is a long one, so we can act accordingly.

Dennis the Peasant: Verrrrry conservative, funny as hell, and perhaps the baddest ass in Blogolia. First encountered the guy back when I was still allowed to comment on the pre-PJM Roger Simon blog, and was invariably torn a new one before I went fetal. Not for the faint of heart.... [link via MaxSpeak]

I feel just like Jesus' son....

Those who are both college hoops fans and love reading something that will make you run gagging and screaming from your monitor by check out this.

The Onion has the last word on the most-overhyped sports story of the week, here.

Any outrage I was supposed to have felt for the "revelation" that a baseball superstar has been on the juice for the past six years was quelched when the writers (and S.I.) apparently thought it newsworthy to publish the hearsay testimony of one of Bonds' former skanks that he only married the current Mrs. because she was black. It was a story of dubious relevance, at best, to the issue of whether Bonds had taken steroids and lied about it to a grand jury, even if Bonds had called a press conference and announced it to the public. The fact that it was an otherwise unsupported allegation made by an embittered and biased witness, the publication of which having the clear effect of hurting people (Bonds' wife and children) who are not public figures, is a truly scummy act by the book's writers and Sports Illustrated.

Profumo Dies: Until I read of his passing, I had no idea he was still alive.

I don't often write about high school sports, but tonight's Southern Cal hoops semifinal between No. 1-ranked Compton Centennial and No. 2-ranked Harvard-Westlake* is worth noting. In recent years, the two schools have developed one of the nation's most intense rivalries in high school basketball, more so because of how diametrically opposite they are. One is a predominantly African-American public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the region, the other, a prep school known nationally as a feeder for the Ivy League. While H-W is known as much for its role in educating the progeny of power lawyers, movie execs and bankers, Centennial is part of a school system that was taken over by the state awhile back for poor test scores and misappropriation of funds. It's Duke-North Carolina taken to the nth degree.

And yet, for some reason, the two schools have now played in four of the past five CIF title games, with H-W winning three of them, as well as several epic battles in the state tournament. Although H-W has won most often, the Apaches have the recent edge, knocking H-W out of the state tournament two years ago on the road, and winning the CIF title last Saturday. As always, it was a thriller: H-W coming from way back to take a two point lead with four seconds to play, only to have senior guard Tyre Thompson go from end-to-end on an Edneyesque run and hit a desperation trey at the buzzer to win the championship. This time, it's the Wolverines turn to travel to Centennial, with the winner advancing to the state semifinals next week.

UPDATE [3/10]: H-W won, 60-58 [O.T.]. Tar Heel-bound senior Alex Stepheson led the way with 26 points and 22 rebounds, to go with 10 blocked shots. The Wolverines play Artesia tomorrow for the So-Cal title.

*In the interest of full disclosure, my alma mater

A good exegesis as to why Crash won and Brokeback lost, here. The two biggest reasons, I think, come down to the fact that the winner had a much better pre-Oscar campaign (a DVD in every pot, as it were), and that it took place in Los Angeles, and was thus easier for the working members of the Academy to relate. For all the sanctimonious twaddle and hype during the ceremony about what a precious and unduplicable experience seeing a movie "before a crowd of strangers" on "the big screen" is supposed to be, in reality, the race came down to the fact that the winner had been released on DVD months earlier, and its studio took full advantage to make sure that every possible person with a vote would have a copy long before screeners for the other candidates went out.

The other reason, dealing with the locale of the movie, is perhaps counterintuitive, when one realizes that in the first 76 years of Oscar, not a single film set in the City of Angels had ever won the top honor, and only a handful of films had so much as a scene set here. Now that we've had back-to-back winners, it's useful to see what it is the two last two films (Crash and Million Dollar Baby) had in common: they are both films that inhabit the real city, not some glamorous or mythical stand-in for same. Classic films that came close in the past were either period pieces (Chinatown, L.A. Confidential) or were films about Hollywood (most notably, Sunset Blvd. and Singing in the Rain); obviously, such films, while admirable on an aesthetic level, have nothing to do with the ups and downs of normal, everyday life here. Most of the Academy membership are not, by any stretch of the imagination, stars; they may have made a good living off of films, but they still have to inhabit the same universe everyone else does. People who are "stars" can afford the luxury of owning homes on each coast, while dissing the city as fake and superficial; the rest of us just have to make do, and perform the same mundane tasks as everyone else, like go to the supermarket, drive their kids to school, etc.

For the most part, Academy members do those things in Los Angeles, so any film that broaches the topic of what Los Angeles is, as a community, has an appeal. Since most of what "L.A." symbolizes to the rest of the planet is based on what non-Angelenos think, there becomes a dichotomy between the real city and "Hollywood", and it becomes a very rare thing indeed to see that "real city" on the big screen. Not having seen Crash, I can't say for certain whether that film succeeded in doing so, but I can see why it might have appealed to a member of the Academy who isn't making $50 million a picture (the fact that it was shot in the city, at a time of runaway production, no doubt also played a factor). For good or ill, provincialism is universal.

A correction from last week: I have seen an Oscar-nominated film. Two, to be exact: Revenge of the Sith is up for Best Make-up, and Batman Begins is nominated for Best Cinematography.

I can safely say that I would not be watching tonight's Oscar ceremony were it not for a familial tradition. For years, my parents attended an Oscar-night party hosted by a family friend, and my late father, who like his son is not a movie fan, had the job of tabulating the results of the Oscar pool. When he passed away, I inherited the task, to my increasing discomfort, as I have come to see fewer and fewer films as the years pass. The two hours or so between major awards now leads to some big-time squirming, so I pass the time napping or catching up on my reading.

If this Patrick Goldstein article in this morning's L.A. Times is any indication, I'm not the only person greeting this year's ceremony with a yawn. Situating the Oscars in the context of other big events that have experienced significant drop-offs in TV ratings, Goldstein argues that there is less interest now in events that "capture the communal pop culture spirit". I would argue that we've entered an era in which movies are just not that important anymore, either as entertainment vehicles or as works of art, and just as film replaced vaudeville in the '20's, and TV obliterated radio drama in the early-50's, we now live in an age in which the time and expense necessary to leave home and see a movie on a large screen isn't worth it to a lot of people anymore.

Something similar is happening to the music industry right now: why buy an album when you can tailor-pick your musical selection over the internet, at much less cost, and without much of the annoying filler. Last month's simultaneous release of a Steven Soderburgh film (an Oscar-winning director, no less) on DVD and cable television indicates that someone gets it; the old methods of delivering the product from studio to consumers isn't necessary anymore, and people are more likely going to choose the method that is cheapest, most convenient, and gives them more control over when and how they see it. People will still choose the cinema to see comedies and slasher pics, since the communal experience in seeing a film with a group of strangers is most enhanced, as well as films that emphasize the visual spectacle (such as any Star Wars or Harry Potter film), but everything else is going straight to video. And that includes the five Best Film nominees, none of which would probably have seemed out-of-place (or, for that matter, particularly distinguished) had they aired on HBO first.

Speaking of "straight-to-video", my one rooting interest tonight will be in one of the early categories, Best Supporting Actress. Anyone who has ever channel-surfed in the middle of the night has probably seen the classic "sequel" to the Ryan Phillippe-Reese Witherspoon vehicle, Cruel Intentions (actually, a prequel). Originally shot as a TV-pilot called "Manchester Prep", with the same director as the original, the show was dropped from the Fox TV schedule in 1999 a month before it was to air, after Murdoch's minions saw the finished product and realized that it was trashy even by their own low standards. Quickly reedited, Cruel Intentions II subsequently became a late-night staple on cable; the Shower Scene alone is worth the two hour investment, though it adds absolutely zero to the plot. Inheriting the role played by Sarah Michelle Geller, Amy Adams is a true trash goddess in CI II, savoring each line with an Alexis Carrington-in-prep-school fury.

So for overcoming such auspicious beginnings, I salute you, Ms. Adams. Take home the Oscar, and make us all proud !!

Katrina: Bush lied.

UPDATE [3/2]: In what may be one of the more lamer attempts at defending Bush, Mickey Kaus writes:

A good deal of the gleeful Froomkinian outrage in the press and Democratic party over that pre-Katrina video seems to be based on what is at best is a semantic misunderstanding. After Katrina, Bush said "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." In the video, Patterico points out, Bush is warned by hurricane expert Max Mayfield that there's a chance the "levees will be topped." Topping is different than breaching, no? When a levee's "topped," or "overtopped," some water sloshes over it and into the city. Then the storm passes and that's it. When a levee's "breached," there's a hole in the levee and Lake Pontchartrain pours in the gap and keeps pouring in until the city is completely flooded. What Bush said after the storm seems quite consistent with what Mayfield told him before the storm--i.e., he thought the levees might be topped by the storm surge but not that they'd be breached, with the catastrophe that resulted.

Yeah, that's the ticket...all Bush was warned of was that "some water" might drip over the levees and down into the Big Easy as a result of Katrina, not that there would be mass flooding as a result...such a trivial thing, too; I wonder why Mr. Mayfield even broached the subject. And technically, Clinton didn't have "sexual relations" with Ms. Lewinsky either.

Jeez, that doesn't even survive the giggle test. In fact, "topping" and "breaching" are the same thing, in this context. Both constitute a failure in the levee system to prevent water from flooding the city of New Orleans, and with Katrina predicted to be a Cat-5 hurricane when the President was briefed, the predicted result was going to be the same: a calamitous and overwhelming ocean of water entering the city, ruining everything in its path. It didn't matter if the water was coming over the levee or through it. Bush knew that this was possible, was warned about it before it took place, then denied he had been told anything of the sort several days later. This isn't even lame spin; it's insulting.

A fine wrap-up on Marshall v. Marshall, by Dahlia Lithwick:

It seems cruel to report that Anna Nicole then stood and exited the courtroom, leaving the building by a side door and again granting no interviews. I would love to tell you that she did something, anything, to distinguish herself from the thousands of appellants who have brought their cases into these marble walls. But the court has worked its magical spell of blandness, even upon Anna, and she is just another litigant with a probate dispute today. She has stepped into the only place in America where her breasts have no power.

Well, Clarence Thomas aside....

As if we needed more evidence that the Housing Bubble has burst, comes word that last month, home sales reached a ten-year low in Massachusetts, the state that saw the most sustained increase in home values over the past twenty-five years. I thought we caught a real break last year when the Bubble sustained itself through the expiration of the old bankruptcy law; the unsupportable increase in home prices over the last decade has been one of the things that helped limit the number of credit defaults, since people who sustained a medical emergency or job loss could always borrow money off the equity in their home as a last resort. Now that home values have peaked, and monthly credit card payments are soon to double, it may get very ugly again in the bankruptcy courts....

In re Vickie Lynn Marshall: Not much of substance to add about this case (for that, go here and here), except that the trial in her matter took place in the same bankruptcy court that I used to hang out at, in Downtown L.A. (most of my work is now done at the Woodland Hills branch). On occasion, I would drop by the packed courtroom (1575, on the 15th Floor, is where Judge Samuel Bufford holds court) and sneak a peek of the fat model listening to the proceedings during her trial. That she was initially awarded such a huge amount of money, in spite of the earlier decision by the Texas probate court, was no surprise, considering the strong pro-debtor leanings of Judge Bufford, whose obsession with the correct pagination and tabbing of motions and briefs has made appearances before him such a deeply pleasurable experience for all local counsel. And now Anna Nicole, like Dred Scott, Curt Flood and whoever "Wade" was before her, will live on in American history, to be studied and scrutunized by law students into the next millenia.

Political Relativism: Blogger Jane Hamsher writes:

While it's open to debate how much influence NARAL's decision not to support anti-choice Langevin in the Rhode Island race had on his decision to drop out, it was perceived as significant. Their endorsement may not mean a lot in Alabama, but it means a lot in solidly pro-choice New England states. Further, their decision to continue to support Lincoln Chafee and Joe Lieberman even after their disastrous vote on Samuel Alito is a signal to other Senators that is okay to vote like this in the future and keep your official pro-choice credentials in the process. NARAL and Planned Parenthood are rubber stamping these votes. How exactly do they plan on coming out and fighting the next Supreme Court Alito-lite nomination if they don't start yanking chains now?

Whenever major media outlets need an official quote from the pro-choice movement, they call NARAL and Planned Parenthood. If they are not speaking up against this bullshit, nobody is.

The problem is that in doing nothing they are actively hurting their own ability to do the good work that Planned Parenthood consistently does. If the South Dakota Rapist Rights bill goes through, it won't matter how many brave souls are willing to staff an abortion clinic, they won't be able to do so. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is no more important task right now before the pro-choice movement than changing the balance of power in the US Senate and breaking up the Gang of 14....

I can think of nothing that will have less importance to the "pro choice movement" in the U.S. than electing a Democratic majority this November. However unlikely, at the moment, the prospect of taking seven GOP-held seats may seem, the prospect of taking over the Senate will be of almost no signifcance in preserving abortion rights, or protecting the privacy rights of women. That fight is now in the hands of the judiciary.

And if party stalwarts such as Daniel Akaka, Herb Kohl, and Maria Cantwell were not motivated to use the filibuster when the party was in the minority, and it was one of the only weapons in their arsenal to fight back against the far right, why should anyone believe they'll put up much of a fight when they gain the majority? And if the blogosphere doesn't care enough to send them a message, instead focusing all its wrath on the hapless Mr. Lieberman, why should other Democrats stick their necks out on principle either?

Based on recent history, the party's track record is not promising. One doesn't even have to look to the last four years, and examples such as the 2005 Bankruptcy bill or the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, to realize what a worthless vehicle the party is in effecting worthwhile change, since there are numerous examples of what it did when it actually had a majority. In the five and a half years since 1990 when the Senate was controlled by the Democratic Party, it:

1) confirmed Clarence Thomas;
2) prevented President Clinton from ending anti-gay discrimination in the military;
3) failed to pass bills mandating access to health care (Hillary's plan, or any plan), public financing of elections, K-Street reforms, term limits, or efforts to curb gerrymandering;
4) passed the Patriot Act;
5) supported the resolution to go to war with Iraq, and generally supported the President's policies (before they opposed them);
6) created the Homeland Security Department; and, last but not least,
7) confirmed Michael "Heckuvajobbrownie" Brown to run FEMA.

That's quite a track record for a political party that's ostensibly supposed to be defending the great liberal tradition in this country. So pardon me if I don't get too exorcised about whether NARAL endorses Joe Lieberman or Lincoln Chafee, or use my small corner of the internets to whore for Democrats this election. Making the Democratic Party something worth fighting for can't be done by scapegoating a single Senator, not when almost half the party sucks from the same sleazy teat.

Le Menu Cunningham: I suppose when there's no one guarding the henhouse, it shouldn't be surprising that one Republican Congressman would not only sell his office, but would actually set out, in writing, a "menu" for what services he could provide in exchange for what level of bribe. This sort of corruption is never bipartisan, since the minority party can't offer government contracts, or any of the big ticket items that exist in this scandal. Yet it's a "Republican" scandal only because they currently hold the reigns of power; there is nothing in the modern ideology of liberalism that would make its believers any more pristine than conservatives. Moreover, this is a problem that can't be fixed by any of the normal palliatives, such as the public financing of elections, since the money doesn't go to campaign spending. Greed is greed.

Overshadowed by the election of the first woman to baseball's Hall of Fame is the welcome news that Minnie Minoso may also be pegged for the Hall. Among the players chosen today for their contributions in the Negro Leagues, Minoso had the prior misfortune (as far as his HOF candidacy was concerned) of having straddled the gap, putting up splendid numbers before and after the integration of the Major Leagues, but not having the career numbers in either to be an obvious selection. Today, that can be remedied.

UPDATE [2/28]: Not remedied, after all. Minoso, along with Buck O'Neil, were among those passed over by the Hall.

Texas Q.B. Not Borderline Retarded: Deadspin sets a rumor straight...dog bites man !!

Matt Welch, et al., opine on the five nominated films for next week's Oscars. I haven't seen any of them, including the flic Welch rips, Crash; moreover, I haven't seen any of the films featuring the twenty nominated actors or ten nominated scripts. Besides being a dying medium akin to radio drama in the early-1950's, lying supine at the feet of high-def TV, it's also a rip-off to pay twenty bucks for the overrated "communal experience" that even movie connoisseurs don't seem to care about anymore. I'll go see a comedy, or anything that would look good in IMAX, but for everything else, I can wait for it on cable.

If I really want to see it, I'll get the DVD, which now only comes out a few months after the original release. Inevitably, technology will make it easier to download movies, either on to my computer or DVR, without having to wait even that small amount of time. Actually going to a movie theatre will soon be akin to visiting a museum, an activity based more on social class than a need to be artistically enthralled and captivated.

Proponents of school vouchers should take a look at these private institutions, where the only subject on the curriculum is...basketball. As reported in today's New York Times:

The Times found several schools with curious student populations.

¶Genesis One Christian Academy in Mendenhall, Miss.: Two years ago, this kindergarten-to-Grade 8 school added a high school and a Grade 13, for basketball players who did not graduate to raise their grade-point averages. At least 33 of about 40 students at the unaccredited high school play basketball, and its stars have signed letters of intent to attend Oklahoma State, Arkansas and Alabama.

¶Boys to Men Academy in Chicago: The student body consists of 16 basketball players, who can earn credit for the equivalent of eight high school core courses in a year by studying online through an accredited correspondence school.

¶Rise Academy in Philadelphia: Opened last fall, it outsources lessons to others, including Lutheran Christian and two online high schools.

¶God's Academy in Irving, Tex.: A summer basketball coach started with three students in August. Now 40 students in Grades 6 to 12, all basketball players, meet with two full-time teachers four days a week at a recreation center. The curriculum is provided and graded by an education center 25 miles away. Its star player, Jeremy Mayfield, signed with Oklahoma.

Some of these institutions recently joined other private schools to form the National Elite Athletic Association. With more than two dozen teams from Los Angeles to Toronto, this conference is seeking a shoe contract and a television deal. Its teams sometimes travel thousands of miles to play in tournaments that often attract more college coaches than fans. Those coaches will pay $100 for booklets of information about the players.

What's a Wilf? A comprehensive list of who athletes donate to in political campaigns, here. As you might expect, people in the World o' Sports tend to contribute disproportionately to the right end of the political spectrum, but there are some exceptions, more so one than one would find in examining the leanings of entertainment figures. Those exceptions can be found in three categories: African-Americans (duh), basketball coaches (bravo to the Zen Master, Pat Riley, Dean Smith and Gregg Popovich, et al.), and team owners/executives (incl. the aforementioned Minnesota Vikings owner, Zygy Wilf).

Some surprises: Muhammed Ali leans Republican; Arnold Palmer, who used to be a golf buddy of Ike's, has been a generous backer of Jack Murtha; and tennis stars tend to be as Democratic a voting bloc as NBA players. No surprise: golf pros are more Republican than the Christian right. [link via Roger Ailes]

Earlier this week I mentioned my endorsement of another blogger for something called the Koufax Awards, which is sort of a lefty popularity contest. It seems one can't write about the contest without mentioning the financial woes of the blog that's hosting the awards, and asking that a "contribution" be sent their way, which I won't do here (on the other hand, if you like their blog, then by all means give 'til it hurts; it's a pretty good site). Banging a tin cup is a particularly tacky thing when it's being done for your own website (one blogger in particular seems to have a fundraising drive every six weeks), but sometimes necessary if you're too lazy to get a real job.

However, doing it for a blog that's providing a potential award or benefit to you isn't just tacky; it's ethically sleazy, calling into question the entire credibility of the award. It's at the same level as the "service" Mitchell Wade or Jack Abramoff provided members of Congress: Duke Cunningham has been a mensch in the field of defense contracts, he works his ass off rewarding his friends, so why shouldn't he get a taste of the Good Life, especially since our business will benefit too. Of course, there's no law against bribing bloggers, or against encouraging payments to support a website that's giving you an award. But the appearance is just as shady.

Suspended for rudeness? This is the type of thing I would expect to see Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chavez try to get away with, not something done by a legitimate "democracy". And what kind of self-respecting journalist chooses to be a complainant in this type of action?

Apparently, Crony Capitalism is a bipartisan affair. Any doubts that a Democratic majority in the Senate would be just as spineless and compliant as the status quo should be alleviated by its rolling over and confirming this clown to sit on the Federal Reserve Board. Just a reminder: it was a Democrat-controlled Senate that unanimously confirmed Michael "Heckuvajob" Brown to head FEMA...and lets not forget the Bankruptcy bill from last year. An effective opposition party has to stand for something other than the fact that it considers the President to be pure evil.

Collapse? Mickey Kaus has been, shall we say, obsessed with the box office appeal of Brokeback Mountain since the film was first released in mid-December, and he seems cheered by its apparent decline over the past few weeks. One problem: it's "decline" is not only less than that of the other four Oscar nominees (see here, here, here, and here*), it's also doing double the business of the two blockbuster pics that were released concurrently, King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia, even though both films are screening on (roughly) the same number of theatres. Moreover, its box office to date is higher than last year's Best Film winner, Million Dollar Baby, which didn't contain a gay sex scene to offend the flyovers. Even more surprisingly, its per screen average for this time in February is higher than the average for Return of the King two years ago. What with the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and Hollywood's penchant for releasing its dregs at the start of the year, I don't see any evidence of a "collapse".

*Crash is no longer screening at theatres.

My Koufax Award pick, Digby, on the "Vichy Democrat" issue:

The Democratic party did everything it could to alleviate the culture war and the partisanship in the 90's by electing southern moderates to the White House and helping the Republicans pass a lot of legislation born of major compromise of Democratic principles. Nothing was good enough. The culture war raged, not on the basis of policy --- there was much in Bill Clinton's policies for a Republican to love. It was based purely on the tribal instincts of the culture warriors who insisted that liberals not only be marginalized (fair enough in politics) but that they be annihilated. They gave no quarter unless public opinion absolutely forced them to.

The grassroots believe that after all that, after moving to the right, after offering to compromise, after allowing our "red state Democrats" to run with the other side who then treated them with nothing but bad faith, now is the time for politicans to make a choice. Submit to them or stand with the resistence.

More to the point, since 1994 "moderates" and "New Democrats" don't have a good track record winning downticket races in Red States. I'll be damned if I'm going to compromise what I believe in to support Lieberman or Cantwell or Akaka or Casey or anyone of those other weasels when they seek high office in a Blue State. We have too many other good candidates to choose from without having to pick an appeasor.

Paging Sarah Silverman: This is wrong, on so many levels....

It seems that the Winter Olympics isn't quite as bad as a GOP convention, here.

Obviously, it should not be that surprising that there are only a handful of black athletes participating in the Winter Olympics, and that the reason has almost nothing to do with racism, at least as that word is typically defined. The sports being spotlighted in Turin are, for the most part, activities that originated in Scandanavia, Finland, and the Alps; had Austria or Norway possessed colonial empires in Africa, rather than Britain or France, we would be seeing more than our fair share of Nigerian speedskaters* and Kenyan cross-country skiiers in these Olympics. Sports, like other cultural activities, generally reflect the socio-political environment, and since the period in world history that first featured the growth of global empires was also the period in which athletic competition was first being developed (the mid-Nineteenth Century), African nations play soccer, not ice hockey.

How dominant a role colonialism plays can be seen where you look at those few countries in which soccer is not the predominant national sport. Those nations can be put into two camps: countries that were part of the British empire, that picked up another pastime of that country, such as rugby (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) or cricket (India, Pakistan and the islands of the Caribbean), or countries that were part of the American sphere of influence, which favored baseball. Almost without exception, every country in which baseball is the most popular sport was occupied, at one time or another, by the U.S. military: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Japan, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, the Phillipines, etc. America was locked out of having an African empire, and South and Central America were part of European empires that predated the existence of the U.S., so our sports (which were themselved descendents of British sports) have had to play catch-up elsewhere, while soccer, rugby and cricket, so popular everywhere else, are, at best, marginal pastimes here. And just as the West used the Third World as little more than trading outposts where we could plunder their natural resources for the benefit of our economy, so too are the athletes of Africa and Central America used today as little more than raw material for soccer and baseball teams in the Home Countries.

In fact, as the world's only superpower, the sport Americans have had the most success exporting in recent years isn't baseball or our own version of football, it's basketball. Like soccer (and unlike baseball or football), basketball is inexpensive, can be practiced individually, and is easy to follow. For the most part, the rules of both sports can be written onto the back of an envelope. Even the physical skills required in both sports are the same: both feature almost constant running by the participants, and movement by players without the ball is of paramount strategic importance. With the exception of Lithuania, the top countries in basketball are also soccer powers, including the Gold and Silver medalists from Athens, Argentina and Italy (as well as, I should point out, the U.S.).

Hence, the games of the Winter Olympiad are largely a Eurasian phenemonum. The leading countries in most of the sports are those in which the activity (skiing, skating, etc.) is tied into the culture, where the athletes take up the sport at an early age, and where, unlike the U.S., there is no class barrier connected to the activity (such as skiing). Historically, those countries do not have a significant immigrant population from Africa, so the competitors are, for the most part, white. And, as I mentioned earlier, these sports originated in countries that did not have colonial empires, so there is no competition from African athletes.

And of course, there isn't a lot of snow in Africa, either.

*A bit of a stretch, but, assuming that a hypothetical Norwegian empire could have existed, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they would have also had the technology and wherewithal to build ice rinks in sub-Saharan Africa.

Apparently pointing out either the 1) lack of black athletes in the Winter Olympics, or 2) the lilly-white nature of the Republican Party, is an example of lib'rul media bias. Whatever....

Open the Fuddgates: Just when I think that Cheneyquiddick might be the type of thing that boomerangs badly on Democrats, particularly those in the blogosphere who seem to be milking this for all its worth (something about how common hunting accidents are, and collective Red State empathy concerning same), along come tidbits like this. The "I had only one beer, officer" excuse is the type of thing that you might say to the CHP after getting pulled over at two in the morning, and it usually doesn't get you off the hook there, either. Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how long it took for the Veep to inform the media; it's the 18-hour stonewalling of the local constables that's the issue, and nothing Cheney can say now is going to remove the stink.

They also ran...No Olympics viewing can be complete without at least a daily visit to this blog, devoted to the last-place finishers in every event.

"...pay tribute to old Harry" A good Molly Ivins piece, on the other man in Elmerfuddgate, and the lessons we can draw about a man who can't shoot straight.

The Virtue of Principles: Digby, again, gets it right:

The president's approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it's pretty clear that it isn't the reporting in the mainstream media or by the "reasonable" Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don't say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush's approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catasprophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush's powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections ---- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

I would add that one of the most potent, albeit frustrating, aspects of the lefty blogosphere is it's tenacity in the area of media criticism. I say frustrating, because it is often a distraction we can ill afford when it comes to focusing our efforts on something that has true, long-term importance; obsessing about the wording of a Washington Post ombudsman's article seems pretty trivial when compared with something like, say, the Alito nomination (whose endorsement by the Senate was clinched the same week).

But the passion, the intensity that goes into leading such airheadish campaigns does have a very important purpose: it changes the terms of the debate, something that is of paramount importance when the electoral numbers are against you. Liberals have been losing elections for decades in America (the only time we win is when there is a national calamity or event that has discredited the party in power, such as the Great Depression or the Dred Scott decision), so crafting a winning message for national elections every 2-4 years can't be a serious priority for those of us on the sidelines. Mau-mauing the media, putting the fear of God into the hearts of opinion-crafters, making pundits believe that if they simply regurgitate Rove's spinpoints, they are going to receive a world of hurtin', now that's a strategy that anyone who is locked out of power can follow without having to compromise principles.

And as I've said before, we don't need to win every election, or even most elections, for our ideas to prevail. I wasn't put on this planet to serve the Democratic Party, and I'd desert it an instant if I ever thought it wasn't anything more than GOP-lite. Our blogosphere gives us that option, an ability to create a politics that doesn't rely on winning elections, where even those of us in the minority can quash the policy prescriptions of the majority party (read, Social Security "reform"). You don't need 50 Senators when the other side is terrified of you could do to them if you don't get what you want.

Digby concludes:

I see that the press does not know what to make of this. And I see that many Joementum Democrats don't get it either. They remain convinced that the country will wake up one day and see that our arguments are superior. They are wrong. This political era will be remembered for its brutal partisanship and sophisticated media manipulation in a 50/50 political environment. Democrats have been at a huge disadvantage because of the Republican message infrastructure and the strange servility of the mainstream press. So, we are pushing back with the one tough, aggressive partisan communication tool we have: the blogosphere.

Amen.

This is called "hunting"? Still, drawing an analogy between the Cheney shooting and Chappaquiddick may be inevitable, but it's not quite apt. EMK, after all, delayed reporting the car accident, and probable death of Ms. Kopechne, to the police, not just the news media, while the Veep apparently informed the Secret Service soon after the accident (there is a dispute, though, as to when the local Sheriff's Department was notified).

Either way, the whole thing does not redound to the benefit of the Vice President....

This is the sort of thing that can only help a lawyer's practice, presuming, of course, that there's no evidence actually connecting Ken Starr to the forged affidavits in question (they were apparently prepared for another lawyer, his co-counsel, by a private dick). Knowingly filing false evidence with a court is a no-no, and will get you disbarred lickety-split, as Bill Clinton can attest, but as long as there are several degrees of separation, ruthlessness is a boon for attorneys specializing in defense practice, as Starr is currently doing. Having a rep of being someone who will do absolutely anything to get a client off the hook is great for business, particularly in the context of a death penalty case, where your adversary is typically a prosecutorial system that may have bent a few rules to put your client in his current predicament.

The worst person in sports, and perhaps in a whole realm of endeavors, is Dick Pound, the autocrat charged with running the World Anti-Doping Agency. Case in point: yesterday's one-year suspension of American medal hopeful in the skeleton, Zach Lund. Mr. Lund was booted out of the Olympics following detection of the anti-baldness medication, Propecia, after a blood test last November. Propecia has an ingredient that can be used to mask steroid use, although it would take an intake of massive proportions for it to have that intended effect.

And Lund, 26, is clearly an individual who has reason to take the drug, a conclusion reflected in the Court for the Arbitration of Sports, which upheld the penalty in spite of issuing a finding Lund to "be an honest athlete, who was open and frank about his failures", and ruling that "it was entirely satisfied that Mr Lund was not a cheat". In fact, Lund had disclosed his use of the drug for some five years before the hammed came down this time, and it took more than a year for the drug screeners to even find the trace amounts of the masking ingredient in his system.

Enter Mr. Pound, whose previous notoriety on this site came last summer, in his role in backing a fraudulent attempt to "test" Lance Armstrong, as well as his frequent attacks on the sports of baseball, soccer, and ice hockey for not dishing out lifetime bans to first-offenders. Pound, exulting over his ability to crush the dreams of an athlete over a technicality, stated that whether or not Lund was a cheat was beside the point:

There have to be other treatments for hair loss, for hair replacement, than stuff that is a masking agent — that are on the prohibited list. I think he was lucky to get one year, frankly. (emphasis mine)

Damned lucky, I'd say; now he won't miss any big competitions in 2007.

In addition to being a clueless asshole, Pound may have done more than anyone to completely discredit his movement for the public to take performance-enhancing drugs in sports seriously. If Lund is not a cheat, if he's taking Propecia to stop male-pattern baldness, without the high blood pressure side effects that other drugs (like Rogaine) have, and not to mask the use of anabolic steroids, which is what the regulation is designed to stop, he shouldn't receive any suspension, much less one that will take him out of a competition he's spent his lifetime gearing for. And he shouldn't have some smug little hitler suggesting that he should have gotten a hair transplant instead.

Reading between the lines of this story, I'd say that the police are looking into The Great One's role in the Tochet Ring, not whether his wife (ie., "actress" Janet Jones) was a degenerate gambler. That is to say, was Gretzky using his spouse to place his action the same way Pete Rose used various sleezeball friends to do the same. If that turns out to be the case, Gretzky's role as Canadian sporting icon and current head coach of an NHL team would take this story out of the curiosity file and into another galaxy altogether.

BTW, it's just a hunch, but what sort of odds do you think we might have a gambling ring, started by and including past members of the Philadelphia Flyers, and not hear the name of John LeClair coming up at some point? Interesting story, that....

LIBRARY TOWER "PLOT" FOILED !!! Or so you might believe if you've been asleep during the last four years. This sounds like more bullshit from the White House, like the use of illegal wiretaps to stop the Brooklyn Bridge "plot". If this is what the Bushies really fear, then they learned nothing from 9/11.

Is there anyone on this planet, with, let us say, an I.Q. over 80, who cares about who wins the Grammy Awards? Can anyone name who won "Best Song" last year? Who won "Best Record" (which, believe it or not, is a different category) two years ago? Is anyone's opinion of Neal Young going to change because he got his gold watch this year, rather than being honored back when he still made music people listened to?

Everyone has fun mocking some of the jokes that were declared the Best New Group (ie., the Milli Vanilli Award), but an even better exercise is to figure out who was sweeping the Grammys the year some seminal band or album broke through. 1956? Wasn't Elvis. 1964? Tain't the Beatles. Never Mind the Bullocks? In Utero? Forget it. But Christopher Cross cleaned up one year....

I suppose the most interesting thing about this story isn't that another celebrity couple has called it splitsville, but that, until recently, Ralph Fiennes was shacking up with a 61-year old woman. [link via Defamer]

Hero of the Day: Bankruptcy Judge Frank Monroe.

We're All Good Germans Now: This is the type of thing that makes me want to surrender my U.S. Passport. It's not that we have a government that would do such things, it's that most of the American public clearly doesn't give a damn. We're going to get blowback from Guantanamo and our other torture camps that would defy the imagination of Noam Chomsky.

UPDATE: A statistical breakdown of who is being held at G-mo, here. [link via TalkLeft]

Within the margin of error? According to the Cook Report, that's the likelihood of the Democrats retaking control of the House in November....

Mickey Kaus points to some interesting focus group data, which seems to suggest that Americans have returned to the historic fallback position of blaming black people for everything, this time concerning the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Kaus puts his annoying Lord Haw-Haw spin on the topic, but his underlying point is true: that no American political party can win at the ballot box if it relies on the compassion of the American public for the downtrodden. Ours is a selfish nation.

The individualism that fuels the American Dream requires some segment of the public to be exploited. Historically, that role has fallen upon African-Americans, although immigrant groups have also filled the role nicely, and it has been a cornerstone of conservative/libertarian political thought that they deserve their exploitation and poverty (nowadays, of course, it is spoken more in terms of code than in any explicit manner). The shocking scenes and wrenching poverty we witnessed from New Orleans last September temporarily jolted the public, but it takes a lot more than levees collapsing to change ingrained habits of many decades; urban slums, redlining, and "benign neglect" didn't go away just because of temporary outrage over Selma or Birmingham.

Poor people don't vote, at least not in numbers large enough to matter, and they don't otherwise impose their political will upon the rest of society. Their interests don't count, their voices are silent, and the liberal Democrats who represent them tend to do so as a matter of public charity, rather than as the type of constituent service most politicians perform. Events like the '92 riots in Los Angeles initially raise questions about what type of people we are to tolerate such poverty, but inevitably shift over time to what savages "those people" are. It's easier, and cheaper on the wallet, to dehumanize others, rather than actually doing something worthwhile on their behalf. It's the American Way, and liberals better understand that if they want to win elections in the Red States.

Eunochrats: The ever-excellent Digby, on the ruling party:

I've watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey eminineces Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.

Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave.

Read the whole thing. Unfortunately, there are 19 or so Democrats in the Senate who belie the notion that spinelessness in the face of power is a partisan affliction.

Free Press Kicks Ass: More Muhammed cartoons, here.

With the Rolling Stones scheduled to perform at halftime Sunday, the New York Times notes an earlier, infamous performance by the band, on the same night as the first Super Bowl:

When the first Super Bowl was played on Jan. 15, 1967, it was called the world championship game and the halftime music was performed by the marching bands from the universities of Michigan and Arizona.

But the Stones were also on TV that day, a few hours later, on "The Ed Sullivan Show." They wanted to sing "Let's Spend the Night Together," but Sullivan insisted they change the lyrics to "Let's Spend Some Time Together."

Jagger consented, reluctantly, but rolled his eyes while he sang. A videotape of the telecast seems to reveal him mumbling one chorus as "Let's Spend Some Night Together." At the end of the sloppy performance, the tape shows Jagger and Sullivan solemnly shaking hands and exchanging what can be best described as cold smiles.

The Times also trots out the inevitable interviews with the actual participants for Sunday, many of whom are young enough to be the grandchildren of the Glimmer Twins, who claim never to have heard of the group.

Just the thought that John Kerry apparently pissed off so many of his comrades in the party caucus, by leading a filibuster that was fated not to succeed, is reason enough to take him seriously in 2008. I mean, really, who cares what Chuck Schumer or Barbara Mikulski, or that matter, any of the other careerists that have put the party in the situation it finds itself in today, think about what is politically opportune?

The filibuster not only exposed what an empty shell the lefty blogosphere is when it comes to mobilizing and effecting political change (snark and mau-mauing the media is easy; politics is hard), but it also proved an eye-opener for revealing what a worthless political vehicle the Democratic Party has become. A party that won't stand and fight in opposition has nothing to offer the public in the unlikely event it ever gains a majority. For all the slams Kerry took after the last election, it should be noted that at least he came within an eyelash of winning, while Reid, Schumer and their compatriots were cratering, losing four seats.

Kerry has learned, a year too late, to fight back, even if it is ineffectual. Too bad the rest of the Party in D.C. hasn't.

OIL FOR FOOD!!! OIL FOR FOOD!!! OIL FOR FOOD!!!: I wonder how much play this story is going to get from our Brethren on the Right:

In the United States, a former official has admitted stealing millions of dollars meant for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Robert Stein held a senior position in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which administered Iraq after American and allied forces invaded in 2003. In a Washington court, he admitted to stealing more than $2m (£1.12m) and taking bribes in return for contracts. He faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.

Robert Stein's story is one of extraordinary corruption and excess amid the ruins of Iraq. He was in charge of overseeing money for the rebuilding of shattered infrastructure in south-central Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

Mr Stein admitted in court to conspiring to give out contracts worth $8m to a certain company in return for bribes. He also received gifts and sexual favours lavished on him at a special villa in Baghdad.

But it didn't stop there. Robert Stein admitted to stealing $2m from reconstruction funds. Some of that money, the court heard, was smuggled onto aircraft and flown back to the United States in suitcases.

Book him a slot on "Big Brother"...but wait, there's more:

Robert Stein, 50, was entrusted with the reconstruction of the central city of Hillah despite a fraud conviction that was apparently overlooked in his Pentagon background check. The former contracting official admitted yesterday that he had conspired to steal more than $2 million in reconstruction money and take kickbacks worth more than $1 million in the form of cars, jewellery, cash and sexual favours. Stein used the money to buy a single-engine Cessna aircraft, a Porsche and a Lexus, as well as other cars, grenade launchers, machineguns, jewellery and property. In a plea deal, he agreed to plead guilty to five felony counts: conspiracy, bribery, moneylaundering, possession of a machinegun and being a felon in possession of a handgun.

The case, which was initiated by a US audit of reconstruction spending, provides a stark look at corruption inside the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that governed Iraq after the invasion in March 2003 until June 2004. Five US Army Reserve officers were also allegedly part of the conspiracy. Two have been arrested. An American businessman based in Romania has also been charged.

Stein admitted accepting at least $1 million in cash and cars, jewellery and sexual favours from women, provided by a co-conspirator previously identified as Philip Bloom. Stein said that he helped to steer more than $8.6 million in contracts to companies controlled by Mr Bloom.

The New York Times has even more on Mr. Stein, who apparently was under the impression (accurately, if only for a time) that he didn't have to make any effort to hide what he was doing. Considering that a little under $9 billion disappeared from the control of the CPA, what this guy did was the proverbial drop in the bucket.

Spiteful bastards: At the same time that they were feverishly seeking to discredit Joseph Wilson, the Vice President and Scooter Libby were armed with a report from then-CIA Director George Tenet, stating that Amb. Wilson was correct as to the substance of his report. Rather than humbly acknowledging they were mistaken, they blew the cover of Mrs. Wilson instead. No freaking honor....

Too little, too late: Why is NARAL being taken to task for its endorsement of Lincoln Chafee, but not for its support of the equally-flaccid clockpunchers Daniel Akaka, Maria Cantwell, and Joe Lieberman? There were enough votes to sustain a filibuster against Justice Alito if 1) a groundswell of support had developed weeks ago; 2) the Democratic minority in the Senate had stuck together (even without the four members who ended up voting for the nominee; and 3) fencesitters within the party had realized there would be hell to pay if they didn't take a stand. What the hell does Chafee have to do with this?

UPDATE [2/2]: More post-mortems, here, here, here, here and here, as well as fellative pats-on-the-back and/or whines about NARAL and Senator Chafee, here, here, here, and here.

Is there some rule that requires us to blog about the State of the Union address? Are we even required to watch the damn thing? ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz.

Barack Obama (D-IL):

"There's one way to guarantee that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court are judges that reflect our values. And that's to win elections."

Does anyone honestly believe that the Democrats would have stopped this nomination even if they had a majority in the Senate? When you're a minority party (and remember, Democratic Senators, as a whole, were elected by more people than the GOP "majority"), the filibuster is one of the few tactics that allow you to have any influence. If you're not willing to use it now, then what difference does it make how many Senators you elect? Unless, like the junior Senator from Illinois, you intend to make a career of it in the Senate, and kissing ass and going along with the program becomes more important than, say, defending a woman's right to privacy, or preventing a President from abrogating the Fourth Amendment.

There were nineteen Democrats who voted to end debate this afternoon, who weren't even prepared, like Obama, Biden, Mikulski, et al., to go through the motions of opposing Alito. Five (Lieberman, Akaka, Cantwell, Carper, and Kohl) face the voters in Blue States this year, (btw, all four are pretending to "oppose" the nomination) and both Lieberman and Akaka have strong primary challenges. Support the challengers, and/or encourage said opponents to run as independents in the fall. There should never be a tent large enough to include a Vichy Wing in any political movement.

As a real Democrat once said, I wouldn't piss down their throats if their hearts were on fire.

The time to have mobilized support for a filibuster of Samuel Alito was in early-January, not the final weekend before the vote. If lefty bloggers seem ineffectual and whiny right now, it's their own fault for being more concerned last week with hurt feelings caused by Beltway pundits, rather than the pending approval of the swing vote on the Supreme Court. Setting priorities, then sticking to them, matter.

Filibusters aren't won by convincing a bunch of people to jam the phonelines of Senators at the last second; careerists like Landrieu and Salazar need to be shown that a political price would be paid, that putting a unreconstructed Princeton bigot like Alito on the Supreme Court would not be forgotten, just like Al "The Pal" Dixon's vote for Clarence Thomas wasn't forgotten when he lost his Senate seat in 1992. An angry fax by a non-constituent just doesn't work.

Abramoff is trivial, another D.C. crook in a town notorious for bipartisan corruption. Alito isn't trivial.

UPDATE: Filibuster quashed, 72-25.

Going where the traditional media refuses, Kevin Drum asks, "Is Charles Logan a Republican?" I would guess that it's his deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression and his substitution of bluster and arrogance to mask his inadequacies that give the strongest hint....

So there will be a filibuster against the Alito nomination after all. Although it doesn't look like the Democrats have the votes to sustain the gesture, it will be useful, if only to expose the losers in our own party whose "opposition" is a tad insincere. Being a part of a permanent minority can be liberating, and knowing who can be counted on to stand and fight is a good thing, if only to know where our limited resources should be spent in contesting (and defending) Senate seats.

Long Blonde Line Redux: The infamous photo of the SC song girl, which showed her leaping in the air after an apparent Texas touchdown after a goal line stand, is starting to look more and more like a fraud. Biggest problem: neither Longhorn touchdown on that side of the field caused a goal line scrum, as was depicted in the picture. The fallback position may be that it was on the two-point conversion that followed the winning TD, but that only serves to make the poor girl seem less stupid (after all, she's supposed to be getting the fans back in the game, not mourning a loss that hadn't yet happened). [link via LA Observed, which has been on top of the controversy from the start]

Tough Love: It's a testament to the barren irrelevance of the pre-Welch LA Times Op-Ed section*, and Joel Stein's place therein, that it took me two days to find out that this column had even been published, even though I perused the section on the day in question. But now that he's been the target of attacks from the whole gamut of blogospheric punditry, from Malkin to Atrios, it behooves me to argue that Stein's logic is inescapable. Those young men (and women) who volunteer to serve in the U.S. armed forces either have a pretty good idea of what they're getting themselves into, or are willfully blind about the consequences. As Stein wrote:

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there — and who might one day want to send them somewhere else. Trust me, a guy who thought 50.7% was a mandate isn't going to pick up on the subtleties of a parade for just service in an unjust war. He's going to be looking for funnel cake.

Besides, those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. They need body armor, shorter stays and a USO show by the cast of "Laguna Beach."

The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel for voting to send them to war and then making absolutely no sacrifices other than enduring two Wolf Blitzer shows a day. Though there should be a ribbon for that.

(snip)

The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack Abramoff's pet name for the House of Representatives.

I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad when I'm tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how they feel.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

Our volunteer military is not supposed to be an army of mercenaries. They're supposed to be defending the ideals and principles of America, not just the ideological objectives of a cabal of political hacks. Holding people accountable for their actions may be politically incorrect, but it still needs to be done. Stein's demand that we act as if our soldiers have some degree of self-agency is a useful reminder to those who contemplate enlisting in the Armed Forces during the remaining years of the Bush Administration, that they will be sent to fight on missions, like "Operation Iraqi Freedom", that are wholly unconnected to the defense and service of their country. In the long run, his column will save lives.

*Notwithstanding the Times' outstanding Sunday Current section.

If true, this is absolutely lame (and all the more reason why the blogosphere's unwillingness to unceasingly engage in the debate over the Alito nomination, in favor of more trivial concerns last week, was so critical). I don't have much of a megaphone, but I wish I had done more. What he says.

Come to think of it, Lynn Swann is starting to look better and better....

Someone named Peter Daou presents a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, on the topic of why Democrats lose elections. Of the three hypotheses that get trotted out as to why we lose elections (the other two being that conservatism has historically been the fallback ideology that prevails in American elections, or that some dark conspiracy operates to thwart the true will of the electorate), the one trumpeted by Daou, that it’s due to massive brainwashing of the public by the MSM, is the one that I find most frustrating.

Daou writes:

The same holds true for the Swift-boat sliming of Kerry: much has been made of the Kerry campaign's response or lack thereof, but there's another angle less discussed: the story was a cable staple for days and weeks, unchecked. Had the cable nets and other media outlets covered that story with more balance, more dignity, more judiciousness, more responsibility, it would have been a sideshow. And this has nothing to do with deflecting blame - the Kerry campaign should have known that their enemy wasn't a vindictive crackpot like John O'Neill, but the many 'journalists' and media outlets who rammed the story down our collective gullets.

To suggest, as Daou does, that the allegations made by the “Swift Boat Vets” were “unchecked” by the media, including cable news outlets like CNN (the “news network” run by Rupert Murdoch clearly doesn’t operate under the same standards of purported impartiality as its competitors; its useless to whine that its not being fair to liberals, since that its entire reason for existence), is ludicrous. In fact, the media (incl. that noted totem of the loony left, Chris Matthews) went after the story more vigorously and with greater determination than John Kerry did (see here, here, here, here, and here); in fact, it did so more devastatingly than the lefty blogosphere. If you don't like the fact that when the ads first were aired, CNN could do little more than report the controversy, rather than dig up government records discrediting the claims, repeal the First Amendment.

I know Kerry’s defeat is still a bitter pill to swallow, and that his tepid, lackluster response to the sleazebags who alleged that he was a traitor who faked his military heroism still rankles, but the media’s response to the Rove-generated attack ads was almost universally negative. It may have taken a week or two, but the media did its job. The ads ended up hurting Kerry because he refused to fight back during a crucial period, making him look weak even to voters who were skeptical of the SBV claims, while providing ammunition to those who didn’t like him in the first place.

Furthermore, to imply that those allegations were trumpeted in the same obsessive fashion as the Holloway disappearance or the Lewinsky investigation is disingenuous, to say the least (if you don’t believe me, just compare the number of Nightline episodes involving Monica, or the number of Larry King shows about Ms. Holloway, with the number of times either show focused on the SBV’s during the summer of 2004). In August, 2004, the media, presented with a particularly nasty set of ads, as well as a “victim” who seemed reticent about defending himself, gave the story appropriate play, When, after a few reporters performed the hard, arduous work of examining events that occurred some thirty years earlier, it came down heavily against the SBV’s, to devasting effect against those who had so loudly trumpeted their claims.

Media bashing (or, to use the more dignified term, “media criticism”) is cathartic, easy, and provides ambitious bloggers with a convenient scapegoat to kick. But working the ref is no substitute for having a gameplan for winning. Revisionist history is best performed when the principal actors have been dead for a few decades; it ill-behooves us to perform it immediately afterwards, when the record is much easier to check.

Arsenal 2, Wigan 1 [2-2]: Fever Pitch, my ass...The Latics are through to their first-ever Cup Final (albeit the less-prestigious Carling Cup), after upsetting the Gunners on the "away goals" rule. Wigan, which had won the first game in the home-and-home series, 1-0, came back two weeks later to hold mighty Arsenal to a similar result on their home pitch, saving a penalty kick in the process, then fell behind in extra time, only to score in the last minute to secure the "win". They will play either Man United or Blackburn next month in the Final.

It is no surprise to those of us who have followed his career from the outset that John Doolittle (R-CA) has been one of the Congressmen most caught up in the Abramoff imbroglio. To those of you who are just discovering what a frightening little man he is, here's a taste from the early days, when he was just a State Senator.

To summarize, back in 1984, his state senate district having been reapportioned into the ether by the legendary Phillip Burton, Doolittle moved into the district of a moderate Republican incumbent, Ron Johnson. Johnson, sensing the rightward shift of his party, decided to run as an independent, while the Democrats, significantly outnumbered in the district, put up (if that's the right word; the state party was unofficially backing Johnson, and the nominee barely campaigned) a sacrificial lamb.

Trailing in the last weeks of the campaign, Doolittle hit upon a cagey proposition. As the California Fair Political Practices Committee later put it:

Shortly before the election, Doolittle campaign consultant John Feliz coordinated the production of a mass mailer sent on behalf of Doolittle's Democratic opponent, Jack Hornsby. The consulting services of Feliz and a Doolittle fundraiser, Jim Grubbs, along with 60,000 mailing labels, were contributed by the Friends of John Doolittle Committee to the Friends of Jack Hornsby Committee. The mailer was sent to Democratic households as a tactic to bring Democratic candidate Hornsby into the three-way race with Doolittle and former state Senator Ray Johnson, thus pulling votes away from Johnson to Hornsby for the benefit of Doolittle.

Doolittle ended up winning the election by an eyelash, paid a token fine for his lack of ethics, and has slimed his way to bigger and better things ever since. As with the early career of Richard Nixon, whose campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Douglas portended even more egregious acts later in life, Doolittle's lack of anything that even remotely resembled an ethical core was evident from the start.

Another perspective on the first six seed to reach the Super Bowl:

Local Boy Makes Good: Congrats, Mr. Welch, on a long-overdue position with the Local Paper of Record !!!

Wouldn't it be nice if lefty bloggers cared as much about the possible confirmation in the next week or two of Samuel Alito, as they do about their hurt feelings generated by a newspaper ombudsman's error? That the question even needs to be asked shows how unready we are to wield power in any positive way.

It's a test of priorities, of what is important and what is trivial, and we're failing it badly. "Working the ref" is something a coach does when his team has the talent to play competitively, and a little bit of verbal bullying on the margins might make a difference. Liberals aren't at that stage yet, even if we can successfully mau-mau the Washington Post into seeing things our way on the tangential issue of Jack Abramoff, his lobbying, and the highly disingenuous qualifier about whether he personally gave money to Democrats (bloggers' spin), merely directed tribes to toss them a dime (Post's spin), or convinced them to give less money to Democrats, without cutting them out (the truth).

What's really important is the corrupting influence of money in political campaigns, something that has been known to afflict a Democrat or two. Bullying newspapers into pretending that Abramoff's style of crookedness is some kind of uniquely conservative ailment, encoded in the genetic structure of Republicans, kills any effort to address that problem. To that end, real liberals back public financing of campaigns, a policy that the bloggers obsessed with Deborah Howell don't seem to care about.

Partisan media criticism is not an inevitable direction for blogs to take; witness the success of substantive bloggers like Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum, or the community building/organizing at Daily Kos. The fact that writing hate mail to newspapers seems to be the popular fad among liberal bloggers nowadays is a cancerous trend, which we must overcome to be worthy of power, in 2006 and thereafter.

LXXXI: There's something about 81 points in a game that concentrates the mind. Like Wilt in the early-60's, Kobe has to play the role of a one-man team, and last night, his heroics were forced in large part by the fact that the Lakers had to overcome an 18-point second half deficit against one of the worst teams in basketball. If he stays healthy and keeps clear of the roadskanks, breaking Chamberlain's single-game scoring record is within the realm of possibility, something I never thought I'd be contemplating.

Over two million people filed bankruptcy in 2005, a 32% jump from the year before, or approximately a half million more filers than in 2004. That's a nice round number, a half million: the number of people who filed the week before YBK last October was just over a half million. Chapter 7 filings were up almost 50% from the year before; about one in 53 households filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005.

At least one Democratic Senator is going to have to face a strong primary challenge this year, but it's not (yet) the one you're thinking of. In Hawaii, Representative Ed Case has tossed his lei into the ring in an effort to unseat the 81-year old incumbent, Daniel Akaka. With a popular GOP incumbent governor, having two octogenarian Senators is increasingly risky for the Democrats, putting at risk any chance the party might have of recapturing (and keeping control of) the U.S. Senate over the next four years.

Case, however, is from the Lieberman "New Democrat" school, with an ambitious streak to boot; after running (and losing) a run for governor in 2002, he won a special election to fill the seat of the late Patsy Mink in 2004, defeating her widower. Having him replace the dependable liberal stalwart Akaka (who himself was appointed to replace a deceased Senator, Spark Matsunaga, in 1990) would be a bitter pill to swallow. Chalk it up to the perils of gerontocracy.

Cuba, si !!! Reversing course, the Bush Administration has o.k.'ed the participation of Cuba in the upcoming World Baseball Championship. Now, the big question is whether Japan will send a real team....

Trivial Pursuits? I know it's not as important as, say, the Washington Post ombudsman deciding not to respond to LGF-style spamming from lefty bloggers, but it appears the battle may finally be joined in the Alito nomination:

A procession of Democratic senators, including two who supported the confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., said yesterday that they will oppose the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. They warned that he would not provide a judicial check against the expansion of presidential power or be properly vigilant about protecting the rights of ordinary Americans.

The mounting Democratic opposition underscored the sharp partisan divide that has developed over Alito's nomination, after Roberts was confirmed with 78 votes and solid bipartisan support. But although Democrats appear increasingly united in their opposition to Alito, they remain divided over whether to pursue a filibuster against the nomination.

A filibuster is increasingly less likely, Democratic strategists say, despite pressure from some liberal interest groups for Democrats to keep the option alive. But Democrats are more united in their desire to seek an extended floor debate over Alito -- even as they acknowledge that his confirmation is virtually assured -- because they believe polling shows that the more the American people learn about Alito's record and writings on civil liberties and other subjects, the more they will oppose his addition to the high court.

The newly announced opponents included Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.); Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee; Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the Democratic whip; and Sen. Ken Salazar (Colo.). Leahy and Salazar had voted in favor of Roberts. On Wednesday, Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.), another Roberts backer, said he will oppose Alito.

Baucus' opposition is a pleasant surprise, indicating that it will be very hard for Strip Search Sammy to reach 60 votes. Regardless of what anyone is saying now, once a filibuster (or, shall I say, "extended floor debate") is started on the Senate floor, all bets are off. No Democrat is going to want to be the one who effectively ends Choice by voting for cloture.

Our long national nightmare? It's so over !!! After seven years and $21 million, the inquiry into whether former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros did something horrible enough to justify spending $21 million, Independent Prosecutor David M. Barrett has finally called it a day:

Mr. Barrett began his investigation with the narrower issue of whether Mr. Cisneros lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he was being considered for the cabinet position. He ended his inquiry accusing the Clinton administration of a possible cover-up.

His report says Justice Department officials refused to grant him the broad jurisdiction he wanted; for example, Attorney General Janet Reno said he could look at only one tax year. And after Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington took a Cisneros investigation out of the hands of district-level officials in Texas, the agency deemed the evidence too weak to merit a criminal inquiry, a conclusion strongly disputed by one Texas investigator.

Former officials of the Justice Department and the I.R.S. dismissed Mr. Barrett's conclusions in appendices attached to the report, saying the findings were the product of an inquiry that was incompetently managed from the start.

After being indicted on 18 felony counts, Mr. Cisneros pleaded guilty in 1999 to a misdemeanor charge of lying to investigators. He was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Barrett kept his office open more than six years after the law that created the independent counsel system was allowed to die. Lawmakers in both parties had wearied of the many inquiries that had failed to achieve the goal of removing political influence from criminal investigations of administration officials.

BTW, the "lie" Cisneros told to FBI investigators during a background check was not whether he paid off a blackmailing mistress, but the exact amount. Needless to say, it was well under the amount spent to investigate him; the entire debacle arose out of the bitter relationship between President Clinton and then-FBI chief Louis Freeh, whose obsession with the President on this and other matters inevitably hampered his agency's ability to handle somewhat more arcane matters, such as fighting terrorism.

Reading between the lines, it seems Mr. Barrett didn't have the goods on the "tax evasion" charge either, hence the obligatory attack on Clinton, Reno, etc., in his final report. In the words of a Justice Department attorney quoted in the article, it was "a fitting conclusion to one of the most embarrassingly incompetent and wasteful episodes in the history of American law enforcement."