Far be it from me to criticize the sources of revenue for the local government, but the County of Los Angeles last year made a profit of $3.6 million in fees from online searches of Superior Court cases. Most judicial districts either give the info away for free as a public service, or charge a nominal fee. Sweet.

Resistance Is Not Futile: A good exegesis of the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act (BARF), here. It's a good take on what an honest judge can do to when confronted by a statute drafted by morons:

The problems with the 2005 Act are breathtaking. There are typos, sloppy choices of words, hanging paragraphs, and inconsistencies. Worse, there are largely pointless burdensome new requirements, overlapping layers of screening, mounds of new paperwork, and structural incoherence. These are dark days for all bankruptcy professionals and both judges and debtors' lawyers are on the front lines. Resistance is key to self-respect as well as necessary to keep the system operating in ways that catch abuses while providing bankruptcy relief, at the lowest possible cost, to those who need it.

The main problem with BARF, the article notes, is that it was drafted by the none-too-bright hired guns of the credit industry, who focused primarily on granting their clients' wishlists rather than designing an intellectually consistent (but perhaps politically less palatable) law. By enacting a poorly-crafted law, Congress gave judges the freedom to interpret the law in a manner different from how the credit industry lobbyists and their vassals in Congress may have intended, relying instead on the reasons stated for its passage, on the record (ie., to "protect consumers" and "reduce fraud").

A.A.R. sold, Franken leaves: The new owner is the brother of perennial New York candidate Mark Green. Franken's show was the only good thing about the network; about half the programming for the LA affiliate is non-AAR (ie., Stephanie Miller and Big Ed Schulz), and the few times I listened to the carwreck they aired in the evenings, it seemed little different than dittohead agitprop for lefties.

Apparently, St. Joseph's going to do the old "National Interest" thing in the next election. Pretty big of him, don't you think? What was Gore thinking....

Paging Gretchen Mol: An absolutely cruel take on west-Pennsylvania native Sienna Miller, in Defamer. Vanity Fair has always been good at spotting It Girls-Who-Never-Were (remember Sophie Dahl?), as well as other trends that never quite got off the ground, a tendency memorably recounted by Toby Young in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. To wit, this month's cover girl is "hot" actress Demi Moore, recently snubbed by the Academy for her stellar work in Bobby, and leading the casual reader to wonder why Ellen Barkin or Cher weren't available for the shoot.

Sorry, but the headline, "Key Tapes Said to Exist in Bush Case," is particularly lame. It's not even hearsay evidence; it's the hearsay possibility ("said to exist") that hearsay evidence exists (that is, the "key tapes") that may circumstantially prove Reggie Bush's family was receiving money at some point during his career at U.S.C. And the underlying Yahoo!Sports story is even thinner gruel, since it's based not on what anyone has claimed on the record, but on the fact that during discovery, "at least one of the witnesses was asked to produce 'any recordings in (his) possession of conversations between Lloyd Lake and Reggie Bush, Denise Griffin, or LaMar Griffin.' Denise Griffin is Bush's mother. LaMar Griffin is Bush's stepfather." In fact, asking the other side to produce any recordings that may be in their possession is asked in almost every civil case, and is part of the standard form interrogatories in California civil cases. Duh.

It may be too late for Zach Lund, but WADA has agreed to relax anti-doping sanctions that result in suspensions for athletes who inadvertantly ingested (or ingested trivial amounts of) stimulants tangentially found to improve performance. The group also hinted at possibly reducing the punishment for positive tests for cannabis, a drug with no known performance-enhancing characteristics in Olympic sports, but which has been tested at the strong urging of American representatives.

Eric Alterman points out that Bush's approval ratings are now less than half of what Clinton's were at the same point in his Presidency, which also happened to be when his impeachment trial was taking place.

Among the suitors for the Tribune Company's stake in the LA Times is Rupert Murdoch, apparently. Considering the financial mess his paper in New York City has been, or the clusterfuck that was News Corp's prior trusteeship of a local Angeleno institution, there's no reason to believe he will do much to stem the paper's continuing brain drain or its falling circulation, and as his cable "news" channel attests, he never has been one for practicing actual journalism.

Congolese Yellow Cake: It would be interesting to see how the Mutombo Myth got started, since I doubt anyone in the White House was clever enough to invent it. Since the final five minutes were all I saw, a good question would be whether anything else the President said bore any resemblance to the truth. [link via Hotline]

Today was the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the death of LBJ, and the Foreman-Frazier title fight (ie., "down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier...."). I wonder if there are any other historical dates that had three distinct, unrelated events that were as momentous as those. Roe was perhaps the biggest Supreme Court decision of the past fifty years, and Foreman's stunning knockout of Smokin' Joe not only crowned a new heavyweight champ, it also helped resuscitate Mohammed Ali's career. But the big headline in the paper's the next day was Johnson's death, only two days after his second term would have ended had he run (and won) in 1968.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss....

Your sister is a thespian !!! I didn't believe this guy was still alive, until he wasn't...in all fairness, Smathers did deny ever accusing his opponent of having a thespian relative, or practicing "nepotism" with a sister-in-law.

Imagine trying to generate news on the day Brownback announces for President....

How Al Jazeera covers American football. [link via LAist]

Shorter Richard Dawkins:

Tis a slippery slope indeed twixt MLK and OBL.

(and with all due props to Daniel Davies, Elton Beard, et al., for the "Shorter..." form.)

Any good investigative piece should have some real world impact, and Michael Hiltzik's series on the ongoing fraud that is Olympic dope-testing seems to be getting some positive results in the right places. International sports officials have begun to lobby to end the policy of strict liability, which bans athletes from competition even when testing reveals amounts too tiny to have any effect, or where the doping was purely accidental. The International Basketball Federation is particularly aggrieved at the inclusion of cannibis as a banned substance, even though it provides no known competitive advantage to athletes; it is the number one cause of positive tests in that sport (who knew?), and the notion that an athlete can get banned from his sport and stripped of any medals simply because he got baked after competing is absurd. Moreover, the reliability of the testosterone testing procedures that has besmirched the good name of Tour de France champion Floyd Landis has come under scrutiny, apparently because the scientific principles it adheres to are similar to those of creationism.

Ouch:

And although they all praised the troops before they dissed the troops, we're also starting to see some in the pro-war crowd place the blame for the coming defeat on the troops themselves. Here's NRO's Michael Ledeen slagging the soldiers last week:

Note that an increase in embeds [U.S. troops embedding in Iraqi military units] doesn’t necessarily require an increase in overall troop strength. We’ve got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don’t know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it’s a substantial number. Enough of that.

Could you imagine the reaction from Ledeen's pals at Pajamas Media if Markos Moulitsas (or God forbid, John Kerry) had said exactly the same thing in the exactly the same context? It would have been a pure shitstorm of indignation. Roger Simon would have written a cute little post about liberal reactionaries that incorporated a Buddy Holly song, Charles Johnson would have cited it as inconvertible proof of the worldwide conspiracy between Islam and The Left to enslave us all using the Vulcan Mindmeld, Glenn Reynolds would have sputtered something about Markos (and/or Kerry) hating America and the troops, while Michelle Malkin synthesized it all into a really stupid post of fifteen or so very small words.

In any event, per Ledeen, the war is being lost because our goldbricking soldiers are sitting around drinking latte instead of shooting Muslims. That sounds pretty bitter, too.

--Dennis the Peasant.

DTP used to brutalize me over at Roger Simon's comments, so I do feel empathy for Malkin, et al.'s for being his latest targets...but not a lot. Better them than me. [link via James Wolcott]

Sadly, the California congressional delegation seems to contain a fair share of xenophobes, particularly among the Democratic contingent. According to the LA Times, at least seven California Democrats on the Hill would oppose any move to amend the Constitution to remove the ancient anachronism barring naturalized citizens from running for the Presidency. More telling, a number of supporters say that such a change would be a "low priority," adopting the language many civil rights "supporters" used in the '40's and '50's to justify their inaction in combating Jim Crow. Speaker Pelosi also qualifies her support, demanding that any such amendment have a ludicrously long residency period of thirty-five years.

There are a thousand good reasons why Ahnold should not be elected President, but the fact that he was born in Austria almost sixty years ago isn't one of them, and efforts to point to immigrants having divided loyalties and/or dual citizenship, or references to his piggish behavior on movie sets, are irrelevant to this topic. The real issue is that the governors of Michigan and California, as well as millions of other loyal Americans, are barred from running for President, and it is no different than a Constitutional provision limiting the office to Christians, or to men. Kudos to Henry Waxman, who averred "I favor a constitutional amendment to allow naturalized citizens to run for president, even those I may not support myself."

I dream of things that never were: Could Tommy Lasorda have saved the country from the Nixon Presidency, and ended the Vietnam War five years earlier, if only he hadn't worn tight shoes on the night of June 4, 1968? Some questions are raised....