A good primer on the Senate race in Hawaii, which will be likely settled by the Democratic Primary in late-September. The octogenarian incumbent, Daniel Akaka, has a liberal voting record (although he did support cloture in the Alito debate), but otherwise has been an undistinguished backbencher, and is being challenged by Representative Ed Case, who is running to the right of the incumbent, particularly regarding the Iraq War. Hawaii has a Republican governor who's a near-lock to win reelection, so she would appoint a successor should Akaka die in office. Unlike the more-widely publicized primary in Connecticut, this one's close....

The Da Vinci Code: A critic raves:

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

--A.O. Scott, N.Y. Times.

Over at Slate, David Plotz is bloggin' the Bible. On the Great Flood, he posts:

God announces His first covenant with man, that He will never again destroy the earth with a flood. He doesn't rule out other catastrophes. (God, apparently, is the opposite of an insurance company. He offers flood protection, but no other coverage.)

And who knew the destruction of Sodom and Gomorroh had such an interesting after-story !!

Blair for Lieberman: Harold Meyerson has a "modest proposal" on how to deal with the problem of "Transatlantic Insufferable Moralists With Blood On Their Handsblood on Their Hands".

It's five months too late, but NCAA officialdom is finally admitting that it botched two critical calls in the Rose Bowl that led to Texas winning the national championship (subscription required). The first play was the by-now-infamous Reggie Bush over-the-shoulder "lateral", which should have ruled a dead-ball illegal forward pass, and the other was a lateral thrown by Vince Young for a touchdown after his knee was down. In both cases, the instant replay booth failed to alert the refs on the field that it was reviewing the plays. The championships for both college and pro football this year featured some of the worst officiating I've ever seen for games at that level.

Why Adam Nagourney is Wrong About 2006:

1. November represents the best chance in a generation for the Democrats to win a transformational election in the House. The most reliable indicator in determining who wins a Congressional seat is knowing which party has won that seat in the past. However, every so often there is an election that one party utterly dominates, shattering years of partisan consistency in voting patterns. Among mid-term elections, we can look at 1894, 1910, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1974, and 1994, as years where one party made huge strides, leading to a temporary realignment in how people vote. The Democrats have a chance to make 2006 such an election, and just as 1994 was a more important year, over the long haul, than Clinton winning reelection in 1996, so too might this year. Merely picking up a handful of seats does nothing to change the long-term trends, and it blows a rare opportunity.

2. Any GOP majority in the Senate means that Bush can handpick his judicial nominees. Short of nominating a Klansman, there is no way Senate Democrats will filibuster a Supreme Court nominee from the floor. If you want to impede the reactionary trend of the judiciary, you have to bottle up nominees in the Judiciary Committee, and that requires a Democratic majority.

3. Even partisan investigations benefit the country, if only to make the powerful accountable. Moreover, the public has a right to know what went wrong in our war planning with Iraq, or whether how homeland security is prepared to stop the next domestic terrorist attack. Since the ruling party hasn't evidenced any interest in conducting such inquiries, the Democrats have to step up to the plate. If the Democrats overreach, so be it.

4. With the possible exception of 1992, I've heard some liberal/progressives make the same argument before every election, ie., maybe it's not such a bad idea for the GOP to win this one, let them take the responsibility for the budget deficit/war/recession/whatever. Since the base of the GOP is more concerned with whether our country has gotten right with Jesus in time for the Rapture, things like "screwing up the environment" or "bankrupting the national treasury" or "losing our military in Iraq" won't necessarily discredit the ruling party in Red States, and a complacent political attitude is a terrible one for anybody who truly loves his country.

My home away from the dorm in college, Cody's Book Store, is closing. Back in the mid-80's, I used to park myself at its Telegraph Avenue location, waiting for the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract to come out, where I knew it would have a prominent spot at one of the front tables. Today, I would just order it from Amazon.

Busy day yesterday. Visited my grandma in Kernville (she's 93, and in spite of burying all three of her sons, she continues to brighten the lives of those around her), then attended my high school reunion, which I hope to describe further as soon as I get pictures of the event (hint, hint).

Separated at Birth: Theatre critic John Simon and baseball Hall-of-Famer/raconteur Yogi Berra both turned 81 today. Happy Birthday, ye quotesmiths !!!

Juiced: In the tradition of the President joking about a "search" for WMD's at a White House correspondents' dinner, comes this piece of sick humor.

Some background on the sudden resignation this week of Appeals Court Judge Michael Luttig, who was once the frontrunner to be the first Bush nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Luttig, considered to be the most conservative judge in the most conservative circuit in the country, fell out with the Bush Administration over their extreme positions on executive power and their mendacity in justifying the secret detention of terror suspects.

The hidden cost of NAFTA--illegal re-emigration?

In Defense of Civility: Well, maybe Chait had a point after all. The entire "Steve Colbert Was Ignored by the Mean D.C. Press Corps So Let's Have a Hissy Fit" controversy has started to generate a nasty, internecine battle in the lefty blogosphere. The debate seems to be over whether "civility", the notion that people who disagree with you should be treated as human beings, is a virtue that progressives should continue to profess, or whether being an asshole is a more winning tactic.

As you can tell, I'm in the former camp. The most noxious trend among lefty bloggers in recent months has been the abandonment of any pretense that people who take contrary positions can do so in good faith. It is not enough that someone has an opposing viewpoint; they must be lying as well. Or if the media doesn't report a story, or give emphasis to the right set of "facts", it's because they're in bed with the Bushies.

Liberal bloggers seem to have looked at the weapons the right uses in playing the political field, what with talk radio, FoxNews, etc., and decided that the tone of political discourse doesn't need to be changed, but copied. It's as if there has been a collective decision that what's objectionable about Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter is their ends, not their means.

It's no wonder that most of the megabloggers on the left are snark-oriented, rather than policy-oriented. If you've been beaten down so long, it's entirely predictable that you are going to turn violent, even if it's only rhetorical. Anger and attitude can be very appealing, and bloggers who appeal to that will gain many readers.

But it is a dark and barren path, even if it may lead to occasional electoral successes. For liberals, the notion of "civility" is always indistinguishable from authentic progressive politics. Civility arises out of the same wellspring as compassion, a principle every liberal was supposed to have learned from Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy forty years ago. Our great victories have come not from beating people over the head with our principles, but from our willingness to love the people who oppose us, even those who hate us. It is from the belief that we are no better than anyone else, that the soul of an oppressor always lurks within the heart of the oppressed, that the progressive belief in equality, social welfare and tolerance for others emanates.

Civility is the acme of non-violent action. By abandoning civility, or by deciding that it be practiced only when it is reciprocated, we forfeit our principles. We become anti-Republicans, rather than liberals.

It's comforting to realize that the current national debate over immigration policy is not a new one:

They were portrayed as a disreputable lot, the immigrant hordes of this great city.
The Germans refused for decades to give up their native tongue and raucous beer gardens. The Irish of Hell's Kitchen brawled and clung to political sinecures. The Jews crowded into the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish, fomenting socialism and resisting forced assimilation. And by their sheer numbers, the immigrants depressed wages in the city.

As for the multitudes of Italians, who settled Mulberry Street, East Harlem and Canarsie? In 1970, seven decades after their arrival, Italians lagged behind every immigrant group in educational achievement.

The bitter arguments of the past echo loudly these days as Congress debates toughening the nation's immigration laws and immigrants from Latin America and Asia swell the streets of U.S. cities in protest. Most of the concerns voiced today -- that too many immigrants seek economic advantage and fail to understand democracy, that they refuse to learn English, overcrowd homes and overwhelm public services -- were heard a century ago. And there was a nub of truth to some complaints, not least that the vast influx of immigrants drove down working-class wages.

Yet historians and demographers are clear about the bottom line: In the long run, New York City -- and the United States -- owes much of its economic resilience to replenishing waves of immigrants. The descendants of those Italians, Jews, Irish and Germans have assimilated. Manhattan's Little Italy is vestigial, no more than a shrinking collection of restaurants.

It's an excellent article; read the whole thing.

A bizarre apologia for Joementum, by Jon Chait, in this morning's local paper:

In the end, though, I can't quite root for Lieberman to lose his primary. What's holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman's sins. It's a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.

Were it to be so !!! Hell, I think Lieberman's being scapegoated, being held to account for sins other Democrats have committed with the same enthusiasm. But primary challenges are a good thing; they prevent incumbents from taking the base for granted. And the Democratic Party has suffered for too long from elected officials who value the office more than the people they represent. We shall not be free until the last corporate Democrat is strangled by the entrails of the last liberal hawk. One, two, a thousand Lamonts !!!

Clichegate: Another example. C'mon folks, "Hookergate" isn't even trying. This scandal is so much bigger than that.

Here's another trivial controversy that has dwindled precious minutes from my life: the National Anthem en espanol. I remember a couple of occasions in the early-70's (usually involving the Golden State Warriors) when one of the other verses of the Star Spangled Banner would be sung before the game. Is there some sort of Francis Scott Key lobby that demands that song be kept as the national anthem?

Of all the things I'll regret on my deathbed, the fact that I lost precious minutes of my life reading bloggers obsessing over the non-coverage of Stephen Colbert last Saturday will have to be one of them. Jesus, people, get a life....

Perhaps demonstrating, once and for all, that the LA Times doesn't get the internet or the blogosphere, the Times has fired columnist/blogger (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Michael Hiltzik for...using a pseudonym when he comments at other blogs. Being a monopoly allows you to do stuff like that.

YBK, Revisited: It looks like we caught a break with the Housing Bubble. It burst alright, but at least it did so after the new bankruptcy law went into effect last October. My great fear last year was that people were going reach the limit as to how much they could borrow off their home's equity, and thereafter falling into foreclosure, at precisely the time that the expiration of the old bankruptcy law would occur. We ended up having a panic anyway, but it could have been a lot worse.

Now come these figures, showing that the foreclosure rate on homes has dramatically gone up nationwide immediately after the new law went into effect. The bankruptcy rates are starting to go up again as well, albeit nowhere near the typical numbers from recent years. [link via Sploid]