Lefty blogs need to call a moratorium on the use of Photoshop. It's sleazy and unethical to doctor a photo when you're posting on something unimportant (eg., a photo "showing" an SC cheerleader "celebrating" a Texas touchdown in the last Rose Bowl), so why should it be tolerated in the context of political advocacy over life-and-death issues? And while we're at it, let's vow never to make a point by putting the likeness of an adversary in blackface. Amos & Andy has been off the air for fifty years, and those for whom that is still a visceral image are collecting Social Security. The rest of us just think that the person who creates such a caricature is a jackass.

Arthur Lee, 1945-2006: A giant in our local music scene, Lee influenced both the psychedelic and punk generations. His group, Love, had only two hit singles, but both were classics that sound as fresh today as they did forty years ago: "My Little Red Book", a Burt Bacharach composition which was a huge hit in Los Angeles and on the West Coast, and "7 and 7 Is", their biggest national hit, and for decades a staple for any self-respecting garage band. He hit on hard times, and for awhile he was probably the most famous person to be serving time under California's Three Strikes law. In recent years, he toured Europe with Love, performing songs from their seminal 1967 album, Forever Changes, before calling it quits last year upon the onset of leukemia, which took his life yesterday. Requiescat in pacem.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus has his own tribute, here.

The normally reliable Stuart Rothenberg, on one possible consequence of a Ned Lamont victory:

Some Democrats fear that a three-way contest could encourage Republicans to find a way to force their nominee out of the race and replace him with a much more serious Senate candidate. But a Lamont victory would not seriously threaten the Democrats’ hold on that seat unless the Republicans were to find a stronger nominee.

Lamont’s victory, however, would not be without its downside for Democrats, since it would only embolden the crazies in the party, a consideration not lost on other Democratic elected officials and strategists.

Lieberman’s defeat is likely to add to the partisanship and bitterness that divides the country and Capitol Hill, and to generate more media attention to grassroots bomb-throwers who, down the road, are likely to make the party less appealing to swing voters and moderates. (emphasis added)

Last time I checked, it was the "crazies" in the party that unquestioningly supported the Bush Administration's policies in the Middle East. After three years of abject failure and lowered national prestige, those in the Democratic Party who continue to back the Neocons' Grand Adventure are certainly more nuts than anything Little Green Firedogs might be blogging about this week.

54-41: That's the lead Ned Lamont now has over Senator Joe Lieberman in the race to be the Democratic Senate nominee in Connecticut. It's become increasingly clear that St. Joseph's announcement that he would run as an independent should he lose on Tuesday was the dumbest of a series of really stupid tactical moves in this campaign. He seemed churlish and contemptuous of the voters within his party when he made that announcement, and his support cratered; even voters who were skeptical of Lamont now had a free pass in the primary to vote their conscience on the Iraq War, since the incumbent would still be on the ballot in November. But a rout next week will thoroughly discredit any independent run, and make it more likely that the GOP will try to find a more credible standardbearer for November, further cutting Lieberman's base. [link via Daily Kos]

From Media Matters, a new low for the Far Right (at least for this week): a LaRouchite smear against George Soros begins to worm its way into the "mainstream." And from Andrew Sullivan, a compare-and-contrast posting on partners-in-bigotry Mel Gibson and Ann Coulter:

Coulter has condemned all Muslims and all gays in ways that pander to the basest prejudices against them. She used the term "fag" on cable television recently. She has publicly argued for killing Muslims in the Middle East indiscriminately. She does all this stone-cold sober and means not a word of it. Gibson, on the other hand, clearly deep down believes that the Jews are evil, that they are responsible for all the wars in the world, and his hatred for gay men is well-documented. Both Coulter and Gibson have made a fortune catering to bigotry. But one is sincere; and one is completely cynical.

I don't know about that; is there any reason to believe Coulter's hate isn't as sincere and real as Mad Max's? I know there has been some under-the-table gossip about Coulter and a certain openly lesbian right wing talk radio hostess, but Sullivan doesn't appear to be alluding to that.

Send In The Clown: Who is the genius in the Lamont campaign who thought this association was a good idea? Was Mike Tyson not available?

Wikiality: Stephen Colbert actually did edit several pages on Wikipedia last night on his show, as he said he would.

Sugar-t**s Feminism:

Christian women — especially Catholics — know what pop culture thinks of their role: subservient; unworthy; barefoot and pregnant; seen but not heard. Consider, in contrast, the words of the current pope: "In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a 'new feminism' which rejects the temptation of imitating models of 'male domination,' in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation." Mel Gibson gets that genius.

(snip)

...Mel Gibson's understanding of women and his articulation of their unique mission could have remarkable repercussions. This new — or old, inasmuch as it is natural and commonsensical — kind of feminism, a focus on the different contributions of men and women and the different ways they live their missions, should make us all rethink how we live and love.

- Kathryn-Jean Lopez, National Revew Online (12/2/03) [link via Andrew Sullivan]

Ahnolt's first treaty !! Not bad, either. Stem cell research, now greenhouse gasses; why don't we just cut out the middleman and declare ourselves independent.

When I read this column, a panoply of trite cliches and stereotypes that were stale when England still had a good soccer team, I went slackjawed for about a minute. Can you imagine a similar column about a P.M.'s trip to Ireland or Israel. [link via LA Observed]

The world's worst lefty blogger goes after the world's worst columnist. Hilarity ensues...I guess we should all be relieved that Sirota doesn't use the word "Establishment" at all, and only uses the word "elite" four times, but simply using a dictionary would have helped. First of all, Thomas Friedman is neither a "scion" nor an "heir" to a multi-billion dollar fortune. His wife is. It's her family that has the dough, not his; since he has no legal expectancy of receiving a dollar of that fortune through any future probate proceeding, he's not an heir, and since he is not a blood relative of his wife's family, he's not a scion.

Secondly, the attack on Friedman suggests that because support for Free Trade, job outsourcing, etc., supposedly benefits only the wealthy, and since he is "...an heir to a multi-billion-dollar business empire," that means his opinion is inherently tainted on the subject. I happen to agree that Mr. Friedman is a bit of a loon, but that's because he's usually wrong about what he writes, not the fact that he married into a family that made its fortune in real estate. If we were to impose the strictest trade barriers imaginable, and if we were to criminalize the practice of outsourcing jobs to the Third World, Friedman's in-laws would still be just as wealthy. Their investment is in land, not WalMart.

Atrios is my friend: A list of the Democratic Senators who so courageously went to the matt defending the interests of Visa and AmEx last year: Baucus(MT), Bayh(IN), Biden(DE), Bingaman(NM), Byrd(WV), Carper(DE), Conrad(ND), Inouye(HI), Johnson(SD), Kohl(WI), Landrieu(LA), Lincoln(AR), Nelson (FL), Nelson(NE), Pryor(AR), Reid(NV), Salazar(CO), and Stabenow(MI).

Again, bold means they're up for reelection in November, and blue means they're from a state carried by Democrats in each of the last four elections. I've also italicized the names of those Heirs to FDR and JFK who last week voted to criminalize the assistance of minors crossing a state border to obtain a legal abortion.

Funny how the same names appear on both lists, and Lieberman doesn't appear on either.

UPDATE: But he does appear on this list, of Democratic Senators who voted to invoke cloture on the nomination of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court: Akaka (HI), Baucus (MT), Bingaman (NM), Byrd (WV), Cantwell (WA), Carper (DE), Conrad (ND), Dorgan (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lieberman (CT), Lincoln (AR), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Pryor (AR), Rockefeller (WV), and Salazar (CO). Again, the italicized names are those Senators who voted the wrong way on the other two issues (abortion and bankruptcy). There are eleven Democrats who fit that category, including two Blue State Senators up for reelection this November, and none of them are named Joseph.

UPDATE [II]: Mark Schmitt, writing an early post-mortem for the junior Senator from the Nutmeg State, issues this howler:

...Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society.

The problem with that example is Lieberman voted against the bankruptcy bill last year, as my list above shows. He may have voted in favor of cloture beforehand, but since the bill had the support of seventeen other Democratic Senators, and had been debated, in one form or another, for some six years, voting in favor of finally ending debate on the matter was certainly defensible (unlike the Alito vote, which dealt with a judicial nomination only two months old, and which had the support of only four Democrats). With less than 30 Democrats in support of the bill, the cloture vote simply wasn't very important; the horses had already left the barn, if you will. Saying Lieberman "supported" the bankruptcy bill is not unlike the frequent refrain of the chickenhawks claiming that those who opposed the Iraq War were "supporting" Saddam.

.12: Apparently, it doesn't take a lot of booze to make Mel Gibson a raging, out-of-control neo-Nazi.

In making a defensible argument that Joe Lieberman should not be blamed for voting for cloture before he voted against the nomination of Samuel Alito, Dan Gerstein makes this indefensible point:

Up until this session of Congress, the filibuster was not even considered a fringe option for blocking Supreme Court nominees. With one notable exception, the case of Abe Fortas in 1968, the tactic had never been invoked to block a Supreme Court nomination. According to the official account by the Senate historian, Fortas was not torpedoed because of his ideology, but because of serious ethical issues.

(snip)

That all changed last year with the Roberts and Alito nominations. Some in the Democratic family decided that Bush's high court appointments had to be blocked by any means necessary, and the threat of a filibuster based purely on ideology was openly discussed. This of course prompted the whole showdown over the so-called "nuclear option, with Republicans threatening to change the Senate rules to permanently bar the use of filibuster for Supreme Court nominations if Democrats used the tactic against John Roberts or Alito.

Lieberman and other moderate Democrats then worked with the reasonable elements of the Senate Republican caucus -- the so-called gang of 14 -- to craft an agreement that would protect the right of the minority to filibuster court nominees in the future in extreme circumstances. That was his great sin -- finding a compromise with Republicans that helped Democrats, by preserving the precedent that had been followed for the entire history of the filibuster.

If Lieberman had supported the filibuster, it would not have changed the outcome at all. It would have, though, threatened the agreement he had made, which at the moment was the only thing standing in the way of the nuclear option being triggered and the filibuster being eliminated completely as a check and balance in Supreme Court nominations.

If Lieberman and the other members of the Gang of 14 had broken their word and backed the filibuster, it may have derailed the Alito nomination temporarily. But it would have had disastrous consequences, setting in motion a chain of events that ultimately would have resulted not only in the end of the filibuster as we know it, but in Alito getting on the bench in the end once the Senate rules were changed. Talk about a pyrrhic victory.

Besides totally mischaracterizing the Strom Thurmond-led movement to derail the Fortas nomination, which focused specifically on his high court rulings in favor of civil rights and limitations on the power of the state in criminal investigations, and ignoring the use of the filibuster against Clinton's nominees, Gerstein completely misses the point about why Lieberman's vote for cloture has infuriated so many Democrats. For Democrats, the "triggering of the Nuclear Option" wasn't a worse case scenario, to be avoided at any and all costs. It was, rather, the desired outcome, ending once and for all the noxious barrier to progressive legislation that the threat of a filibuster had blocked for so many years. The Gang of 14's pact ended up giving the Republicans everything they desired without having to make a politically unpopular vote, while maintaining the filibuster for a time when they are no longer hold the majority.

And even if Alito had ultimately been confirmed, Democrats would have had the satisfaction of having fought the President, tooth and nail, on the slogan it has used to rally its supporters in every Congressional election in the past 25 years when the GOP has controlled the Presidency: do we want the Republicans to be able to rubber-stamp the judicial picks that President Reagan or Bush makes. It would have been a sign that the Democrats were going to start to fight back, and not take it anymore.

Gerstein is correct that Lieberman's vote for cloture should not be viewed as one that assured the ascension of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, not when nearly half of his fellow Democrats followed suit, and not when the lefty blogosphere cared more about the apostacy of a Washington Post ombudswoman than the Alito nomination in the weeks leading up to the vote. If there had been a more concerted effort to rally "netroots" opposition to oppose the nomination, rather than a last-second, half-hearted circle jerk the weekend before, we might have been spared a cloture vote even coming up.

Scoop: In the just-released Woody Allen movie, Ian McShane based his character, a dissolute, recently-deceased journalist, on a certain "old British hack who you tolerate in this country."

After a month of the most oppressive, Global Warming-Affirmation of a heat wave I've ever experienced, comes this blessed day. It's 78 degrees in the Valley this afternoon, with just the right touch of humidity. A humid 78 degrees is the constant temperature in Heaven, I believe....

In the area of "better late than never" comes this tidbit, about an attempt to impeach U.S. District Judge Manuel Real. Judge Real consistently appears on the local list of Ten Worst Judges, and almost every attorney who appears in Federal Court on a consistent basis has a horror story about the man. As the Times Op-Ed suggests, this is the sort of thing that would be unnecessary if judges policed themselves, and/or if there was some reasonable limitation on the duration of time they could spend on the court.

I'm not saying that this is an open-and-shut case of sockpuppetry, but still, don't commit any prosecutable offenses in the judicial district surrounding LAX if you value your freedom.

As you might have been able to tell, I'm not the biggest fan of the lefty blogosphere's obsession with Joe Lieberman. There are other Democratic Senators whose voting records are clearly worse than Lieberman's, but who manage to receive a free pass from the commentariat, and the attempt to create an anti-abortion record for St. Joseph sometimes borders on the absurd. He may have voted the wrong way on My Big Issue at the beginning of the year (voting to end debate on the Alito Nomination), but then again, so did allmost half the Democratic caucus, including Daniel Akaka, who is embroiled in his own tough primary battle. His opponent, Ned Lamont, has yet to build a case for why anyone should vote for him (as opposed to voting against Lieberman). And the denunciations, eight years after the fact, of his courageous (but hardly lonely, among Senate Democrats) refusal to exonerate President Clinton for his sleazy betrayal of the charge the American People gave him, discredits the bloggers who make the argument.

But this posting by the Bull Moose exemplifies all the reasons why Ned Lamont must win. In denouncing "Joephobia" by a mythical loony left, Mr. Wittman loses all credibility in building a case for the junior Senator from the Nutmeg State. Contrary to his argument, Lieberman is being challenged not because of a "deep and obsessive loathing" of the Senator, but because a significant percentage of rank-and-file Democrats in that state no longer believe that he is representative of their views on the pivotal issue of the day, the ongoing wars in the Middle East. Wittman claims, sans supporting links, that:

The real passion of the left is the loathing of the President of the United States. The left's beef with Joe is that he believes that there should be some limits on political attacks on the Commander-in-Chief during wartime. However, it is an honorable tradition - exemplified by the late Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg - that politics should stop at the water's edge when the country is confronted with a hostile, aggressive enemy.

The Bush Administration should absolutely be subjected to tough accountability and scrutiny. It has made many grievous errors in this war. The Bushies have too often divided the country. But, should we lose all perspective? Radical Jihadism poses an existential threat to liberal civilization. And there should be some semblance of bi-partisan unity against this clear and present danger.

Contrary to Wittman's brief, there is a nearly universal and multipartisan consensus on dealing with "Radical Jihadism" or "Islamofascism" or "pan-Arabic terrorism", or whatever it is we're calling it this week. Defeating terrorism, preventing a repeat of 9/11, and allowing democratic pluralism to ultimately flourish are goals shared by almost every thinking person in the Republic. The parties may disagree about the means to do so, but not the ends.

It is not that Lieberman believes that "there should be some limits on political attacks on the President during wartime" that has so outraged the Democrats of Connecticut. It is that he has been too often silent when it comes to subjecting the President "...to tough accountability and scrutiny." On almost every aspect of the ongoing debacle in Iraq, Lieberman has been a not-so-silent partner of this Administration, from the decisions and rationale to go to war in the first place to the barbaric treatment of captured prisoners.

During WWII and the early stages of the Cold War, subjecting Democratic Presidents to such scrutiny was certainly not a task shied away from by Wittman's paragon, Senator Arthur Vandenberg. But then again, men like Vandenberg and Robert Taft considered themselves to be part of a Loyal Opposition, members of a coequal branch of government with its own duties and responsibilities. Lieberman, on the other hand, has seemed to be more interested with being every Beltway pundit's favorite "reasonable Democrat," a Cabinet Secretary without portfolio for the Bushies.

Even more offensive, though, is the accusation that the intra-party challenge to Lieberman is based on anti-Semitism:

The degree of left hatred toward Joe sometimes betrays something deeper. One can see it on the threads on left wing web sites where they routinely refer to "Holy Joe" and charge him with dual loyalty to Israel. Anti-Semitism will often not speak its name directly, but there is a distinct undercurrent that may explain some of the irrational venom.

Anti-Semitism is certainly not a primary factor driving the opposition to Joe. But, it is there. If you seek hostility to Jews and Israel, you will find it in the same left wing blogosphere that spreads the vile venom against Lieberman.

And according to Wittman, the Socialism of Fools is apparently not limited to Gentiles:

And it means little that some of Lieberman's critics are themselves Jewish. For over three decades, the Moose has witnessed the phenomena when Jews on the left and decent leftists turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism for the "good of the greater cause." The New Left had in its ranks many Jews who were silent or even abetted this evil.

As support for this malicious accusation, Wittman cites a commenter at HuffPost, and nothing else. The argument, of course, is absurd. It is no more anti-Semitic to oppose Joe Lieberman than it is racist to oppose Al Sharpton. One can only hope that this ludicrous charge will help undermine the argument in other areas; for too long, the frivolous use of the "anti-Semitic" (or "self-hating", depending on the mother of the accused) trope has prevented any sort of rational debate in this country about Middle East policy, in much the same way that the ugly use of the term "racist" mars our ability to debate issues like welfare reform and immigration.

To put it another way, is it anti-Native Hawaiian for Ed Case to be challenging Senator Akaka? Was it wrong for Dale Bumpers to challenge William Fulbright in the Democratic Senate primary in Arkansas back in 1974? Or for Lloyd Bentsen to throw his hat in the ring in Texas against Ralph Yarborough in 1970? Of course not. If a Senator loses touch with his constituents, he will eventually have to pay the price, and the same thing is true when he consistently battles the mainstream of his own party's rank-and-file. No one has a God-given right to hold the exalted position of U.S. Senator, not even when you're the punditocracy's Favorite Democrat.

YBK, THE SEQUEL: Foreclosure activity (ie., foreclosures and notice of default) in California has more than doubled in the second quarter of this year. Although that is a slight decline from the first quarter, and California remains below the national norm in terms of foreclosures, these are frightening numbers, particularly when you combine this with skyrocketing energy costs and the percentage of adjustable-rate mortgages homeowners have in this state. More foreclosures will lead to declining home values, which will diminish the net worth of property owners, making it harder to borrow and invest, leading to more defaults and bankruptcies, as people desperately try to use the last remaining resort to keeping their homes.

Oh, and have I mentioned they changed the bankruptcy laws last year....

Hope everyone had a Happy 25th of July yesterday !!

Kos, on Ohio '04:

In 2004, there was — there were a lot of claims that there was fraud in Ohio. And for several months, people, you know, kept talking about how George Bush stole the election in Ohio. And after enough of that, I thought, 'OK, the evidence isn't there. This is being counterproductive at this point. If you have new evidence that would indicate that, then by all means, you know, share.' But the same discredited, so-called facts were regurgitated over and over again, and finally I got tired of that. I thought it was destructive. I also banned that type of diary.

And I think, in a case like that, what the problem wasn't necessarily people saying that the election was stolen. It's they were making claims that it was voter-box stealing, when in fact, I think a really strong case can be made that enough people were disenfranchised in Ohio that perhaps that was the margin of victory for George Bush. And instead of focusing on the, on the real problems in the electoral system, such as ballot-box access, having people put in felon voter rolls when they were not felons, not enough boxes in poor neighborhoods, in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods while out in the suburbs, there can be an in-and-out voting in 15 minutes.

Those are real problems. And people are still fixated on, you know, the boxes — the black boxes were stolen. That, I thought, took the focus away. And then actually de-legitimize actual conversations on voter rights issues that actually, you know, voter right violations that happened in Ohio.

Read the whole interview, from "Nightline".

Blame It On Beckham? [link via Ezra Klein]

FYI: Democratic Senators who voted in favor of criminalizing assistance to minors who cross state lines to obtain a legal abortion without parental consent: Bayh (IN), Byrd (WV), Carper (DE), Conrad (ND), Dorgan (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Nelson (NE), Nelson (FL), Pryor (AR), Reid (NV), and Salazar (CO).

Bold means they are up for reelection in November, blue means they represent a state carried by Democrats in the past two Presidential elections.

Incidentally, Lieberman voted against the measure.

Pizzagasm: Why eating 'za is like casual sex....

The Samgrass Chronicles: Last month, I attended a local media function and met an English writer who was acquainted with Christopher Hitchens. He told me that Hitchens would bring a bottle of "Evian water" to his public speaking engagements, the "water" actually being an Evian bottle filled with straight vodka, and that as the debate would progress, it would be easy to spot him becoming more and more intoxicated. Here, Hitchens' "fake but accurate" defense of the Niger Forgeries this morning seems to be influenced by a generous helping of Smirnoff, washed down with a couple o' shots of Jagermeister.

Summer in L.A.: Hell is...a humid 118 degrees...with the air conditioning on the fritz.

Odds & Ends: Charles Pierce reminds us of a Senate primary where an incumbent critical of his own party was sacked by the voters...and the Media cheered from the sidelines. And has a prominent liberal blogger/author been caught sockpuppetting? Patterico builds a circumstantial case, here and here, while the blogger in question denies the charge, here.

Another reason to like Tour de France champion Floyd Landis...

[UPDATE (8/6/06)]: Retracted. Please disregard.

Sticking it to The Man: Did you know David Sirota has a book out? It's not like he ever mentions it on his website...or at HuffPost, where he puts up the same posts for people too lazy to visit his blog. Or that he uses the term "The Establishment" fourteen times in this post?

Ned Lamont not only has a comfortable lead among Connecticut Democrats, he is now dead even with all Nutmeg State voters, this poll finds.

Atrios links approvingly to this bit of unsubtle homophobia:

Randy Andy still seems to be having trouble figuring out if he's Roy Cohn or Oscar Wilde -- persecutor or persecuted. He's not alone: These days it seems like half of Right Blogistan is busy hurling accusations of betrayal and cowardice at the other half, while that other half is trying hard to ignore the many times it fired those same charges across the DMZ into Left Blogistan.
Well, let me help you out, Andy. To paraphrase Grady, the ghostly caretaker from The Shining: You're Roy Cohn. You've always been Roy Cohn. You may have managed to stuff your slime down your own memory hole, but you can't erase the electronic traces of it, which reveal that you aimed your little Wildean bon mot at Susan Sontag, Nom Chomsky, Michael Moore and Eric Alterman -- none of whom sympathized, immediately or later, with Al Qaeda, except in the diseased tissue of your own shrunken brain.

For whatever reason, Andrew Sullivan seems to turn the Kewl Kidz of the lefty blogosphere into W.A.T.B's. Over-the-top rhetoric that would make Ann Coulter blush always seems to find its way into attacks on someone who has recently become the blogosphere's most eloquent opponent of Bushism.

But I forgot: he once said nasty things about liberals in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. BFD.

Lance Who? With only a formality stage tomorrow, Floyd Landis is set to become the third American to win the only international competition Americans still do well in, the Tour de France. His comeback Thursday from eight minutes down is the stuff legends are made....

Dinosaur Rock:

I've really been saddened, in fact, by how often, when I drill down into anti-Lamonter motivations, I find their ideological and electoral motivations mere sandrock obscuring a core rage at this affront to tradition and orderly succession. I didn't believe this even a few months ago, but I've been forced to conclude that what scares folks about Lamont is that he represents an assault on privilege -- Joe Lieberman's, to be sure, but also theirs, no matter what sector of politics they currently represent.

In some ways, Lieberman is the canary in their coal mine, and if his sanctimonious song stops, so too may all of theirs. They never reacted this way to the Club for Growth primaries, or the Unions' promise to work against Melissa Bean, or NARAL's threats to primary Casey, because they were comfortable with the role and global motivations of those groups -- they were part of the structure, and they sought only to make it work better for them, not substantively challenge its mechanisms. The bloggers, however, are different, more unpredictable, less obviously invested in the perpetuation of this fine political system we have. And so they represent not a challenge to Joe Lieberman, but a challenge to the establishment as a whole. And that's why the establishment as a whole is howling.

--Ezra Klein

In fact, I bet if you look at ten or twenty of the most important political battles in the history of Western democracies, you'll find that most of them occurred within the same party, rather than in the actual battle for power itself. I'm reminded of what the Establishment forty years ago was saying when Eugene McCarthy had the audacity to challenge a sitting President for his party's nomination, in defiance of whatever conventional wisdom at the time said about how someone gets elected to that office. McCarthy was also a fairly undistinguished politician, like Lamont little more than a cipher, and his "followers" were motivated more by a desire to defeat LBJ than to bless the Republic with their candidate's ascension to power. LBJ didn't take the threat seriously until it was too late, and his career ended forthwith.

Little Green Firedogs (Pt. 2): On Bill Clinton's decision to campaign for St. Joseph:

Big Dog may not have taken it personally when Lieberman stabbed us all in the back with his speech on the floor of the Senate during the impeachment hearings, but many of us did. Loyalty to machine politics runs deep.

"Stabbed us all in the back?????" Of all the reasons one should support Ned Lamont, the fact that his opponent attacked President Clinton for lying under oath about an affair with an office underling should be way, way down on the list.

Hey, I love Elvis, thought he was the best President of the last half-century, hated Ken Starr and his GOP masters in Congress, and strenuously opposed the impeachment of the President. The entire matter was a ginned-up attempt to nail a politician they hated, and should be correctly regarded as one of the most distateful periods in American political history. Thanks to the GOP, the use of the impeachment mechanism to remove a President will be seen as a partisan stunt for a long time to come, something that a Congressional majority does to register its displeasure with a President of the opposing party.

But anyone who is so morally abtuse as to regard Clinton's behavior during the Lewinsky Affair as appropriate, not worthy of censure, really has a hollow core. In the autumn of '98, Clinton didn't do anything to earn our loyalty with his boorishness and dishonesty, so how can anyone other than his most obsequious retainers feel that Lieberman "stabbed us all in the back." Fighting for liberal principles doesn't entail putting on our collective kneepads everytime a Democrat is under attack for his sleazy transgressions.

It's a shame that the ratings for this year's Tour de France are in the toilet, because this year is the first time in awhile that there's actually a competition for the title, and an American might actually win it again.

Meltdown: Matt Stoller has a good exegesis of the shocking collapse of the Lieberman incumbency. Whoever said that this was like watching your standard-issue incompetent Democratic campaign consultant, but from the outside, really nailed it.

Garbo Talks: For those of you who've wondered what an Exchaton post might look like if he bothered to make an argument more substantive than "Wankers", "W.AT.B." or "Thread Away", this morning's local paper of record has an op-ed slice of Prof. Black, about the primary campaign against Joe Lieberman, that's well worth reading.

He hits all the right notes ("Lieberman's problem isn't bloggers, it's the voters of Connecticut, who seem to be increasingly tired of his support for some very uncivil policies, including federal intervention into the Terri Schiavo case, the administration's operations at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay and, yes, that disastrous invasion of Iraq"), eschews trite idioms (no reference to the "netroots"), and avoids even a semblance of the seething rage that has proven so cancerous to the progressive blogosphere. However, the lack of any positive reason for why the Republic needs Ned Lamont in the U.S. Senate is telling. Has there ever been a cipher with so devoted a cohort of loyal supporters as the Cable King? If Ned Lamont were running against Ben Nelson, a Democratic Senator whose record is quite a bit more conservative than Holy Joe's, would Lamont's "voice" and "vision" be as needed? Would anyone care?

Somalia 1, Rwanda 0: Absolutely my last soccer post for awhile.

In the wake of the unfolding tragedy in Lebanon, it's comforting to know that there are still people in the blogosphere who can post something so utterly and confoundingly clueless. Holy shit, indeed....

Bush Works Blue: Actually, the really embarassing thing is his eating with his mouth open. A classless, vulgarian buffoon.

UPDATE: Omigod. I remember how perturbed the British were twenty-five years ago when President Carter gave the Queen Mother a peck on the cheek. Now we've sunk to the level of having a President who's giving an unwanted neck message in public to the German Chancellor, just on the heels of dropping a vulgarity in the presence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. And that's the level of respect he gives to the world leaders who are his allies. I'm now wondering how it would effect my license to practice law if I turned in my passport....

Man Bites Dog: Blogger admits that he doesn't post about a subject because he doesn't know enough about it to make a worthwhile contribution. Jeez, it's never stopped me from posting on bankruptcy law....

Booted: Arena out as U.S. coach. No word on his replacement. I guess tying the World Champs only gets you so far.

The Midas Touch: What if you gave a dinner for campaign contributors, and no one showed up? It takes a special guest of honor to scare away the fat cats.... [link via Daily Kos]

Howard Owens is back, blogging up a storm in Kern County.

Solid Earth & Gold: I haven't mentioned her recently, but the World's Most Soulful Yooperchick, Annette Summersett, finally has her new C.D. out. Buy it now.

Memo to the Opposite Sex: This isn't sexy. Straight men don't find this to be an attractive look, and we don't respect women who pursue this course; in fact, we pity them. You cannot have a fulfilling, long-term relationship with those men who are attracted, since it's just as likely they are going to be prowling junior high schools looking for their next catch. For the love of Kobe, please don't do this to yourself. [link via Kausfiles]

17 Million: That's the number of people who saw the World Cup Final in the U.S. on ABC and Univision Sunday afternoon. That's a higher number than averaged seeing the 2006 NBA Finals, three times higher than the viewership for the 7th Game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and as high as the average for the 2005 World Series and NCAA Hoops Final, except those games were aired in prime time, and involved American teams. Its ratings were much higher than the final round of the Masters. It was seen by more Americans than saw this season's final episodes of 24 and Alias, combined...take that, Frank Deford.

Zizou apologizes, sort of, for his boneheaded loss of composure Sunday. He gets some props from, of all people, Paul Zimmerman (aka "Dr. Z"), SI's longtime football writer, here. Two other takes, based on the unsupported assumption that Zidane was the target of a racist jibe (something he hasn't claimed, yet), are here and here. It should also be pointed out for the record that Zidane's ancestry is not Arabic, it's Berber.

Italy 1, France 1 [P.K.-Ital. 5, Fra. 3]: The best World Cup final in twenty years, marred by an act of unforgivable idiocy by the game's best player in the final minutes of overtime.

Where to? For me, it's Over/Under in Santa Monica, which I seem to recall having a decided pro-Azzurri tilt....

Germany 3, Portugal 1: The Wrath of Kahn. A surprisingly well-played consolation game, with the host country getting two goals from the Pig Climber in the second half. Portugal had the run of play most of the match, but had no one who could stick it past Oliver Kahn, starting his first game of the tournament, until the final five minutes, when Luis Figo, possibly playing his last international game, set up a goal with a nifty pass. From hell's heart, I stab at thee....

Slate effectively puts the tiresome complaints about ESPN's soccer coverage, and particularly of Dave O'Brien, to bed, here. Money quote:

O'Brien didn't help his cause among the soccer cognoscenti by referring to them as a "petulant little clique." This country's soccer snobs—and I count myself among them—are a persnickety lot. They lament that most of the USA doesn't give a whit about the beautiful game but bridle at attempts to invite in nonloyalists by, say, explaining the meaning of a yellow card. Our little tribe is like the fans of an up-and-coming rock band. We want them to be successful, but when they break big, we resent the hordes of newbies who weren't cool enough to be there at the beginning. ESPN's biggest mistake here was underestimating the wrath of the soccer purist by choosing a baseball guy. O'Brien never got a fair hearing. Hell hath no fury like a footy supporter taken for granted.

But the numbers say plenty of people have tuned in. This ratifies rule No. 1 of television: No one watches (or doesn't watch) for the commentary. Here's rule No. 2: The quality of the game affects the quality of the commentary. O'Brien was excellent during the pulsating Germany-Italy match, which was decided in the dying seconds of overtime with a pair of dramatic goals. As the game got tense, he augmented the scene with context about the Italian match-fixing scandal. Otherwise, he let the match play out. On the other hand, O'Brien made a lot of enemies trying to flesh out the drab England-Paraguay match during the tournament's opening weekend. That's what you get for trying to keep people entertained.

Perhaps more telling is the fact that the guy doing the games for the Beeb is receiving attacks even nastier than the ones dished out by the elitist pricks in this country.

Best take on Lieberman v. Lamont:

Gee, kids, let's not play in front of old Joe Lieberman's house any more. Gosh, what an old grouch.

The Connecticut senatorial debate featured one guy who seemed to still be wearing the shrink-wrap and an 18-year incumbent doing a one-man impersonation of The Old Radley Place. Was politics ever fun for Joe Lieberman? If he's winning, he's burdened ever so by High Moral Purpose. If he's in trouble, which he is right now, he's beset on all sides by ingrates and mountebanks. It must be difficult to remain biblical if you cast yourself as Job AND Jehovah. And while Ned Lamont's most fervent acolytes occasionally seem to be writing for Tiger Beat, last night he was cool and precise and extremely disciplined. I don't know what kind of senator he'd make, but I wouldn't go into a business deal against him without body armor.

--Charles Pierce, in Tapped.

It seems Jerome Armstrong has a new client....

Little Green Firedog: I don't know Ann Althouse from Adam's off ox, but I'm not sure you're going to win many fans on the left by portraying Barbara Boxer as a baboon.

Why people should not drink, blog, and comment on the World Cup at the same time, from the Corner:

Makes You Wonder [Michael Ledeen]:

In today's "reportage" of the World Cup semifinal between Italy and Germany, the (lefty) Washington Post reported that the game-winning goal was scored on a left-footed kick, while the (righty) Washington Times reported it was scored on a right-footed kick. The Post account was correct, but don't you find it mysteriously symbolic of something or other?

Emphasis mine. Remember, he's not retarded, he's differently abled.

Since even Thomas Lipscomb has backed away from his assertion that he was "nominated" for a Pulitzer Prize, you would think that the wingers who backed him originally would feel chastened, or at least somewhat reticent about returning to the issue. But, lo and behold, there are some who continue to justify the original mendacity, by arguing that, well, everyone lies about being nominated for the Pulitzer. Tom Maguire brings up a USA Today journalist who claims three prior nominations, while Mark Hyman of Sinclair Broadcasting fame opines

Pulitzer receives 1400-1500 nominations in fourteen journalism categories each year. The organization lists on its website 2-3 names for each category of which one is designated the "winner" and the others are called "nominated finalists." Tom Lipscomb was nominated in the 2005 "Investigative Reporting" category by the New York Sun for his work exposing fabrications by John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. Lipscomb didn't finish among the top three. The Pulitzer staff told The Point they prefer the term "entrant" rather than "nominee" for anyone not selected among the top three. But they acknowledge it is common practice for newspapers to refer to everyone entered as having been nominated.

The last sentence is particularly disingenous, since what is "common practice" is for journalists who worked on articles for which the newspaper received a nomination (such as the USA Today reporter referenced by Maguire) to claim that they were "nominated". Technically, that isn't a true nomination either, but it's a far sight more factual than claiming that the thousands who send in entry forms are "Pulitzer nominees". As Ted Remington notes, by that standard Lipscomb could claim with equal validity to have been nominated to be Miss Universe.

France 1, Portugal 0: Taking advantage of a very generous call on a trip inside the penalty area (from the same ref who called the U.S.-Italy game, btw), Zinedine Zidane once again put off his retirement party for another day, converting in the 33rd minute to lift Les Bleus to the Final. Portugal appeared to be the better team, controlling the ball for long periods in the second half, but had no one who could put the ball in the back of the net; the low point came when Figo missed a point-blank header less than ten feet from the goal in the final twelve minutes, after Fabien Barthez made one of his patented bobbles off a Christiano Ronaldo free kick.

Ronaldo was jeered at the entire game, no doubt due to the combination of the events Saturday, when he was front-and-center in the maneuvering that got Wayne Rooney sent off, but mostly because he wears that handsome, smug, shit-eating Tom Cruise grin. Nevertheless, he played exceptionally, giving his side numerous opportunities to score, but it appears that Man U may be about to perform a Perugia, and tell him to hit the road. A defense of Ronaldo is made here, in the middle of a column that is a hardy perennial in English sportswriting, the blanket attack on anything and everything that has to do with the Three Lions. It has all the classic essentials of such a piece: the personal attack on the coach, his assistants, and his team selection; the character blasts on the star players (Beckham, Rooney and Lampard); the indefensible notion that reaching the quarterfinals is tantamount to a national disaster; and, my favorite, the extolling of the Magical 1966 champions. Brian Glanville has written the same banal piece after every international tournament since 1970.

There's a kernel of truth to these attacks. England may have made the quarterfinals this time, but they never looked very impressive, and for the coach to select a teenage player who had never started in the bigs, at a position for which his squad was thin, in favor of other, more experienced players, then never seeing fit to use him during the tournament, deserves all the ridicule one can muster. But the notion that all England needs is a good coach to start dominating the World Cup is, frankly, nuts. Of the other major soccer powers, it draws from the smallest population base, thanks to the archaic division that allows Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to field different teams. England did win one World Cup, in 1966, because a) it hosted the tournament; b) Pele was injured; and c) the English got a terrible call in the Final that gave them an undeserved goal. The U.S. will win a World Cup before England wins its second.

And, of course, culturally, the present age is not a particularly rich time in English history. Its film industry is decrepit, churning out costume dramas and little else. Kylie Minogue is considered a major pop star. A culture that continuously spits out and relentlessly hypes the Spice Girls, Oasis, Guy Ritchie, Kate Moss, Coldplay, Robbie Williams and Kate Beckinsale, that elects and reelects the likes of Tony Blair, and that considers Christopher Hitchens, Julie Burchill, Tina Brown and Mark Steyn to be "public intellectuals", can't help but ensure that its athletic heroes are going to be drawn from the same low hanging fruit.

Italy 2, Germany 0 [O.T.]: A great finish. The Azzurri maintained their unbeaten record against Germany in World Cup play, scoring two goals in the final two minutes of play after putting a relentless onslaught at the German goal in extra time. Having been eliminated the last four World Cups in extra time or penalty kicks, the Italians finally got the breaks. Grosso, a defender, hit a perfect curl in the 118th minute after a corner kick, which the Italians had performed poorly the whole game, then sub Del Pierro converted on a breakaway in the waning seconds of action.

Some belated perspective on the American position in world soccer: on Sunday, a team will be playing in the World Cup final that failed to beat the U.S. in the same tournament, in spite of playing with a man-advantage for half that game.

If I were a Democrat in Connecticut, I'd vote for Ned Lamont. Having said that, Lieberman has every right in the world to run for his party's nomination, and, losing that, preserve the option of running as an independent in November. If its "democracy" to challenge a sitting incumbent within a primary, there should be no objections to that same incumbent trying to win by appealing to voters outside the party. Elections are won by getting more votes than the other guys, not having the election handed to you in a one-party state because you win your primary. If Lieberman believes he would win a plurality of votes by running as an independent, bully for him.

I just don't want to hear about any sitting Democratic Senator (that means you, Charles Schumer) knifing Lamont in the back if he wins.

Smythe Gets Results: Remember the Pulitzer "nomination" boasted by Swift Boat backer Thomas Lipscomb, whose columns on the subject were touted as the most persuasive on the subject by numerous right wing bloggers. Well, the Pulitzer claim has now been scrubbed from his bio, which now reads that "his work was entered for the Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 2005." In other words, someone (maybe himself) filled out an entry form on his behalf.... [link via Daily Kos]

France 1, Brazil 0: Les Bleus own Brazil. For the third time since 1986, France eliminated Brazil, with Thierry Henry's goal in the 57th minute proving decisive. The collapse of the defending champions, who were dominated in a manner not heretofore seen at this level, was utterly inexplicable. Another superb game by Zinedine Zidane, whose perfectly placed free kick found Henry wide open at the mouth of the Brazilian goal; amazingly, it was the first time in the 55 matches they had played together that Zidane had ever assisted on an Henry goal. Coming less than a week after conservative politician Jean Marie Le Pen had attacked the team for not reflecting the French people, a team whose starting line-up consists of seven black players, including Saturday's goal scorer, and is led by the child of Algerian immigrants can feel especially vindicated.

It sets up an all-Europe semifinal, with Axis powers Italy and Germany meeting on the 4th of July, while their wartime lackeys face off the following day. Brazil remains the only non-European team to take the Cup on European soil, while no European team has ever won the Cup outside the continent.

Portugal 0, England 0 [P.K.-Port 3-1]: Damn penalty kicks. In a game which England dominated, in spite of playing a man down for the final 58 minutes, the lack of an assured goalscorer proved decisive. Portugal, the only nation still left that has never won a World Cup, advances to their first semifinal in forty years, and assures that this year's winner will be a country that was at one time ruled by a fascist government. A devastating loss for the English; this was by far their best game of the tournament, and the red card given to Wayne Rooney is further evidence that the world's dumbest soccer players play for the Three Lions.

Great Moments in Crackerdom: Overheard by a spectator at the annual Dems v. GOP Congressional Baseball Game:

Two rows behind me is Congressman Bilbray. A lot of people walked by and said congratulations and all that, and these two guys stop and say it and that they were out in San Diego for election day helping him. And Bilbray says ‘you guys were great out there, that’s an election day you can tell your grandkids about, let’s just hope you don’t have to tell them in Spanish!”

[Link via Wonkette]

Italy 3, Ukraine 0: To no one's surprise, the Azzurri are through. Gianluca Zambrotta's goal in the sixth minute was all Italy needed, and Luca Toni ensured the Ukrainians would sleep with the fishes by scoring two easy tap-ins in the second half. Ukraine came close several times, hitting the cross bar twice, but failed to score on Gianlugi Buffon, who has yet to allow a shot past him in the World Cup.* The only blemish on Italy, as they head to the semifinals on July 4 against Germany, is the 1-1 draw with the U.S.

*The only goal he conceded was an own goal.

Germany 1, Argentina 1 [P.K.- Ger., 4-2]: Klose Kall. Trailing by a goal with less than ten minutes to play, Germany equalized via the head of Miroslav Klose, then prevailed on penalty kicks over an exhausted Argentinean team playing its second extra time in less than a week. It was everything predicted, at least for the first ninety minutes, as both sides through everything they had at the other, Argentina grabbing a lead just after the start of the second half, only to lose their momentum when goalkeeper Roberto Abbodanzieri had to be replaced following a collision with Michael Ballack. The tense action during regulation gave way to a tentative overtime, with both sides, previously unbeaten in penalty kicks, seemingly content to run out the clock. Then Jens Lehmann, whose controversial selection as starter over legend Oliver Kahn threatened to drive Jurgen Klinsmann of the country out on a rail, came up big, stopping goalscorer Roberto Ayala to clinch a place in the semis.

Todd Zywicki, who normally writes apologias for last year's awful Bankruptcy Reform Act, has a rather thoughtful piece on the World Cup, and its sudden emergence as a major event on the American sports calendar:

The way to think of sports, I think, is like fashion (I'm sure this isn't original to me). The rising and falling interest in sports over time is just a matter of changing tastes, rather than one sport or another being better or worse than another. Having just read Jeremy Schapp's "Cinderella Man" I was stunned to learn how popular boxing was in the 1930s compared to all other sports. Babe Ruth's scandalously large contracts during that era were a small fraction of the amount that Jack Dempsey would pull down for one fight. Today, boxing is a borderline fringe sport. Ditto for horse racing. The Olympics may or may not be in a permanent death spiral--I suspect that it is too early to tell. Hockey has gone from one of the country's "four major sports" to essentially the same level as Major League Soccer, and I think the NHL strike just expedited a trend that was already underway. It is now standard to refer to the "three major sports" in the U.S. Casual sports fans used to be expected and able to watch and politely talk about the Stanley Cup playoffs; today that is no longer the case.

So, the World Cup is becoming more popular because, well, it is becoming more popular. For whatever reason, one can speculate. But I'm guessing it has little to do with the intrinsic merits of soccer and more to do with the fact that it is becoming part of the lexicon of the casual sports fan, perhaps because it is fun to be wrapped up in an event of such global proportions. But, for instance, I don't expect much crossover from the World Cup's popularity to MLS. In the sense I am thinking of it, MLS is essentially a different sport from the World Cup because it is wrapped in a different social network, not because it is somehow a different sport.

Zywicki's observation about the malleable trendiness of certain sports is well worth noting. When I first started following sports some thirty years ago, the sports landscape we know of today was much different than it was then. Baseball was inarguably the national pastime, with pro football battling with college football for second. The NBA was a distant third, with half-filled arenas and title games broadcast at 11:30 p.m., and college basketball a sideshow, with attention paid only when the "UCLA Invitational" reached the finals. Pro hockey had no Sun Belt presence worth noting, and soccer barely existed. And every four years, everyone watched the Olympics, and unless you were willing to plunk down cash to see closed circuit broadcasts of the event, no one saw the World Cup.

With individual sports, the landscape was even more different. When one spoke of tennis, it was almost exclusively of the men's game, and it was considered a major sport, light years ahead of golf in terms of popularity. Women's tennis was considered a novelty; some interest would be paid if Billie Jean King was in the finals, but beyond that, nothing. Not only would Muhammed Ali routinely defend his title on live prime time network TV, so too would fighters in lower weight classifications, like Carlos Monzon and Roberto Duran. Track and field was also a major sport in the U.S.; the annual dual meet between the US and Soviet Union was one of the big events of the late summer. The Indy 500 was much, much bigger than the Daytona 500; NASCAR was considered minor league, and A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti routinely dominated that circuit when they deigned to race in it. The Triple Crown in horse racing was huge; you weren't a sports fan if you could not name the previous year's winners. And obviously, thirty years ago there was no cable sports TV to speak of; a fan pretty much got to see his local teams, the Game of the Week, and little else.

None of the changes over the last thirty years occurred overnight. In the U.S., cable television has pretty much obliterated the sports world we knew of back in 1975. It not only fueled the explosive growth of sports like football (both pro and college), where the public appetite can now be sated by wall-to-wall broadcasts of games over fall weekends, but it has also enabled other sports, like soccer and hockey, to survive even with a fraction of the public interest. It has created public interest in activities (X-Games, poker, hot dog eating, spelling bees) that weren't even imaginable as spectator sports thirty years ago, and given female athletes celebrity that exceed that of men in the same sport (as with tennis or U.S. soccer), at the same time that few people know who the heavyweight champion(s) is, or can name another male tennis player besides Roger Federer.

The changes fueled by cable television are what makes a broadcast of the World Cup possible in the U.S. Otherwise, it would be impossible to justify televising all sixty-four games of a tournament for a sport few English-speaking people in the country follow. With so many channels available, each of them appealing to a separate niche, televising Serbia v. Ivory Coast or Angola v. Iran becomes viable; American soccer viewers are now plentiful enough to sustain the needs of advertisers, so that even the lowest-rated games in the World Cup are higher than what would typically be shown by ESPN at that time.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that today's Supreme Court decision invalidating the President's "innovative" interpretation of due process would be seen as surprising, rather than just a routine assertion of what a fair trial is supposed to look like.

Halfway through my forty-eight hour decompression, I present you some...fun with numbers !!

The long-awaited decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Tom Delay gerrymander is out, and it's a split decision (literally: it was 5-4, with something like six different opinions). A couple of the districts will have to be redrawn on Voting Rights Act grounds, which may help the Democrats pick up a seat, but the principal of mid-term reapportionment was sustained by the Court. This could be super good news for the Democrats over the long run, since legislative districts can now be redrawn everytime the party captures the governorship and state legislature in a state. Rather than waiting until the next census, the party can rely on any big year at the ballot box to make changes (ie., Ohio in 2006, anyone?).

UPDATE: A more pessimistic view of the decision is here. Certainly, in states where Democrats now have control of the state government, like Illinois, creating even more Democratic districts will be tough, because of the Voting Rights Act. While that constrains the party from encouraging immediate reapportionment, the key will be how well Democrats do in statewide races in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio, where the Republicans have a decided partisan edge in House membership even though the states are split down the middle between the parties. Should the Democrats capture the governorship and the legislature in just one of those states, since today's ruling gives a stamp of approval for the redrawing of districts as early as next year, it would wipe out much of the current GOP edge in the House.

So much for a powerful wave of xenophobia carrying the GOP to victory in November. Utah Republican Congressman Chris Cannon, who was targeted by anti-immigrant groups for his moderate stance on the issue, won an easy primary victory tonight over a challenger who ran a single-issue campaign based on anti-immigration. If there was any deep-seated obsession among the conservative base (Utah, anyone?) on this issue, it would have shown up here.

France 3, Spain 1: Two late goals from '98 vets Vieira and Zidane enabled Les Bleus to maintain its perfect all-time record against Spain, and advanced to a quarterfinal rematch with Brazil. The Spanish, on the other hand, maintained its perfect streak of never having failed to disappoint in the World Cup.

Part of the story of this evening's game will be how France has managed to drift aimlessly through the first round, barely doing enough to qualify with a 1-0-2 record, only to "suddenly" catch fire and surprise the Spanish, who had looked so impressive in the first two weeks. It's always a story when that happens, even though it seems to happen every World Cup.

For instance, in 1970, Italy finished the first round with a 1-0-2 record, managing only one goal, and failing to score against both Uruguay and Israel, but still qualified for the quarterfinal. They went on to lose in the Final to Brazil. In 1978, Holland went 1-1-1 in the first round, including an embarassing loss to Scotland, and qualified for the second round only on goal differential. Again, they caught fire, and took Argentina to overtime in the Finals before losing. In 1982, Italy went 0-0-3 in the opening round, and again got out of the group on goal differential. They ended up winning it all, beating West Germany, a team that lost its opener and also only making it out on goal differential.

And so it goes. The West Germans again had to struggle in 1986, losing to Denmark, tying Uruguay, and rallying to beat Scotland in the first round. Even after they squeaked out of their group, they didn't get hot right away. They beat Morocco, 1-0, on a goal in the final three minutes, then knocked out Mexico on penalty kicks (after a scoreless game) to go to the semis, where France completely dominated them from start to finish. However, the Germans scored a fluke goal early, then snatched the clincher when the French sent everyone forward at the end, thereby earning the right to lose to Argentina in the Finals.

Four years later, it was Argentina's turn to live dangerously. After losing to Cameroon in the Cup opener, they needed a late goal to tie Romania and advance to the second round, where Brazil slapped them all over the field for 81 minutes, only to score on their only opportunity of the day, and win 1-0. As with the West Germans four years earlier, the quarterfinal featured a scoreless tie, this time against Yugoslavia, which was then followed by a 1-1 tie against Italy in the semis. In both instances, the gods smiled on them in the penalty kick phase, and the RG's suddenly found themselves in the Finals. And in 1994, Italy started off 1-1-1 in its first round games, again advancing only on goal differential. They never looked that impressive en route to the Finals, scoring two goals late to beat Nigeria, beating Spain 2-1 in the quarters, then getting some questionable non-calls against Bulgaria in the semis to win, 2-1.

In 1998 and 2002, each of the Finalists breezed through the first round, so it's not like the Finals have to include at least one team that started slowly (although France in '98 and Germany in 02' did not set the world ablazin' in the games leading into the Finals). But how well you play in the opening round is not a reliable barometer on who goes all the way, and fans of France and England should be advised that other squads have played even more poorly than theirs, yet have still been able to play for the gold trophy at the end.

Brazil 3, Ghana 0: Ronaldo completely pulled the pants off Ghanaian goalkeeper Richard Kingson in the fifth minute, juking and jiving before drilling a shot into the back of the net for his record-breaking 15th career World Cup goal, as Brazil beat a game African squad to advance to next Saturday's quarterfinal. Both this article and the ESPN broadcast noted how the Black Stars played the more attractive soccer, and "dominated" the action, which, quite frankly, is bullshit. Brazil scored right off the bat, played prevent defense and allowed Ghana only a couple of good scoring chances, and hit back when they needed to. Ghana kicked the ball around more, and to use the euphemism favored by soccer geeks, played "creatively" (ie., they looked good when ineffectually firing the ball at the goal), but the game was never in doubt. The score could have easily been 7-0; only the brilliant play of Kingson kept the game respectable. Ronaldinho still hasn't scored, btw.

A great inventor dies.

A level-headed, non-elitist critique of the O'Brien-Balboa announcing team, as well as why many of us who understand little espanol still prefer watching the Univision broadcasts, in the NYT World Cup blog. And to follow up on last week's post on the killer ratings the Cup is getting, here's a story from the heart of Red American, Atlanta, where the U.S.-Italy game last Saturday outdrew all three games of the Braves-Red Sox series, the U.S. Open, and that week's NASCAR event.

I suppose the two questions people have of over the new Mrs. Urban's nuptials last night are 1) how come it was in a Roman Catholic church, if her previous marriage wasn't annulled; and 2) why was she wearing white? Well, for an answer to the first question, at least, go here...Andrew Sullivan has more.

Ukraine 0, Switzerland 0 [P.K.-Ukr., 3-0]: The Swiss accomplished two dubious firsts, one ignomonious, one bittersweet, in the process of being eliminated by Ukraine. After both teams failed to score in ninety tedious minutes of regulation and thirty undramatic minutes of overtime, Switzerland failed to make a single penalty kick, the first time that had ever happened in a World Cup. Moreover, after shutting out their opponents for the fourth straight game, they became the first team to ever go an entire World Cup without surrendering a single goal. The Ukraine now take on Italy this Friday in the quarterfinals.

Italy 1, Australia 0: An absolute heartbreaker for the Socceroos. Francesco Totti converted a penalty kick on the final play of the game to lead the Azzurri to a spot in the quarterfinals. Australia had a man advantage almost the entire second half, and seemed prepared to take the edge into the thirty-minute overtime, when disaster struck.

Portugal 1, Holland 0: In the ugliest game of the tournament to date, Portugal used a goal halfway through the first half by Maniche to edge the Oranje (who, incidentally, were wearing their away gear, which inexplicably has no orange in it. What gives?), as the first of the World Cup co-favorites gets bounced. Nine of the fourteen Portuguese players who saw action got carded, opposed to seven of the Dutch players, and some of the record-tying sixteen yellow cards were even deserved. Both sides finished with nine men. Kudos to referee Valentin Ivanov, for reminding soccer fans that at the end of the day, it's really the refs that are the story, not the players. Portugal next plays England, but will be without playmaker Deco, who received a red card for, believe it or not, delaying the game, and, in all likelihood, Man U. star Cristiano Ronaldo, who was badly injured in the first half.

Steve Gilliard, whose "e-mails" figure prominently in the New Republic's fatwa against Kos, responds here. It's an eloquent and measured post, indicating that on a very key point in Jason Zengerle's argument, something may have been falsely atributed to Gilliard, and at the very least, TNR owes the man an apology (least of all for quoting private e-mail), and the rest of us an explanation.

[UPDATE: Zengerle has now, kinda sorta, apologized, admitting that the Gilliard e-mail was bogus, but then claiming that "this error is of a relatively minor nature," which unfortunately will allow "others to try to use this minor error to distract people from much larger issues" (including, swear to Kobe, whether Kos' buddy Jerome Armstrong was once a believer in astrology), and refusing to out the source who gave him this Fake-But-Accurate memo.]

The New York Times has a good summary of the collapse of immigration reform in Congress. Although most of the article focuses on the problems Bush has had with House Republicans, it really underlines how the Democrats have hit the Trifecta. Not passing any bill shows that Bush and the Republicans can't get anything done, depressing turnout among the base in much the same way that the failure to pass a health care bill doomed the Democrats in 1994. Second, taking an extreme anti-immigrant position turns off swing voters who are less passionate about the issue, and are amenable to a compromise that doesn't vilify immigrants. And lastly, it dooms efforts by the GOP among Latino voters, who stand to be much more important, over the long haul, than any latent conservative appeals to xenophobia, as the California Republican Party can attest. The Republicans may be on the verge of creating a Democratic base in the Southwest, and more significantly, making Texas a two-party state again, that may rival the solidly Blue Northeast come election time.

England 1, Ecuador 0: David Beckham provided all the offense England needed with a patented swerving free kick in the 60th minute, then threw up moments later due to dehydration caused by the extreme humidity in Stuttgart. England almost never loses games like this in the World Cup, and they did just enough to win today. None of the athleticism Ecuador showed in their first two games was evident here. In spite of the fact that Beckham has never really come up big in the World Cup, he is now the only English player in history to score in three different Cups. All in all, a morning yawner.

Argentina 2, Mexico 1 [O.T.]: Unbelievable game. Maxi Rodriguez hit the goal of the tournament nine minutes into overtime, as the the popular favorites took everything the Tricolores had for 120 minutes. Both teams swapped goals in the first nine minutes, then exchanged body shots the rest of the way before Rodriguez hit his gamewinner. Those who have attached Team U.S.A. as "overrated" should note that Mexico is a team we routinely beat. Next up is an epic quarterfinal between Argentina and Germany, a rematch of the 1986 and 1990 World Cups.

The local paper had an op-ed piece yesterday by a local talkradio blowhard, who discovered the startling numbers Univision has been getting for its World Cup coverage and posited the notion that the Reconquista has occurred. Imagine, more people are watching Spanish language coverage on Univision than on ABC (a phenomenum that has been true in L.A. for the 25 years that the games have been broadcast). More people are tuning into Mexico's games than the U.S.' (bfd, most soccer fans in SoCal aren't American citizens, they're immigrants; why should they root for the U.S.?). Being a sports fan means developing a loyalty to a team, a loyalty that doesn't get abandoned simply because you move away. If a Mexican immigrant were to immediately abandon El Tris and start rooting for the U.S., that would be stark evidence he's untrustworthy and not fit to be a U.S. citizen, and he should be deported immediately. Who wants someone in our country whose loyalty is so pliable?

Germany 2, Sweden 0: Lukas Podolski scored twice in the first twelve minutes, and Germany dominated an undermanned and outclassed Swedish team the rest of the way to earn a quarterfinal berth, probably against Argentina on Friday. Germany's performance through four games has been a vindication over the controversial, "American" tactics of manager Jurgen Klinsmann, who now finds himself the frontrunner to assume the same position with the U.S. Klinsmann lives in Orange County, and would no doubt find the move less taxing.

One of the more popular postings on World Cup-related blogs has been an attack on the lead announcing team for ESPN-ABC's broadcast, Dave O'Brien and Marcelo Balboa. Boycotts of the English language broadcasts have been proposed, an online petition has been started, demands that the Disney corp apologize for this massive affront to American soccer fans: a veritable clusterfuck of indignation. For most of the people watching, it's hard to see what the outrage is about. The broadcast sounds like a typical American sporting broadcast, not unlike what you would hear if the sport was basketball or baseball, the sport O'Brien hails from.

The real reason for the outrage is simple. Native-born American soccer fans are elitist pricks. Soccer is the only sport that is regularly attacked in the sports section, so we have to had to develop a pretty thick skin over the years. We have had to go out of our way to get our soccer fix, hitting pubs at 5 in the morning to watch Premier League games, picking up rudimentary Spanish to follow the broadcasts on Univision. As a result, we have come to see ourselves as a Band Apart: we're not the ones with the problem, it's the ordinary American sport fan, who despises soccer as an element from a foreign culture, that misses the point. When the World Cup comes around every four years, the sport picks up more than a few casual fans, fans who aren't in the slightest bit interested in the Bundesliga or the lastest fixing scandal in Serie A, but who are intrigued by the international flavor and intensity of the event, and those fans easily outnumber the native-born fanatics.

So it's not like Dave O'Brien is doing an inept job announcing the games.* Any American announcer would be getting blasted; every American who has attempted to announce World Cup games in the past, from Jim McKay to Mario Machado to Charley Jones to J.P. Dellacamera, has been blasted by the American Soccer Fan. It's part of the snob appeal of the sport, not unlike how the connoisseur of the music felt when Ken Burns did his documentary on the history of jazz; if an American is doing the game, and he's bringing techniques learned and crafted from announcing other American sports, he's going to get roasted. It says less about the quality of O'Brien's work and more about the chip on the shoulder that the native born fan has towards American culture

*One of the attacks, I swear to God, is that one of the announcers allegedly called the English goalkeeper Paul Robinson, "Paul Robbins", a syllable that probably gets dropped a hundred times during the Premier League season by announcers trying to think on their feet in the middle of a game.

A good thumbnail guide to the various teams that made it to the Round of 16, starting tomorrow.

Switzerland 2, South Korea 0: The last Asian team (and the side with the loudest fans) gets sent home early. The Swiss scored once in each half, and used a rock-solid defense to crush everything the Koreans threw at them, to get the win and the group title. Next up: Ukraine.

Incidentally, Sunday's telecast on ABC featured a look-in at fans of the Korean team at a packed Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Many of those fans chanted and sang in Korean, and waved Korean flags in celebration after their team scored late to tie France. And yet, none of the Minutemen xenophone-types were complaining about such blatant disregard for the feelings of true Americans....