Fanshen: The more one reads of other lefty bloggers concerning l'affaire Nyhan, the more I can see how comfortable many of us would have been participating in one of those Maoist circlejerks during the Cultural Revolution. Apparently, one of the crosses we must bear in the political wilderness is our obligation to denounce any self-criticism, unless the criticism is that we aren't revolutionary enough.

As usual, Andrew Sullivan is eloquent on the Torture Agreement:

The trouble is: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Addington are not gentlemen. If we have learned anything these past few years, it is that they are not to be trusted on the torture question, that they have lied repeatedly and knowingly and insistently, that their use of the English language is designed to obfuscate and obscure the reality they are advancing, and the constitutional freedoms they are bent on dismantling. In so far as this bill grants this president discretion in enforcing Geneva, it means that the standards of Geneva will not apply under this president - although they might under a more civilized and competent one.

I should add that it is essential to the integrity of language and law that the word torture not be defined out of existence. Waterboarding, hypothermia, long-time-standing, and various forms of stress positions are torture, have always been torture and always will be torture. What we must do is what Orwell demanded: speak plain English before it evaporates from our discourse, refuse to acquiesce to the corruption of language and decency. In that respect, the press must continue to ask both McCain and all administration representatives whether passing this bill means that waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, long-time-standing or stress positions are now illegal and unavailable to the CIA. They must not be allowed to get away with the answer that they will not mention specific techniques. The specifics are everything. And we must not be snowed by abuse of English into saying something is true when it isn't. Until they are completely forthcoming on these critical details, this bill should not be passed. Moreover, something this complex and this grave should not be rushed into law with round-the-clock haste. We need this to be debated and deliberated slowly. Which means leaving it to the next session of Congress.

Amen.

I think one of the things that is proving so uncomfortable about President Chavez' literal demonization of President Bush is that we Americans are finally seeing the rhetorical excesses of our own leaders from the opposite side. Hugo Chavez is most definitely a buffoon, but was his speech at the U.N. really any different from what we have come to expect hearing out of the mouth of George Bush? [link via Altercation]

Europe 5, U.S. 3: This time, Woods returns to past Ryder Cup form, and loses the afternoon four-ball battle. The world's greatest golfer is now 8-12-2 against Europe in his career, including a lame 6-11-1 when paired with a teammate. About the best that can be said right now is that the U.S. started better than it did last time, when it trailed 11/2-61/2 after the first day, or in 1999, when it trailed 2-6 at Brookline before rallying Sunday.

Europe 2 1/2, U.S. 1 1/2: Trying to end a miserable year for American sports, the U.S. started quickly in the 36th Ryder Cup, with Tiger and Furyk thwarting years of futility in this tournament by winning the opener (over Monty, no less !!), but the favored Euros took charge in the subsequent matches of the morning to take the early lead. Lefty, natch, found a way to lose.

On the McCain "compromise":

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of “grave breaches” of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret.

Even before the compromises began to emerge, the overall bill prepared by the three senators had fatal flaws. It allows the president to declare any foreigner, anywhere, an “illegal enemy combatant” using a dangerously broad definition, and detain him without any trial. It not only fails to deal with the fact that many of the Guantánamo detainees are not terrorists and will never be charged, but it also chokes off any judicial review.

The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.

--N.Y. Times editorial, 9/22/06

LA Observed notes a disturbing effect of the penny-pinching afflicting the local paper of record: the use of writers from out-of-town newspapers affiliated with Tribune Inc. in the pages of the LA Times. Not only is it occurring in the sports section (in spite of the two local NHL teams, Kings and Ducks away games will not be covered by a beat reporter this season), but it has also occurred with some annoying frequency elsewhere. I suppose it's one thing to farm out writing on NASCAR to writers from areas where the sport is something more than an annual event, but the Times has used Chicago Tribune film critics to review several recent releases, including Gridiron Gang, starring the Rock, the inner-city hoops drama Crossover, and Charles Sturridge's Lassie; I guess it would have been next to impossible to find anyone locally with any interest in movies. It will probably be a matter of time until its national political reporting consists largely of wire service copy.

Jacob Weisburg raises the possibility that maybe the Democrats shouldn't want to capture one or both houses of Congress, before scotching the notion entirely. The view that it's actually a good thing not to win the next election is pretty common, particularly with ideologues, and is usually based on the false premise that once things get worse, as they surely will, the people will hold the party that wins accountable. This mid-term may not be as important as winning the Presidency in 2008, or even winning the mid-term in 2010, but a Democratic win this November would have positive historic implications, even if it lessens our chances of victory two years from now.

Remember when Stephen Colbert was actually...funny?

Actually, it wasn't that long ago. The Colbert Report was still airing episodes with humor and wit as recently as late-August; it's just that his post-Labor Day efforts have been the comedic counterpart to the Oakland Raiders offense.

This is an interesting way for the top law enforcement officer in the country to be spending his weekend: with Ann Coulter and Jerry Falwell, before an organization that shares its mailing list with David Duke.

An interesting summary on the instititutional reasons military lawyers oppose the Bushies' efforts to "clarify" the Geneva Conventions, here.

Even Nixon's doodles seem over-programmed....

One of my favorite liberal bloggers, Brendan Nyhan, gets canned because he refused to kiss enough liberal ass in the blogosphere, less than a week after he attacked the use of an urban legend for anti-Bush purposes at Eschaton. Having someone like Nyhan around calling bullshit can be very frustrating, but it's worth it if it forces you to show greater discipline when blogging, and being more attentive to the facts. It's the easiest thing in the world to find something on the internet that proves conclusively whatever preconceived notions you might have are correct. What's hard is double-checking your link to see if it's true. Mau-mauing Nyhan means Atrios and friends never have to challenge their own preconceptions, or take any care in what they post. They can go back to calling other people "wankers" or "liars", and be content in their own version of reality, freed from the constraints of building a reasoned case in support of their ideals. In fact, it's not unlike a certain occupant of the White House.

"HABEUS CORPUS MATTERS" The "twisted priorities" of Roger Waters.

Dodgers 11, San Diego 10: Unfreakingbelievable.

The always fun-to-observe Rasmussen numbers now have St. Joseph up by only two over Ned Lamont. Rasmussen has consistently had this race closer than other polls, so take this with a grain of salt.

UPDATE [9/20]: An ARG poll has the same margin. Lieberman is losing slightly among independents. The Republican candidate is drawing less than 5%, so any improvement at his end can only help Lamont.

Huh?

Angelenos and news-crits: Before you rush to agree with LAT columnist Tim Rutten's self-satisfiedly righteous denunciation of the evil, greedy absentee-owning Tribune Company: 1) Do you really think Dean Baquet couldn't put out a high-quality Los Angeles newspaper with a mere 800 editorial employees (instead of the current 940)? The Washington Post operates with about 800 editorial employees. It's pretty good! 2) If you are a reporter at the LAT, do you really want to work at a paper owned by Eli Broad, Ron Burkle, or David Geffen--three of the local billionaires you should be covering? They aren't known as people who like bad press. ...

P.S.: The LAT has become a much better paper under Baquet--better than it ever was under the Chandlers--while it's cut back staff. Does that bolster the argument against cutting?

--Mickey Kaus

Wow, where does one start? First, the metropolitan area of Los Angeles has a population of almost 18 million people, making it more than twice the size of the D.C.-Baltimore metropolitan area. Besides the fact that the Post isn't half the newspaper it was in the '70's, a good newspaper in Los Angeles should have quite a bit more editorial employees than one in D.C., especially one whose circulation is almost 20% higher.

Second, having a local billionaire sign your paychecks is going to represent no more of a potential conflict of interest than having a publicly-traded corporation do so, and its interest in the bottom line uber alles. At least having Eli Burke or Ron Burkle running things at Times-Mirror decreases the likelihood of having advertisers trying to censor unfavorable articles, an inevitable result of having a publicly-traded corporation in charge, where everything is constantly and monomaniacally geared towards maximizing profits for the shareholders. If the trade-off is not aggressively investigating your billionaire patron, I'll live with that.

Lastly, that the LA Times is better now than it was in the Chandler Era (and thus, the best that it's ever been; the pre-Otis Chandler Times was a joke) is not only news to those who continue to subscribe to it, and have to read the bare-bones sports and metro sections, but it's also news to regular readers of Mickey Kaus, who has been unsparing in his attacks on the paper the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), both before and after the promotion of Baquet in July, 2005.

In fact, as recently as last May, Kaus approvingly cited this reaction from one of his readers:

Alert and anguished L.A. reader "G"--not me! And not Brady Westwater neither!--writes:

Two more Pulitzers are going on the wall at the L.A. Times, which means the editors at Spring St. can delude themselves, for at least another year, with the belief they are putting out a decent newspaper.

Prizes, which award either prestige or cash, are meant to reward, and thereby encourage, good behavior. ... And, at their best, the Pulitzer Prizes encourage papers to pursue serious journalism. The possibility of a Pulitzer is a good reason for an editor at a small paper with a limited budget to let a reporter spend a lot of time investigating a local scandal. ... But at large papers ... the Pulitzers are reinforcing bad behavior. At the LA Times, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and every other large paper in the country, editors year in and year out mount big projects with Pulitzers in mind ... (Did you make your way through even one of the NYT's Pulitzer-winning Race in America series? I didn't think so.) Typically these projects are snoozes which have their largest readership among Pulitzer judges. ... But at the WSJ and NYT, that's okay. Both papers are excellent despite their Pulitzer pursuits.

But by continuing to hand out prizes to the LAT, the Pulitzer committee is complicit in the journalistic disaster in Los Angeles. This is not to say that it's King/Drew series or Kim Murphy's reporting from Russia weren't excellent. ... Or that the four Pulitzers it brought in last year were undeserved. Under [John] Carroll and [Dean] Baquet, the LAT does national politics and foreign reporting about as well as anyone out there.

But for some reason that high quality journalism seems to stop at the Los Angeles County line. Local coverage (that is the daily stuff that isn't in a prize-bait series) is shoddy. Anyone who actually lives in L.A. and is dependent on the local paper for news and analysis of L.A. will be sorely disappointed.

There's every reason to pop champagne bottles and give self-congratulatory speeches in the newsroom today. But tomorrow, please mull this thought over: winning Pulitzers may be the thing that the LA Times does best. Which is a kinder way of saying, no matter how many Pulitzers go up on the wall each year, from the vantage of your local readers, you still put out a lousy paper. [Emph. added]

I suspect declining circulation numbers and heat from the Chicago boys at Tribune Co. may get the message to Carroll & Baquet through the celebratory haze.

If Kaus' opinion of the Times has changed in the brief period since Baquet took over, it hasn't been evident in his writing. Is a front-page that now includes profiles of the Cannibis Babe Attorney really such an improvement? Since when has he liked the paper?

FWIW: The Encyclopedia Brittanica's entry on Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus of Byzantium, cited last week by Pope Benedict as an authority on the evils of Islam. He doesn't appear to have a particularly important leader; the Byzantine Empire was on its last legs, kept alive only by internal divisions in the Ottoman Empire, and would ultimately disappear from the world stage during the reign of his son. The writings cited by the Pope were likely written for the purpose of fomenting anti-Muslim feelings in the West at the end of the Fourteenth Century, when Manuel's empire was besieged, but he also played his cards well for a time with certain factions among the Turks, and remained in power for well over three decades as a vassal. Why the pope was inspired to cite him as an authority on any theological points staggers the imagination.

Very unusual choreography. And not lip-sync'd !!!

Did Gareth Keenan come up with this?