JUST A PEEK. I don't have time to stay for the whole thing, but from the abortion, health care, and social security questions, the candidates seem to be protecting their respective non-leads. Kerry's advantage is that he has plans -- plans that can only be vaguely stated here, and maybe anywhere, but the message is that he can hit the ground running. His disadvantage is the same as Bush's advantage: that, over the last twenty-odd years, Americans became suspicious of government plans, which are traditionally associated with Democrats. Bush's disadvantage is that he has plans.

Tactically, I think it's bright of Bush to attack Kerry on immigrant amnesty, given the porousness of our borders in the past four years, and it was bright of Kerry to open his response on an entirely different topic before crowding the immigration part of his answer into a plan-filled finish.

I don't like Kerry calling me "America" all the time. (It's bad enough he can see me through this telescreen!) I would like to hear him say no to a draft, which he skillfully refuses to do.

I wonder who told Bush that a good answer to the question about stop-loss was to say that he met soldiers who were pleased to be in Iraq.

Oh hell, I stayed longer than I meant to.

A LITTLE TINFOIL NEVER HURT ANYONE. The Poor Man has a good read on vote fraud, featuring tsuredzuregusa's suspicions regarding the FBI-empowered confiscation of Indymedia servers in England -- he suggests a connection to Indymedia's erstwhile tormentor Diebold, a company best know for its vote-conversion machines.

The connection is a bit of a stretch, admittedly. The Feds may have done this for just about any reason -- barring, of course, those suggested, in his usual obfuscating spirit, by the Ole Perfesser. (Also, I must inform TPM regarding its correlated item on registration fraud that the dodge in which street-corner operatives of Party A cheerfully accept, then discard, registration forms submitted by prospective members of Party B is about as old as the Maiden's Dropped Hanky. In other words, it may be evil but it is too well-known and widespread to qualify as cabalistic activity.)

On the other hand, it is always good to track the movements of our worst malefactors, especially when those movements, or their motivations, appear to run very close together over an extended period of time. Let us be attentive but not obsessive. There is a fine line between paranoia and enlightened mistrustfulness, and it has mostly to do with the presence or absence of color-coded charts.

DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES. The FCC is fining Fox Broadcasting $7,000 per participating station -- over a million dollars in toto -- for some raunchy bachelor/bachelorette parties shown on its "Married by America" reality show.

According to the FCC's 29-page(!) report on the incident, the Commission judges indecency by two criteria: "[it] must describe or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities... Second, the broadcast must be patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Fox thought its pixelation policy protected it on the first count, but the FCC demurs: "Even with Fox’s editing, the episode includes scenes in which party-goers lick whipped cream from strippers’ bodies in a sexually suggestive manner. Another scene features a man on all fours in his underwear as two female strippers playfully spank him. Although the episode electronically obscures any nudity, the sexual nature of the scenes is inescapable..."

A fair cop. But in Fox's defense, the FCC never fully addresses the "community standards" part of the test. (Maybe the Republican-dominated Commission did this on purpose to enhance their old pal Rupert Murdoch's grounds for appeal.)

The FCC has a broad bailiwick here, having previously decided that the "community" is really an idealized single figure: "[our] criterion is that of an average broadcast listener and, with respect to Commission decisions, does not encompass any particular geographic area."

Even if we accept this standard, I must say that if the Commissioners think the "average broadcast listener" -- or viewer, in this case -- can be offended by some pixelated porn, I would suggest that they don't watch nearly as much TV as their office would seem to demand.

While "Married by America" sounds gamey, I don't see how it could be worse than the premiere episode I recently viewed of "Boston Legal," which, like all David E. Kelley shows, regards human sexuality from the perspective of a retarded, priapic teenager. The episode featured a man walking around with no pants or underwear, an affair between William Shatner and the trophy wife of a geriatric client, and James Spader announcing "You had sex," as loudly and alacritously as if he had just found an Easter egg, in a room full of smirking lawyers.

As Kelley's general success shows, the "average broadcast viewer" eats this stuff up. While no genitals were exposed nor copulative acts simulated, the viewer was allowed to know that something nasty was going on -- something dark and corrupt and impossible to reveal -- something known to a depressing number of our fellow citizens as sex.

I left "Boston Legal" feeling besmirched. Now, if you know the kind of life I've led, you might question my sincerity, but let me say that it is not the sexual nature of the material that repels me, but the leering attitude. Let CBS run "The Teabaggers" in prime time, and so long as the behaviors on display are forthrightly sexual, and not embellished with pop-eyed voyeurs, mocking trombone wah-wahs, or hackneyed depictions of passion taken directly from Herbal Essences Shampoo commercials, I would be happy to see the show pumped into day-care centers nationwide.

But that's not going to happen anytime soon, so when producers scrounge for new thrills to offer viewers, these will be of the dank, half-concealed sort that incites "censorship" controversies and grainy ass-shots on the small screen. Actual sexiness will be absent, but some sense of transgression will steam off the product and the smell will keep the couch potatoes firmly planted.

Contrary to what the preachers say, the TV folk are not engaged in a full-on assault on American Values; theirs is more a skulking, schoolboy approach, which is not only enabled but reenforced by the hapless playground monitors of the FCC, who seem to know they are here to keep the lid on but loosely, so that both they and the industrious offenders they prosecute will, when the fireworks are over, never find themselves removed from their comfortable positions.

Meanwhile the ordinary American, after an after-dinner bout of Internet Porn surfing and the equally thrilling effort of concealing it from the spouse, will join the family in front of the Boob Tube, and together they will switch dreamily between shows starring people they admire, and shows starring people they would like to fuck.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS. Let's play a game: I'll complain about immigrant workers in my local supermarket -- one of whom doesn't speak English well enough to suit me, two of whom speak English too well to suit me -- and you try and guess whether it's self-parody or just me being an asshole again.

DEJUNKING. Went to a book party for Ken Smith's Junk English 2, which, like its predecessor, distills some words and phrases that have become through misuse (or prevarication) meaningless (or worse) to their true essences. Examples:

Comfort Words. Nebulous nouns -- factor, function, status, system, and their kind -- when used to modify already abstract nouns that need no modification, are like hot fudge poured over fudge-flavored ice cream. [e.g.] business entity = business... cost factor = cost... crisis scenario = crisis... weather conditions = weather...

Customer relationship management... is what happens when companies try to sell their ability to anticipate customer needs and thus increase sales... The promoters of customer relationship management want you to think of CRM as a euphemism for its outcome -- personal service -- rather than for its hidden workings -- invasion of your privacy...

Product is turning up behind the names of products for no apparent reason. [e.g.] "It is actually quite impressive to see how the Penders family developed this amazing 'one size fits all' hair rinse product."

It is sad that this job needs to be done (and that it is so large as to require a second volume of corrections, at least), but it is nice to see that someone is trying to do it. Here at alicublog we treat inanities on a larger scale with less delicate instruments, but just as nanotechnology and gene therapy show promise as ways of attacking cancer, so the reform of our muddled discourse may be more efficiently achieved at the etomylogical level.

JONAH GOLDBERG DOES HISTORY the way he does everything else:

Frank Foer's got a round-up essay on the the history of conservatives in the NYT (man would I love to write something similar on the history of liberals some day). Anyway, it's not a bad recap, even if I'd quibble with parts. For instance, while Foer concedes, quietly, that plenty of liberals and leftists were also Isolationists he does it in a bloodless way. It's as if isolationism is central to his conception of conservative ideology while it's merely tangential to the history of liberalism. This is the conventional wisdom among liberals and the conventional wisdom is simply wrong. After all Charles Beard and John Dewey, to name probably the two most influential liberal thinkers of the 20th century, were just as isolationist -- if not more so -- on WWII than, say, Charles Lindbergh.

By this novel theory, FDR prosecuted World War II with no support from liberals, who were busy attending night rallies for Charles Beard and John Dewey. It's a miracle this country ever beat Hitler. Perhaps it was our coalition partners in Brazil that turned the tide.

Goldberg's schtick, of course, closely mirrors the one mentioned here last week, whereby the operative holds up an Andrea Dworkin effigy and yells, "Hey, liberals, here's your girlfriend!" The Goldberg variation is more offensive, of course, because it goes beyond the usual perversion of current events into a perversion of history. One might even call it Orwellian, had one not been informed that Orwell was really a neoconservative.

JUST IN CASE YOU WERE STILL TAKING HIM SERIOUSLY: Roger L. Simon on the Friday debate:

Kerry starts his close with: "Obviously the PResident and I have strong convictions." Wrong. Only the President has convictions. Kerry has none.

As an exercise, I tried to imagine myself writing something that meretricious for publication, but couldn't -- even my self-loathing has some limits.

Where do they get these people?

HELLO NAZI. I had to miss the debate last night because I was booked to play bass at an ill-attended gig above a strip joint near the WTC site. Let's just say we weren't at the top of our game. The most interesting part of the evening was the performance before ours of a reconstituted version of Tuff Darts, the first New York punk band I ever saw (Fall 1977). It was strange to hear those old songs played so slowly and sloppily so many years later, and to see lead singer Tommy Frenzy -- back in the day a skinny, manic, shades-and-sneer type -- looking like James Lileks after a night in the drunk tank.

I did catch a few minutes of the hilariously misnamed Town Meeting (which conjures visions of Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting, redone to suit modern times, with the leather-jacketed citizen's image appearing in a dossier perused by government and network vetters), and read the transcript the next day. I hate to say it, but it hardly requires comment. The combatants' talking points were clear after the first debate, and while the issue of Kerry's detached WASP bonhomie vs. Bush's strutting aggressiveness makes mildly interesting style-section copy, I can't see much significance in it.

It is fashionable among conservatives to say that liberals don't really love Kerry, and I suspect that may be true, as he is clearly driving the center lane, politically speaking, in hopes of a game-winning basket; but can it be true that normal conservatives (excepting that small minority obsessed with abortion and homosexuals) love big-government Bush any better?

The electoral importance of these dog-and-pony shows seems as slight to me as it seems massive to the writers who obsess on it. The election will be decided by people who are not regular followers of political weblogs. While those who obsessively sift the tea-leaves wonder what effect their brew has had on the lumpenproles, citizens are comparing their real experiences and prospects to what the candidates describe. I am fast coming to the conclusion that this election will not be about which fella Joe Sixpack would prefer to pop a few cans with. It may be that my cynicism about American voters has been outstripped by my cynicism about the people who speculate on the needs and wants of Joe Sixpack.

My Saturday night was devoted to the Beastie Boys at MSG. You can imagine what a New York moment that was ("I got my BVDs from VIM"). The joint was sold out, every mention of the City drew full-throated roars, and the vommies leading out of the Garden rang with a loud chant of "Let's Go Yan-kees!" (I was rooting for the Twins tonight, of course, but take comfort in the fact that their defeat at the hands of a local team probably aggravates Lileks no end.)

The anti-Bush stuff from the Beasties also went down a treat; though the To the 5 Boroughs lyrics were too new and too muddled by the sound system to connect, the playing of a video in which Will Ferrell portrayed the President as a dumbass entertained the crowd, and when the band dedicated "Sabotage" to Bush the audience was loud and unmistakable in its Approval of This Message ("You're scheming on a thing that's a mirage").

But that's how we roll, yo. We've supported Democratic Presidential candidates for 20 straight quadrennials. You see the line-through-W more than the Chanel logo on our streets these days. Knoxville we ain't.

Though I love New York and I love America, I know -- any sane person knows -- that they aren't entirely the same thing. Neither are America and the offices of the National Review, or the Weekly Standard, or the Washington Post, or Dan Rather.

All around the dedicated Bush and Kerry centers, a lot of deciding is going on that is not only invisible but, I think, incomprehensible to media big and small.

And though I would never denigrate the value of hard work, I think the strenuous efforts of partisans (outside of the empowerment of voters and the monitoring of vote fraud, which, given the nature of the current Administration, is essential) will have only a small effect on the outcome in November. We all know what time it is.

Which actually makes me feel rather optimistic.

ROUND TWO: SPIN BEFORE THE WASH. NRO cites Tony Fabrizio on the upcoming debate:

I actually think that the bar of expectations have been lowered so much based on the last debate, the recent stories on Iraq (Bremer and WMD report), the jobs numbers this morning and a format that favors Kerry that the President can 'win' by not giving or ceding ground to Kerry and making a connection on domestic issues and showing he is 'in touch' with voters concerns.

I'm going to try that approach at my next employee evaluation: "Edroso, we just found out that your big project, which you represented to us last year as an unqualified success, was in fact a colossal blunder that cost the company millions and got a lot of innocent people fired." "Yes, and I'll do the same thing again if you just give me a chance. Plus I think we should switch the water coolers from Deer Park to Poland Spring." I'll make sure to drop my g's and affect a becoming swagger. A fat raise is assured!

THE OLE PERFESSER ABROAD. I see Perfesser Reynolds has taken his quest to convince the credulous that he is not a conservative international.

Actually, that's just the jumping-off point for Reynolds' Guardian article. He explains to his foreign hosts that American Liberalism is typified by neo-Puritans such as Hillary Clinton and Andrea Dworkin, who presumably lunch together on the Upper West Side and plot matriarchy, while Reynolds and his fellow not-conservatives dream of (but do not actively support) "an America where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons" -- a nifty sitcom premise, at least.

The Perfesser lavishly describes this fantasy world where folks such as myself wish to go Cotton Mather on the asses of less enlightened fellow-citizens, but does not mention the actual restrictive proclivities of the Religious Right, despite the fact that, while Dworkins stand among but not of us lefties as peripheral figures, the RR is, of its nature, an authoritarian outfit, dedicated to the Christianization of America by force of law. He probably left them out because they are part of the coalition he hopes will sweep W to victory in November, after which time he and they will have a good laugh over some moonshine about gay couples and assault weapons, with much miming of gunfire and jocular flailing of limp wrists.

I am not surprised by his act, which was old when Methuselah was a pup, but considering how often he has bitched about their paper, I am surprised that the Guardian published it. I should have thought they would at least insist that he dress for the portrait accompanying his column in overalls and a large, ragged straw hat, with several of his teeth blacked out.


I mean, I thought the left was all about crushing dissent. Heh.

PRE-EMPTING AHNULD. The best I can say about this proposed repeal of the national-born-citizen requirement for Presidents is that history tells us such things backfire. The Republicans rammed through the Twenty-Second Amendment to prevent another FDR from bogarting the Oval Office, and it prevented them from running the still-popular Ike a third time. And lowering the voting age to 18 didn't do much electorally for the Democrats who were fond of the idea.

There's still time for the Democrats to groom a foreign-born alternative to Schwarzenegger. Maybe Antonio Banderas? He did play a gay guy, but Ahnuld played a guy who got pregnant. It will make for some entertaining debates: "It vas a tess-tube pregnoncy! Iss not the same as having zex wiz a man! In many ways it vas my hardess role! It takes balls to haff a baby!"

BUT WHY WOULD BANK ROBBERS DO SUCH A THING? A GOP HQ gets shot up in Knoxville, and The Ole Perfesser is on the spot with Crushing-Of-Dissent-Heh-Indeeds.

I'm sure sane readers do not attach the shooters' behavior to that of mainstream Democrats, and they may have more than one reason -- read the tag on the linked news item:

In an unexpected twist, a bank directly across the street from the headquarters was robbed as KPD officers were busy investigating at the scene of the shooting.

Maybe Deputy Dawg and the boys 'round the cracker barrel think it's a "twist," but I been doin' me some calculatin' and here's what I reckon:

If you're a Democratic activist and you shoot up a Bush HQ across from a bank, you hand a PR victory to the opposition;
If you're a politically unaffiliated bank robber and you shoot up a Bush HQ across from a bank, you create a most useful distraction among the apparently way overextended KPD.

To what shall we give more credence -- common sense, or visions of Mandy Grunwald and the boys shooting up storefronts?

ONE FROGGY EVENING. I had to miss the Great VP Debate, but I understand from the usual impartial sources that Cheney did well, which means, if the gods are giggly, that epidemic ticket-splitting will result in a Kerry-Cheney executive. The Dantean idea of those two chained together and gnawing on one another's brains for four years offers a little comic relief.

I attended instead a showing of The Frogs at Lincoln Center. It was not the pathetic mess I had been led to expect, mainly because someone got the idea to play it mostly at light-speed in the manner of Olsen and Johnson's "Hellzapoppin'," and it was fun watching Nathan Lane crack Roger Bart up. Of course, the mad rush to the gags rather trampled whatever deeper meaning the authors intended, but from what I could see that was a good thing. And cute as the idea was to substitute Shaw and Shakespeare for Euripedes and Sophocles, it appears Aristophanes had the right idea in stacking the deck against Euripedes, because tonight I was rooting for Shaw all the way and that can't be right.

Sondheim's music was wonderful but the whole thing was a little undercooked and overheated. I can see why the project stayed so long in the drawer.

I see also that the Sox won and the Yankees lost, so on balance it was a good evening.

SPEAKING OF THE RIGHT TO CARRY:Elton John in the papers:

Sir Elton -- given to sporting frumpish track suits these days, except for awardsfests -- apparently went crazy when he learned that Madonna was a nominee at the same event for her live concert efforts.

"Anyone who lip-syncs in public on stage when you pay ($134) to see them should be shot," the former Reg Dwight said while picking up his Q for songwriting.

I would prefer Ms. Spears be given community service, but I'm a big old bleeding-heart.

UPDATE. Yeah, I meant Ms. Madonna, or Esther, but what's the diff (except maybe Sir Elton would decline to fire on Ms. Spears, fearing a pneumatic blowout that could injure innocent bystanders).

LIPSTICK LIBERTARIANS. Professor Reynolds plays dumb, asks:

We're often told that Congressional efforts to repeal the D.C. gun ban are an affront to D.C. citizens' right to self-rule… But those efforts are in support of an explicit Constitutional right to keep and bear arms -- and since D.C. isn't a state, there's none of the usual argument about whether the Second Amendment should apply to its efforts or not.

So would a Congressional effort to overturn state bans on gay marriage in support of an unenumerated right to marry constitute a similar affront to local autonomy? I'm just, you know, asking. . .

This is the sort of lame sophistry you get from that particular sort of nerd who argues that, if you really believe in the Constitution, you will cede him the right to build a nuclear reactor in his mom's basement. One expects it of a student enjoying the now-traditional, youthful fling with libertarianism, but in a grown man it is just depressing.

(Of course, perhaps the Professor has outgrown it, but uses the language of lipstick libertarianism merely to plague pro-gay-marriage, anti-gun liberals on behalf of his current Party.)

The superficial similarity between the two cases -- gay marriage despite public will, gun emancipation despite public will -- does not withstand a form of logical analysis called common sense.

Briefly: two guys get a marriage license. This has the no power to affect their neighbors other than in fantasies. (Some feeble arguments attribute to gay marriage the power to destroy heterosexual marriage, but this magical thinking may be disregarded by sane people.)

Alternately, two guys get a cache of semiautomatic weapons. This has power well beyond the reach of fantasy. If this is only a "potential" threat, so is a jar full of smallpox.

Matrimony and weapons are categorically different. (No smart remarks, Mr. Bundy.) Society has a limited right -- one might say duty -- to regulate the presence of the latter in a community, to protect its citizens. (Hell, even lipstick libertarians and Tommy Hobbes acknowledge government's common-defense function.) It may be that the D.C. ban went over the line, but the remedy for that would be through the courts, followed by action from the appropriate legislative body (in D.C.'s case, the Council). The remedy is not a bunch of redneck Congressmen showin' the boys back home they's regular by afflicting D.C. with a utopian gun policy.

THE ME GENERATION. "I have been trying to understand the real meaning of what happened in 1968. After all, I was a participant in those events, as much as John Kerry, perhaps more." -- Roger L. Simon [emphasis mine].

This is news. Did he blow up a Dow Chemical plant or something?

HERE I STAND, I CAN DO NO MORE. As a liberal, of course, I kill babies, hate freedom, and disdain all absolutes, but this I find totally unacceptable:

Saturday's Twins-Indians game at the Metrodome was suspended with the scored tied at 5-5 after 11 innings because the playing surface had to be prepared for a University of Minnesota football game. The unfinished game will be continued Sunday at 1:10 a.m. CT with the regularly scheduled game to follow 20 minutes after the conclusion.

Only rain and natural disasters should preclude the completion of a Major League Baseball game, not fucking college football. Representatives of the Twins are saying this means they need a new park. Bullshit, Twinkies. You are engaged in the national pastime. This is a sacred trust, not a corporate franchise. You should have set aside your asshole GM's lust for greener pastures for a moment and forthrightly told UMinn to fuck off to a practice field somewhere in the vast prairie spaces abutting your two-bit burg while you did what God intended -- play the game out till somebody wins. Let Minneapolis/St. Paul sue if it will. A nation, or at least Ken Burns, would rise to your defense.

Priorities, people!

UPDATE. This time I went too far. I don't know Mpls, but I'm sure it's a lovely city, worth far more than two bits. Pardon -- when I write about baseball I lose that cool, bloodless style that distinguishes my political writing.

A WALK 'ROUND THE SOUTH SIDE. Around 11:20 I heard what sounded like a riot outside my apartment, so I padded down the stairs. From behind half the apartment doors in my building came howling and excited chatter. I got to my bodega and found the proprietor sitting well back from his usual station, watching a small TV tuned to a boxing match on HBO.

"Who's fighting?" I asked.

"Tito," said the proprietor, eyes glued.

On the tiny screen, a dark-haired young man was pounding on a pink-haired young man. Other citizens entered the bodega, exchanging money directly and carefully with the proprietor so as as not to divert his attention too much from the event.

"I hate that clown," said one young lady, referring to the pink-haired young man.

"Mm," said the proprietor. He is a small, pleasant- and small-featured fellow, his hair short, both his earlobes sporting small, bulbous growths, his skin the color of weak coffee.

The pink-haired young man was shown in close-up, a sealed cut visible high on one cheek of his dazed visage. Someone was squirting water at his mouth, which he barely acknowledged. "He's done," said a dreadlocked guy, passing the proprietor some bills for a six-pack of Malta Corona.

The pink-haired guy was nonetheless game enough to get up and exchange blows with the dark-haired young man, who soon got the better of him, knocking him down thrice before the referee raised the dark-haired young man's hand. No one in the bodega cheered, though I heard some roars in the street.

On my way home I was preceded by a teenager in a velour-drapery-inspired running suit of deepest purple. "Trinidad won, son," he drawled into his cell phone, swinging his legs as if he were accepting this victory for himself. "Nigga went down three time." "VZVVZZZ ZVVZV NIGGA ZBBZBZBZVVZ," replied the cell phone.

I had no idea the victorious Felix Trinidad is from Puerto Rico, the place of origin of most of my neighbors, but I inferred it quickly enough. His opponent, Ricardo Mayorga, is from Nicaragua, and showed a lot of heart. My compliments to him, and to Trinidad, and to all my neighbors, who paid (if they did pay -- pirate cable is rife here) fifty dollars to watch the fight on television.

I really don't understand why some folks pay extra money to live among white people.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING. As you may know, crime in New York City went down quite a lot in the 1990s. Conservatives attribute this to "Broken Windows" theorizing (arrest squeegee men, murders will plummet!) and the godlike demeanor of strongman Giuliani.

But back in 1994, the NYPD, which actually did the job, had an alternate theory:

Police Strategy No. 1, entitled "Getting Guns Off the Streets of New York," sets forth the Department's plan to eradicate gun violence by stepping up efforts to find and seize illegal firearms. These strategies remain in effect through the present… as implemented by the NYPD, "stop & frisk" serves the Department's No. 1 strategic goal -- "getting guns off the streets of New York." Notwithstanding its origins as a technique designed to ensure officer safety, "stop & frisk" plainly has been used as a method to detect and seize illegal handguns.

In 2001, Giuliani and then-Commissioner Kerik bragged that the City had confiscated almost 90,000 guns since 1994. Even right-wing factota like Heather McDonald agreed that "by getting thousands of guns off the streets… the NYPD has saved thousands of lives and allowed a semblance of normality to return to once terror-stricken neighborhoods." And to this day, our gun laws remain among the most restrictive in the nation.

Anyone who actually lives here – especially those of us who have lived here a very long time, and more than once been serenaded by the sound of gunfire – would see the sense in this. The mean streets are no place to play John Wayne. An armed society may be, as the bumper sticker says, a polite society -- in Happy Valley or Oshkosh. But not in Brooklyn.

This piece of common sense does not seem to have penetrated the skulls of Congressional Republicans, who last week rammed a bill through the House designed to increase the number of firearms floating around crime-wracked Washington, D.C.:

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill yesterday repealing most of the District's gun laws, in a vote that handed an election-season victory to gun rights groups and was denounced by the city's leaders as a historic violation of home rule.

By a vote of 250 to 171, the House passed the D.C. Personal Protection Act, which would end the District's 1976 ban on handguns and semiautomatic weapons, roll back registration requirements for ammunition and decriminalize possession of unregistered weapons and possession of guns in homes or workplaces.

More semiautomatic weapons – despite the expressed wishes of the citizens! That’s the (forgive the expression) magic bullet that will curb D.C. crime, alright alright.

But, of course, no one is his right mind believes that the GOP Congressmen from Bumfuck give a rat’s ass about the security of the largely-black citizens of the District of Columbia. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R., Bumfuck), decreed that this result was "demanded by the people of the United States" – which translates roughly as "demanded by the nutcase core of Rep. Souder’s Party."

This would of course include the NRA, whose paper on what they consider to be the deleterious effects of gun registration in New York actually ignores (though written in 2000) everything that happened after the NYPD got tough on guns in 1994 -- showing far less interest in the crime drop than in the case of some guy in Staten Island who lost his weapons cache.

These malign agents are aided and abetted by conservative hard-liners eager to flood cities – including New York – with firearms just to show solidarity with gun-nut voters. One such, National Review’s Jack Dunphy, a pseudonymic "officer in the Los Angeles Police Department" (Mark Fuhrman?), actually derided the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s thorough (and thoroughly reasonable) endorsement of Senator Chuck Schumer’s tough gun-control stand, using the blind quotes of another alleged cop as his flimsy prop. Dunphy’s nameless mouthpiece derided PBA chief Pat Lynch as a wuss and a sellout – which would no doubt surprise New York’s real cops, who voted Lynch in, and who stand a far smaller chance of being killed in the line of duty since our gun count went down.

A similarly nutty piece was published (though under his real name) on OpinionJournal by John Fund (not a cop). "The debate over the district's draconian gun ban should provide valuable lessons for other cities that have foolishly tried to fight crime by disarming their citizens," says Fund. "Gun control is bad for public safety…" Unsurprisingly, he does not mention New York, leaving that to his published commenters -- "The cities in our nation, which have the most restrictive gun ownership and usage laws, also have the highest violent crime rates… You need only look at D.C., New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles to see it," says Ken Taylor of -- (wait for it) -- Heath Springs, SC.

Do any of you guys remember way back when the conservatives (and the mainstream media) were bitching about an alleged phenomenon called "Political Correctness" – whereby liberals were supposed to be foisting their untested, unsupportable social-engineering ideas on people via crackpot laws and codes?

Haven’t heard much about it lately, have you? The Right appears to have dropped it as a swear-word.

Maybe because they’ve decided it’s not such a bad idea.

READING THE TEE-HEE LEAVES. At OpinionJournal we hear that "a Baptist-bashing Crawford, Texas, newspaper endorses Kerry."

At the New York Post, movie reviewer Lou Limenick decries John Kerry's "foundering" campaign, and music writer Dan Aquilante criticizes Flogging Molly's "anti-Bush, anti-Christian, anti-American-football sentiments." (No word, thus far, from the theatre and TV critics.)

Rush Limbaugh says CBS lies.

Jim Lileks says, "#@!*%@!"

Gee, Kerry must have beat Bush worse than I thought.

UPDATE. This is driving them nuts at The Corner. The talkings points are:

• Bush doesn't smirk, Kerry smirks! ("Just more evidence he is not up to the job of diplomat in chief.")
• Bush sewed up the Polish vote! ("I hope Polish Americans send Kerry a message.")
• Here's what I woulda said if I was Bush ("'big bomb... knee-jerk left-wing'... how hard was that?")

and

• I know things look bad, but we will prevail against our homosexual enemies! ("[the House] improved significantly on the vote in the Senate...")

I imagine the boo-yahs will be back presently, but it's sort of cute to see them rattled.