FIRST TIME AT THE BALLPARK, MR. CARNEY? Timothy P. Carney compares the Democrats to Red Sox fans and the Republicans to the Yankees team -- a crappy analogy which Carney says he doesn't want to "take too far" before pounding three feet into hard ground. He compares the Dems thus not because they, like the Bostonians, have learned wisdom from long endurance of unjust defeats, but because they are (new Republican buzzword!) haters. As the Bostonians "find it more natural to hate the Yankees than to love the Sox," he says, so the Democrats are more about hating Bush than about loving Kerry.

First of all, John Kerry is not the Boston Red Sox. At best, Kerry is Terry Francona. (The Yankees/Republican analogy is slightly more apt -- both entities are awash in money; both are run by boorish, half-mad Nixonian tyrants; and in both cases, they get their strongest support from people who know the least about the game.)

The Bostonians' hatred of the loathsome Yankees is well-known, and seconded by all right-thinking people. But how does seething at one's enemies mean that you don't love your team? Carney offers as evidence the chant of "YANKEES SUCK" with which they responded to Bill Mueller's game-winning homer on Saturday. Perhaps he thinks the hardscrabble sons of a hardscrabble city should have thrown confetti and yelled, "GEE WHIZ, WE SURE DO LOVE OUR GREAT GUYS THE RED SOX, AND WE MEAN THAT IN A NON-SEXUAL WAY!" or whatever they do in the Montana Farm League.

Things are a little quieter now but time was, whenever the Phillies played at Shea, security had to be stepped up to quell the inevitable, Amtrak-enabled fistfights in the stands. The "YANKEES SUCK" chant has been heard at Shea, too. I suppose Carney might say that Mets fans have been "driven to insanity" by the Yankees, though I would not suggest that he say that anywhere near Flushing Meadow.

Come to think of it, I have heard (and been party to, and with good reason) booing of the Mets at Shea. Maybe we hate ourselves!

And maybe Carney should leave the baseball analogies to Ron Shelton.

ARTS ROUNDUP. A fellow named Daniel Fuchs wrote a book called Summer in Williamsburg back in the 30s. The novel, and its sequelae, didn't sell. Fuchs went on to write screenplays (including Love Me or Leave Me) and got rich.

Summer in Williamsburg isn't great, and suffers a good deal by comparison to that other New York Jewish proletarian novel of the time, Call It Sleep, but it's a fun read, especially (at least at first) if you live in Williamsburg. It touches on all the fashionable themes of its era -- the roiling misery and foolishness of the slums, race hatred, the weary arguments of capitalism and socialism, and some very specific intellectual pretensions of the day, to illumine which Fuchs uses a bohemian but untalented and neurotic young man named Cohen, and a girlfriend of the mensch protagonist who goes to ethnicified "modern dance" recitals and such like.

Fuchs apparently finds all this the bunk, which explains why he went on to write screenplays, and why the novel gets wearisome after a while. He even writes things like "High up, a million miles into the sky, God sits on a big cloud. He looks absent-mindedly about... now he peers down for a moment, His gaze rests on Williamsburg..." (This reminds me of a story Bennett Cerf used to tell about a cub reporter who found himself in Johnstown during the great Flood. He wired his lede to his editor -- "God sits looking down on a desolate Johnstown tonight..." -- and the editor wired back, "OK forget flood, interview God, rush pictures.")

But still it's nice to see old South 2nd Street and Merserole and the Bridge Plaza rendered, however romantically, in the days when penny candy really was a penny and people were called names like Natie the Buller.

Saw Night of the Iguana on TV. It's not first-rate Williams, but it sings in its own morbidly poetic way (his stories have a way of sucking you in once you stop gagging on the froth). And who can imagine a self-consciously lyrical text like this being made into a Hollywood A-picture, with stars the like of Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr, today? Camera tricks aside, it makes David Lynch look like Jerry Bruckheimer.

TELLING DETAIL. It's a small thing, I know, but often the devil is in the details, in this case literally so:

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT! "Dems bar Nader from Convention."

"More crushing of dissent" is of course the Ole Perfesser's way of making a funny (often with the appendage "in Ashcroft's America") when someone identified with the Left cracks down on someone's speech.

Those not nuts will realize that Ralph Nader is running against John Kerry and has no Constitutional right to attend his opponent's private function.

The responsible thing would be to trawl through the Perfesser's old posts and see which other ones are total crap. But in the immortal words of Hemingway (speaking, I believe, of the work of James Jones, to which he had been accused of paying insufficient attention), I do not need to eat a bucket of shit to know that it is shit.

SHORTER WILLIAM BENNETT. How dare you Democrats campaign vigorously against a sitting Republican President! That's not the Democratic Party I abandoned.

(Also, Preacher Bennett seems not to realize that Germany and Japan were allies in the Second World War, which is how Pearl Harbor got us at war with Hitler; it was not, as the Preacher suggests, an early version of Bush's "As long as we're all pissed off, why not invade another country?" strategy.)

PROFESSIONAL COURTESY. Tbogg reproduces some long, long paragraphs of godawful crap by this frother. I tunneled through it, wondering if anything T could stick at the end would make it worth the struggle. And there it was:

Kind of makes you wish you couldn't read English, doesn't it?

And with one light, deft smack the lumbering prose of Mr. van der Leun goes into a ditch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is style.

GOP OMG. Throw ya guns in the air like you just don't care! The 2004 "Stand Up and Holla!" competition for GOP youfs is in full effect.

Finalist Reza say:
What’s your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie? King Kong: I’ve always wanted to hang off of the Empire State Building with a beautiful woman in my arms. Swing her upside-down, bro -- no abortion discussion necessary if you bust a nut in her mouth!

Finalist Adam say:
What is the best show ever to hit Broadway? The best show to ever hit Broadway is “A Raisin in the Sun.” It captures all that is good and bad about America and the power of the American dream. Step off, Adam! Don't you know all commie Langston-Hughes related joints is straight-up wack?

Finalist Prabel say:
“I voted for Prell to go back to the old glass bottle. Then I became deeply cynical” ... Homer Simpson encapsulates why presidents ranging from Kennedy to George W. Bush have called for more community service. Well, maybe Homer doesn't quite mirror the president's sentiments, but it's for Americans like Homer that community service is important... Mr. Goldberg votes for you to write his columns. They don't make sense, either!

Finalist Hans say:
What is the best show ever to hit Broadway? West Side Story. We don't be hatin', but you can't get married, yo.

Finalist Clarence say:
What's your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie?
The 1990s musical Newsies features a scene where a group of boys, angry at the way they were being treated, stand up to a newspaper giant in the streets of NYC. This scene shows that NYC represents the heart and soul of America -- a land where everyone has the opportunity to succeed because of the free society we have been blessed with. See Hans.

Finalist Nathan say:
What’s your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie? What comes to mind first is a childhood favorite, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I was about 8 years old when this movie came out and I remember thinking how cool it would be to live as Macaulay Culkin did in a suite at The Plaza Hotel, with an unlimited budget for room service. Damn, Nate -- you's a GOP-dawg fashizzle!

STOP THE PRESSES! OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger doesn't like Fahrenheit 911. Among his complaints:

Even the Iraqi victims in Baghdad are props. A baby's corpse is lifted from a dumpster, bloodied limbs are shown, people wail--but in a succession of quick frames. Moore never spends any time with these people. They just, so to speak, blow by.

Not like the "liberal media" coverage of the war itself, where we got lots of up-close-and-personal interviews with bombed Iraqis. And:

Moore's on-camera characters are invariably lower middle class and inarticulate.

Henninger obviously wants a fiction film with sparkling urbanites discussing the art of love. Can someone give him the number for Moviefone?

Coming next week: how Citizen Kane unfairly maligns wealthy press magnates!

REAL TERRORISTS. The Syrian 'hijackers' who freaked out Annie Jacobsen so badly turn out to have been, as they claimed, just a band flying not to Jihadi Paradise but to a gig:

On Monday, a Federal Air Marshal Service spokesman, Dave Adams, said that the suspicious characters on Flight 327 were musicians. The man in the yellow shirt was a drummer, he said. "We interviewed all 14 of these individuals," Adams said. "They were members of a Syrian band" traveling to a gig at a casino near Los Angeles, he said, adding that their names were run through "every possible" data bank and terrorist watch list. "They were scrubbed. Nothing came back."

Annie Jacobsen isn't convinced. I asked her about the inevitable charge that ethnic stereotyping was driving her narrative. "I am simply not a racist," she said. "I travel everywhere. This situation was entirely different. I have never been so terrified."

That's interesting: "Jacobsen isn't convinced." I understand her mistrustfulness; I feel the same way about her.

I CRY THEE MERCY THEN, FOR I HAD THOUGHT/THAT THOU HADST CALLED ME ALL THESE BITTER NAMES. Some time back, Meryl Streep told the press that to prepare for the evil political mom in The Manchurian Candidate, she watched tapes of Karen Hughes and our own Crazy Jesus Lady, Peggy Noonan.

Catching wind of this, rightwing operatives from the backwoods of Tennessee to the closets of Los Angeles to the lowliest Internet tide-pools came out to insist that Streep was playing Hillary Clinton. Some normally astute people got fooled as badly by this disinformation as did the usual retards.

When operatives were reminded in public forums of Streep's comments, they said Streep was actually wrong about herself, or just pretended not to hear.

The masterpiece of the mobilization is in today's column by Streep's study subject herself, Peggy Noonan, in which she claims "People think the evil woman Meryl Streep plays in 'The Manchurian Candidate' is Hillary because, well, they've seen Hillary make a speech."

This is pure evil genius, friends, right up there with Richard III's turnaround on Margaret ("'Tis done by me, and ends in 'Margaret'"). If I didn't hate the bastards so much, I'd give 'em a golf clap.

AND THEN MY MIND SPLIT OPEN. Usually, not much can shake Jonah Goldberg's "point out my threadbare logic and mommy will breathe fire on you" insouciance, but he's set a-frothin' by Barbara Ehrenreich's perfectly self-evident observation re abortion that "there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves." Says Goldberg:

This is monumentally dishonest and more than a bit daft. Where else does Ehrenreich enforce this standard? Should racists stay racist? White people used to have the right to shout the n-word in the faces of black people. Does Ehrenreich -- who I assume supports hate crimes laws -- denounce former racists who would "deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves"? Does a sexual harasser need to oppose sexual harassment laws lest he be counted as appalling in Ehrenreich's eyes? Since OJ Simpson got away with two free murders, should he believe that everyone should?

There you have it, folks: women who have had abortions are like O.J. Simpson.

Well, these are the people who think Rick Santorum will be an ornament to the Republican Convention.

HARD SELL.Tony Fabrizio writes about a gap between "perception" and "reality." Those terms take me back -- as I suppose they're meant to -- to the old Rolling Stone ad campaign, targetting media buyers and meant to demonstrate that the boomers whom buyers might have written off as shiftless hippies were actually quite loaded with disposable income. (Perception was a crappy Volkswagen, Reality was a Mercedes, etc.) Fabrizio, though, has a difference dichotomy in mind:

At the national level unemployment is down to 5.6 percent from 6.3 percent one year ago. The economy is creating jobs at a steady rate and economists predict solid job creation through the end of this year...

But, despite the hard data on jobs creation, the voters aren't yet buying it. Therein lays the "gap" and the political challenge.

The signal difference between Fallon McElligott Rice's campaign and Fabrizio's is not that the former was trying to sell ad space and the latter is trying to sell Bush. It is that the Stone ads told their audience about a useful service they may have misperceived, whereas Fabrizio suggests that the voters have misperceived their own situation -- with the help of duplicitous Democrats:

The Kerry team, in contrast, is hoping it can keep as many voters as possible on board the Pessimism Express to the November elections. They can't attack the current job-growth numbers, but they clearly will try to muddy the waters by talking down the economy and talking up jobs lost since January 2001. And this makes the rhetoric over the economy a contest between job losses of the past and job growth of the future...

Put this way, it sounds as if Kerry et alia were engaged in negative advertising to wrench the buyer's loyalty from its current product of choice toward a new competitor. But negative advertising doesn't work if the consumer has no reason to be dissatisfied with the performance of his current choice. (Fabrizio should know: he worked for Bob Dole's attempt to unseat Clinton in '96.)

I think it's fair to assume that advertising would be different in general if you had to choose a deodorant every four years and stick with it. And it's just plain true that worries over employment and employability in any given community are a hell of a lot more crucial to voters than whether they'll be liking Speed Stick as much in '07 as they do in '04.

So hammering the dissonance between the national job numbers and what someone in, say, Columbus, Ohio thinks is happening to his local economy -- and himself, and his family -- doesn't necessarily mean that the Ohio native is wrong and should just trust the numbers or the experts patiently explaining them. The Economist may tell you that though job outsourcing means "individuals will be hurt in the process," still "jobs will be created that demand skills to handle the deeper incorporation of information technology, and the pay for these jobs will be high." But if you're a telemarketer with no hope of becoming a programmer or data analyst any time soon, and people are being fired all around you, you probably won't count yourself an unlettered dunce for worrying about it. And if the Wall Street Journal tells you that the Kerry campaign's claims of a decline in wages is "just the gap between wages and 'what they would have been given historical wage growth,'" your reaction to this news will be strongly affected by whether or not you see stores closing all around you, sick days cut, and prices and interest rates moving beyond your reach -- certainly more strongly than by WSJ's assurances that "the return of 'McJobs' rhetoric means that an [economic] expansion is in full swing."

Maybe we'll be rolling in dough by November, but telling people that prosperity is just around the corner isn't a winning strategy no matter how confidently you shake your slide rule as you say it.

THE KIDS AIN'T TOO BRIGHT. "'What is emerging,' writes [Kay] Hymowitz, 'is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.' That's trouble, I believe, for the Democratic party..." -- James Glassman. (Coming up next: improved Crest Whitening Strips spell doom for Kerry.)

This beautiful piece of reasoning is part an article talking about how right-wing wonderful the kids are getting to be. Philosophe de biscuit-baril Reynolds offers a qualified endorsement, calling the new teen craze a "pro-gay-marriage, libertarian kind of conservatism" -- which is to say, the sort of "Eagle" conservatism Andrew Sullivan thinks is going to sweep the country right after our current batch of living, breathing conservatives gets through herding gay people into concentration camps.

Their fodder is something called the Mood of American Youth Survey -- an annual report, the San Jose Mercury News tells us, put out by the Horatio Alger Association, at whose site you can read the thing.

75% of the high-school students polled "feel hopeful and optimistic about the future." 52% say they spend between one to five hours a week on homework. (I notice, though, there is no category for "less than one hour.") 90% of them feel that "feeling personally satisfied" is "very important to success."

The one explicitly political issue, the War, finds 58% in favor. Only 21% plan on joining the military, though. (Hey -- maybe they are Republicans.)

They all love Mom and Dad lots and lots, and 49% of them -- surprise! -- are looking at "technology" as a career.

100% of them own a television.

Why don't we just lower the voting age to 13? They're obviously qualified to lead.

Now, I can understand the conservatives' desire to claim the love of the Young. I too feel that desire, particularly when I see pictures like this. But I don't go around telling people that Scarlett Johannson is going to marry me.

There are other dissonances in the rightwing youthquake thing. Glassman and Reynolds are reacting to polling data on how the young people feel. I thought the primacy of feelings was a liberal racket -- you know, the cult of self-esteem and all that.

If the American conservative movement is supposed to be something greater than a bunch of drunk fratboys punching each other in the chest and surreptitiously trying to brush up against their female R.A. -- actually that's probably as high as they're aiming, but let's keep the debate elevated for a few more minutes anyway -- why are they so interested in the hormone-driven emotions of teens? Supposing the pollsters had also asked, "Which would be more tight -- an iPod that you could plug into your eyes and it would show movies, or one that shoots webs like Spider Man?" How might the skew on that affect the 2012 Iowa Caucuses?

A more useful foreshadow of the kids' beliefs might be what they think about things like the economy, foreign policy, white-collar crime, social-security reform, environmental policy -- you already see where this is going, don't you?

I hate to play the bitter old crank here (oh, who am I kidding, it's the role that made me famous) -- but really, who cares what young people think? According to a National Geographic Society poll, among even older kids (18-24) only 13% could locate Iraq on a map. To be fair, a whopping 30% could locate New Jersey. If the 2002 Zogby survey is right, and today's college seniors are about as well-educated as high-school seniors were 50 years ago, I shudder to think where this puts today's high-schoolers.

There's a reason for that. They're children. Do you remember high school? How smart were you? No, I don't mean "How many teachers said you were smart," or "How many of your classmate found you intellectually stimulating," I mean how genuinely intelligent were you at 16? Would the current you even want to talk to the 16-year-old you?

I think the cons are betting that the kids won't get any brighter and will make all their future voting decisions based on inchoate (and easily orchestrated) feelings of rage and nationalism. They may be right. 75% of the kids are hopeful and optimistic, and they all have their own TVs.

COMRADES! IS MAKING UNFUNNY THIS SIMPSONS FOR TREASON! PLEASE NOT TO LAUGH! "I was wondering, Jonah, what you would nominate as the worst episode ever. The question came to mind last night as I watched, for the second time, the one where the family is sent to a re-education camp for being unpatriotic. I've seen several episodes with politics I disliked, but never before one that was so unrelentingly unfunny. Any others come to mind?" -- NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru. Was it less funny the first or the second time, Comrade Ponnuru? Also, please tell us which Family Guy jokes are politically incorr-- I mean, counter-reaganrevolutionary.

It gets harder for normal people to be conservative. For years the cons have been under bizarre sexual prohibitions, and now they are obliged to find The Onion unfunny and witless propaganda like this amusing.

Maybe NRO's first spin-off should be an American version of Krokidil, so true believers needn't expose themselves to socially retrograde humor.

WILD IN THE STREETS. Boy. I just thought of it as good material for some weak gags, but some people really seem to believe that evil hippies will go apeshit during the Republican Convention. Writes Michele Catalano, in a piece that really needs to be read aloud over swelling choruses of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, "I've got better things to worry about then getting hit on the head with a brick meant for Starbucks... I'll be damned if I'm going to go out at the hands of some wannabe hippie who smashes my head instead of smashing the state. But if a chain of events should occur that has that scenario playing out, my last words will be, 1968. I told you so."

The ones she should really be watching out for are the Protest Warriors, right-wing kids who relentlessly seek confrontation and coverage by major media, who promise to send hundreds of their troops to counter-demonstrate during the Convention.

These kids seem nice, but wrapped a little tight. Here we see one of their number, documenting lovingly his own fight to keep a bunch of political flyers he put up in his school from being taken down. One admires his, and his colleagues', youthful brio and romantic isolation ("keep fighting the good fight, even if it isn't the popular thing to do. You might feel alone in your struggle, but you are not..."), if not their equally youthful obnoxiousness, sophistry ("'Rednecks?' A sign can't have the word 'Arab,' which isn't a racial slur, but she can say 'rednecks'?"), and homosexual panic. But I can't imagine they'll be very happy Warriors in Manhattan; stranded for days on an island teeming with wrong-thinking blue-state citizens who will not be so eager to play verbal patty-cake with them as the saps back at their high schools, they may get testy and paranoid. It will be very hot out in the streets, and if there's ever been a situation in which a would-be Debate Club President might lose his cool, this would be it.

None of which means I don't welcome them here. It'll be lively outside MSG, but as a longtime New Yorker I've seen my share of lively, and the cops know their jobs. So come on down, kids. Just remember to hydrate.

UPDATE. Reader Myca offers this account of a Protest Warrior counterdemo. Apparently part of their schtick is videotaping the people they're protesting, which makes me wonder if they're not getting adult supervision from PW Fanboy David Horowitz, who has been known to do surveillance of his enemies in the past.

DEFINING JOURNALISM DOWN. I really do wish I were conservative sometimes, not only because the resulting reduction in brain activity might ease these horrible, horrible headaches, but also because it would increase my chances of publishing stuff that I had written while drunk or half-asleep or both, as demonstrated by this National Review Online article: A right-wing professor goes to Taxachusetts, where he finds feminist professors deconstructing Nathaniel Hawthorne. They do not share his distaste for Hester Prynne's adultery, so he makes fun of them. ("Fun" is used here in the familiar colloquial sense, not to imply that there is any actual fun to be had from the professor's account.) He runs into some Japanese people who don't say anything feminist, so he doesn't make fun of them -- actually he doesn't do much of anything with them. Then he runs into a tour guide who tells him more about the architecture of the House of the Seven Gables than he wants to know, so he calls the guide "jejune," an academic term that translates roughly as "Target store clerk insufficiently bent to my will" in Lileksese.

Imagine going on little adventures like this, making only such observations as flatter the prejudices of one's publisher, cutting and pasting them into more-or-less chronological order, submitting them to an editor with a strong stomach, and collecting for this modest effort a paycheck! No wonder they're always so cheerful over there.

FUCK YOU, EH. There is more imbecilism in this OpinionJournal thing about an American and a Canadian town than I want to spend much time addressing. I will just point out that, in comparing the "faceless bureaucracy" town of Stewart unfavorably to the "politically incorrect" town of Hyder ("politically incorrect" being, in rightwing world, a term of approbation, unless you're talking about sex or something evil like that), the authors find it necessary (in anticipation of adversarial journalistic answer, no doubt) to say that both municipalities accept beaucoup government largesse, that "in an earlier year's self-staged July 4 fireworks display, [Hyder] had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the fire engine inside," and that "The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves [sic] seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities."

In other words, they live peaceably together, though some of the people like to hang loose and some of the people like to hang tight.

Nonetheless, the OJ article seeks to show that the wild 'n' crazy free-marketeers of Hyder (and, by association, the tough-talking authors of this piece of shit) are morally superior to low-key residents of Stewart, and (by means of quotes from cowboy movies) to fan up some heat between the two apparently harmonious communities.
 
Having some Canadian ancestry and experience myself, I would imagine the good citizens of Stewart will find some quiet, polite way to express disapproval of this un-asked for incendiarism -- perhaps a gastask full of sugar -- in the unlikely event these social scientists happen back that way.

MY UNRINGING ENDORSEMENT. I have read the Democratic Party Platform, and found it full of the bland generalities and meaningless catch-phrases that have made America great. Nonetheless I am impressed with some of the concrete proposals, such as:

More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia still has nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons and enough nuclear material to produce 50,000 more. For most of these weapons and materials, cooperative security upgrades have not been completed. The world is relying on whatever measures Russia has taken on its own. At the current pace, it will take 13 years to secure potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union. We cannot wait that long. We will do it in four years.

Best of luck, President Kerry, especially after the Congress rushes for the exits when President Putin, in whose soulless, murderer’s eyes President Bush II found such deep reservoirs of fellow-feeling, turns out his pockets to dramatically indicate his complete inability to assist in this badly needed project.

But let us absent ourselves from pessimism awhile and consider some platform boilerplate that does indeed gladden the heart:

Today's tax law provides big breaks for companies that send American jobs overseas. Current "deferral" policies allow American companies to avoid paying American taxes on the income earned by their foreign subsidiaries. John Kerry and John Edwards will end deferral that encourages companies to ship jobs overseas, and they will close other loopholes to make the tax code work for the American worker…

President Bush and the Republicans in Congress have ignored the middle class since day one of this Administration. They have catered to the wealth of the richest instead of honoring the work of the rest of us. They have promised almost everything and paid for almost nothing. And the middle class is shouldering more taxes, earning less money, and bearing higher costs. The bottom line for the middle class under President Bush and the Republican Party is this: Instead of working hard to get ahead, the middle class is working hard just to get by…

First, we must restore our values to our tax code. We want a tax code that rewards work and creates wealth for more people, not a tax code that hoards wealth for those who already have it. With the middle class under assault like never before, we simply cannot afford the massive Bush tax cuts for the very wealthiest. We should set taxes for families making more than $200,000 a year at the same level as in the late 1990s, a period of great prosperity when the wealthiest Americans thrived without special treatment…

While this falls far short of the alicublog plan, which involves the entrails of priests and the necks of tyrants -- and what is this "middle class" to which the authors refer, and how may I, a humble salaryman with no hope of owning a home or car anytime soon, join it? -- it is still refreshing to hear of mainstream politicians with some hope of attaining Executive power address, however feebly, the savage inequity in relations between the haves and the have-increasingly-lesses. Saint Ralph may be more pure, but the Big Stiff and his charismatic teen sidekick have at least some shot at adjusting the machinery of power a little more in favor of us hapless unbillionaires, and in these parlous times that will have to do.

ALSO, THOMAS HARRIS IS NOT A SERIAL KILLER, AND CARL SANDBURG WAS NOT ABRAHAM LINCOLN.National Review Online advances its willful misunderstanding of simple reality a great deal with this incoherent Mark W. Davis piece:

Alfred A. Knopf... has decided that it is now acceptable to sell, as edgy entertainment, Checkpoint, a novella by Nicholson Baker that explores explicit fantasies about killing President George W. Bush...

Davis appears to have heard about a character in the book who has these fantasies. But unlike you arty-farty literary types, he considers the words "character" and "author" to be synonyms:

The author and publisher, no doubt, will argue that they are expressing an emotion, not an intention (which would be illegal). The problem is, intentions emerge out of emotions.... Checkpoint, whatever its literary conceits, will be an act of linguistic terrorism...

Sometimes you wonder whether they're dumb or malign, but here it's easy. If Davis were really as stupid as he's pretending to be, he wouldn't be able to write complete sentences.

ALICUBLOG CHARGES THE MOUND.As usual, the All-Star Game sucked -- not as much at the 2002 "fuck this, let's quit" All-Star Game, but at that one you at least got to watch the fans boo and throw things at millionaires. This year's was just tedious.

The bright note came early, though, with the shelling of the despicable Roger Clemens in the first inning. This will likely be the Rocket's last nationally-televised appearance (at least until he becomes Governor of Texas and starts running executions in prime-time, personally triggering each lethal injection by throwing a fastball at those clown-dunk-cage targets hooked up to a hypodermic), and it's nice to see him go out a goat.

As a Mets fan, of course, I already have more than one reason to dislike Clemens. I got to dislike him more when I saw him on the David Letterman show, joking about the rumors that Piazza is gay. It takes a special type of barbarism to almost kill a guy, then crack lame fag jokes about him. (Clemens also said on this occasion that he has two high-inside pitches, the second of which is thrown "so they don't think the first one's a mistake.")

I merely nodded when Clemens screwed the Yankees because, well, it was the Yankees. Still, it was piquant that "Pinstripe Pride," regarded by its acolytes of some sort of magical force, turned out to be no impediment at all to the Clemens self-actualization program; one could enjoy, in a mordant way, the image of Clemens accepting New York's delirious ovations and free cars and press panegyrics at the end of the 2003 season, with a little thought balloon drawn over his head, reading "Suckers."

I give the closing to, of all people, a New York Post reporter (but one working at that paper's relatively serious sports desk), Mike Vaccaro, who wrote brilliantly today:

Clemens, to the end, has believed he alone is entitled to invoke his will on everyone and everything around him. He has his own set of rules around the Astros, he is allowed to live his own life, be his own man, worry about the team when he feels like it. When Barry Bonds makes these demands, he is filleted from coast to coast as a me-first, ego-centric blowhard; Clemens' apologists present him as a caring family man.

FUCKING HIPPIES. Let me say on the record that I am very much against anything that screws up the trains. Can't you guys get up a nude love-in or something? Oh, and bring back Pigasus!

BTW, rncnotwelcome.org seems like it has its heart in the right place (I didn't find anything in their onsite search feature for "gelginite," and they linked, albeit indirectly, with this) but I have to say I got a few laughs out of the "City Living" section. Among the tips:

First of all, you have to remember a few things about New York delis: This is not Starbucks...

So don't throw a trashcan through the window after you get your coffee. Peace out!