Sure, you can waste your money on those cheesy videos of promiscuous co-eds, but to see the REAL partiers you need to follow the antics of today’s college coaches! Their summer tour of the human vices such as alcohol (Larry Eustachy) and sex (Mike Price) has moved on to gambling with the recently announced troubles of Rick Neuheisel. The soon-to-be-late University of Washington football coach is sweating out his college administration’s impending decision on his future after admitting that he bet $5,000 in a NCAA basketball pool. I’ve included a national story and a local one which illustrates Coach Rick’s casual attitude toward ethics and established rules of the NCAA, and his stale act of feigned surprise that he did something wrong. This has been Rick’s MO during his tainted tenure with several college football programs now, so maybe all the Athletic Directors out there will finally wake up to his scam and not hire him to infect another school with his low-bar integrity.

With leaders like this coaching trio shaping the character of so many young athletes, it shouldn’t be surprising to see many of them merely following the example that they’re shown.

Can’t throw a rock in the air without hitting an opinion piece on the significance of missing Iraqi WMDs. Here are two particularly interesting ones.

First, from Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos: Why the snipe hunt matters. I really like Gilliard (in case you hadn’t noticed). He has his opinions, sure, which you may or may not agree with, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with them. He just lays out what he thinks, and backs it up with his reasons for thinking so, and leaves it up to you to agree or not.

Second is this piece that really got me, from John Dean: Missing weapons of mass destruction: Is lying about the reason for war an impeachable offense? Dean answers in the affirmative, and his argument seems pretty solid, at least to me, though there are a few factors that would tend to lessen his credibility. For one, he apparently takes the original Guardian story about Wolfowitz’s “swimming in oil” comment at face value. Second, well, he’s John Dean. Is there anybody in the world willing to trust John Dean?

As I wrote the first time I saw someone mentioning impeachment in the context of the fraudulent war justification, I think impeachment talk is an energy-suck without much (any?) potential payoff, except maybe that it helps hammer home the message that what Bush has done is far, far worse than anything Clinton did with Monica. If that pisses you off enough for you to want to punish him, fine; punish him by making sure he ends up a one-termer, just like his dad.

Anyway, enjoy.

Writing in WeeklyDig, Brandon Keim complains about an RNC campaign to plant faux “letters to the editor” in publications across the country: Insincerely yours. I remember this issue coming up in the last election; apparently it works well enough that we can expect lots more of the same.

Robin Cook, who resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet over the decision to go to war, makes some interesting observations in this op-ed piece from the LA Times: Shoulder to shoulder and stabbed in the back (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for the login).

Basically, he points to the widening gap between Blair on the one hand, and the Bush administration on the other. Unlike Bush, who used a shell game of ever-morphing justifications for the war, Blair focused squarely on WMDs. Now, Blair is forced to maintain with increasing stridency that the WMDs will be found, while Bush is gradually moving to a position of “Well, we had to pick something to base the war on, and that seemed like the thing everyone could agree with,” or “Yeah, maybe the weapons aren’t there. But they were there once, and Saddam would have made more eventually, so it really doesn’t matter.”

Granted, Bush himself isn’t saying those things yet. But that’s clearly the direction the administration is headed, based on recent comments from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Dick Morris isn’t buying Hillary Clinton’s timeline for what she knew and when she knew it. From the National Review Online: Hillary’s fable: The lie she’s sticking with.

William Rivers Pitt of Truthout has a nice summing up of the WMD thing, and the price he believes Bush should be required to pay: We used to impeach liars.

It’s no secret that I’m basically with Pitt on this one. I don’t think the WMD evidence was ever credible, so I don’t see anything particularly shocking in the non-results coming out of the post-war WMD hunt.

If you bought the WMD evidence initially, you’re in a more difficult position. You can continue to believe Bush, and argue, like that guy debating the smooth-moon theory with Galileo, that Iraq is covered with vast stockpiles of invisible chemical and biological weapons (with a few invisible nukes thrown in for good measure, if you’re a bigtime Believer).

Or you could argue that, like you, Bush and Co. were the victims of a major “intelligence failure.” It wasn’t their (or your) fault you were mistaken; it’s those darn mid-level managers who fed you unreliable data. We’ll call this the Challenger-disaster approach.

Or I suppose you could just face the reality that the emperor has no clothes. But unlike the fairy tale, the emperor in this story will never acknowledge his nakedness. He’ll continue to strut and pose as if he’s fully dressed, and a significant fraction of the townsfolk will, by virtue of their having long ago given up any pretense of objectivity, continue to nod approvingly and dismiss the criticisms of their opponents.

Here’s an interesting one. From the BBC comes the staid AP version of the story: Doubting Danish priest suspended. Thorkild Grosboel, a Lutheran priest, has given an interview in which he said, “there is no heavenly God” (among other brow-raising statements).

For a slightly more-fun version of the story, see Christianity Today: Danish pastor suspended after denying God, eternal life, and resurrection.

Big news day for lying yesterday.

As pointed out by Craig in the comments on the Is Wolfowitz Serious? item, the Guardian has acknowledged that they misrepresented Wolfowitz’s statement about Iraq “swimming” in a sea of oil: Corrections and clarifications. So Onan’s immediate questioning of the spin being applied to the remarks, and Craig’s swift assertion that the interpretation was bogus, are both vindicated.

I don’t think there’s any way to sugar-coat what they did at the paper. It wasn’t an innocent mistake. It was a gleeful pouncing on a suggestive turn of phrase, in full knowledge that the spin being applied to it was misleading. It demonstrates that the Guardian’s partisanship interferes with their ability to truly inform their readers. I have a long memory about those sorts of violations.

Meanwhile, quite the hubbub on this side of the Atlantic regarding the resignation of New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and his top deputy, in large part over the Jayson Blair debacle. From CNN: Analysis of New York Times resignations.

Both these stories are interesting to me on a meta-level. Note how both the Guardian and the Times are actually acknowledging their own lies, and taking responsibility for having misled people. That doesn’t excuse what they did. But it does mean there’s some higher standard that they’re aware of, and are willing to acknowledge that they haven’t met.

Compare this, say, with what currently passes for political leadership in this country. Can you imagine Bush or Clinton simply coming out and admitting to the lies that virtually everyone knows they told, and actually taking an appropriate degree of responsibility for what they’d done?

Yeah, neither can I.

What would baseball be anymore, it seems, without some controversy or scandal? This article provides a good set up of Sammy Sosa’s troubles, with some pro and con opinions. But is a corked bat really all that helpful? Some researchers seem to have some scientific doubts about it. I found two columnists who have starkly different takes on the player and the controversy. One, from Chicago , and the other, Skip Bayless, who seems to be taking some cheap shots at Sosa by piling on some other accusations that may be unfair to tag directly on him. What’s the matter Skip, did Sammy turn down an interview request one time?

For myself, I am willing to give Sammy the benefit of the doubt. Although he has never impressed me as being the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and he tends to play the media and the baseball public with his “I love baseball and everybody” image, I don’t think he would knowingly risk his icon status with the baseball public with such an unnecessary gamble. He seems to value and respect his standing back in the Dominican Republic and takes that role model image there personally.

Can a player make an unthinking and careless mistake and grab the wrong bat from the bat rack? I’d think so. Sosa has broken many bats during his career without a similar incident. And all his other bats, have checked out clean. And based on Sammy’s eager-to-please persona, I don’t doubt he brings out a corked bat during batting practice to try to give the pre-game fans a thrill.

Then again, that same persona could tempt him to use any advantage, real or psychological, to get an extra edge and maintain that Slammin’ Sammy image.

Only he may know for sure.

The problem I have these days isn’t finding articles that talk about high-profile lying; it’s wading through the vast sea of such articles to find the most interesting ones. Anyway, here are a couple from today’s crop at The Smirking Chimp that deal with Bush: First up, from David Corn in The Nation: Where’s the outrage? And from Marie Cocco in Newsday: Bush presents US with no-fault presidency.

We live in a time of lies, surrounded by cynicism and examples of our own powerlessness, writes Paul Loeb at WorkingForChange. But we can’t lose perspective. Reclaiming hope: The peace movement after the war.

In a similar vein, Jim Wallis wants to pass on some wisdom he received via a voicemail message from his 4-year-old son, Luke: Don’t be afraid.

I found these pieces this morning, and wanted to rush out and put them on the site, but I needed to come up with an appropriate topic first. So there you go. Peace.

She lied to the SEC. She lied to the FBI. And this isn’t about her hiding her secret recipe for chicken tartar. The question remains on whether or not she is going to go to jail for misleading investigators over a paltry $229,000.00. But at least its going to be entertaining to watch her squirm in the courtroom!

Hey, maybe we can talk jbc into giving us a daily update on her wardrobe throughout the trial.

Paul Wolfowitz, the visibly-vibrating-with-barely-contained-excitement nerve center of the neocon cabal currently running the country, has been making some very odd statements lately. First there was his recent admission in Vanity Fair that the WMD justification for going to war was chosen for “bureaucratic reasons.” That news cycle is barely dead, and he’s back in the headlines for having announced to an Asian security summit that the reason we went to war with Iraq, rather than with North Korea, is that the former is “swimming” with oil. From The Guardian: Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.

Another nice piece on the whole WMD thing, by the way (which, given the title, I can’t resist) is the following from Mother Jones: Liar, liar.

After looking more like a fratboy at a kegger than a sober statesman in most of the images to come out of the European stops on his current trip, Bush apparently got serious upon arriving in the Middle East. He reportedly met with five Arab leaders with only translaters (and no handlers!) present, and was so caught up in this whole “leader of the free world” thing (or is it religious fervor?) that he persisted in speaking his own words even when Egyptian TV cameras were rolling (though apparently that was an accident). Anyway, interesting stuff. From the NYT: On camera but unaware, Bush displays his fervor.

Aaron passed this story on to me, with the comment, “Holy fucking crap. Sharon might actually be serious about this.” “This,” in this case, is the whole roadmap thing, including recent statements by Sharon that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an “occupation” that needs to be ended. Which is sort of like Bush using a press conference to push for US energy independence achieved through tough new fuel-efficiency standards and a special tax on gas-guzzling SUVs.

My own take is that the extent of Sharon’s reversal, and the timing of these statements, are pretty suspicious. I’m inclined to view it as political payback to Bush for the overthrow of Saddam, with a lot of surprising talk now, but an eventual reversion to the Sharon we know.

Anyway, here’s the story: Sharon mystifies, scares supporters.

Media Research Center gives this new NBC report on Private Lynch’s rescue. They provide some information to dispute some of the earlier BBC/ABC accusations such as the use of blanks and just how recently the Iraqi military was present at the hospital. Interesting to hear, since I still find it hard to swallow that a military force would be sent into any battle zone with only blanks.

However, in fairness to the conspiracy-types out there, it should be noted that NBC also still plans on developing a movie on the rescue of Lynch. Could their News Department be stretching their journalistic integrity to save their Entertainment Department’s future big ratings blockbuster? Hmmmm……..

You’ll all recall the day when a US tank fired a shell into the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad, killing two European journalists. Now the relatives of one of them have asked a Spanish judge to extradite three members of the US armed forces to Spain, where they face war-crimes charges. The Village Voice has a nice piece on it: They shoot journos, don’t they?

The Voice takes a predictably pro-journalist stance (“In a moral universe, there is no excuse for killing journalists under any circumstances,” for example). But the really interesting part of the story comes toward the end, where it talks about AP reporter Chris Tomlinson, an embed who supposedly overheard a US officer freaking out on the radio after the shell was fired: “Who just shot the Palestinian [sic] Hotel? Did you just fucking shoot the Palestinian Hotel?” It’s interesting, see, because it tends to support a different interpretation than the heavily-spun version of the event the military has been selling.

Bigtime thanks to readers Glen and/or Pilar for the link.

Paul Krugman raises the level of concern in his personal Homeland Security Alert system, citing the way that the systematic and brazen distortion of the facts by the Bush administration has reached a level “never before seen in US history”: Standard operating procedure.

In a somewhat-thematically-related piece, Steve Perry writes about how the real terror-alert system is a heads-I-win,-tails-you-lose proposition for Karl Rove’s (re-)election schemes: Who’s your daddy?

Here’s a really wacky story about a really wacky guy and the really wacky girl he was dating for a while, and the really wacky judge who issued an order telling the first he couldn’t write things, even true things, about the second on his web site. From the New York Times: Internet battle raises questions about the First Amendment.

To fullly appreciate the wackiness, you’ll need to read the pre-restrained version of the party of the first part’s web site. Which, conveniently, you can do using Google’s cache (at least for the moment): The Miss Vermont Story. You’ll probably also want to check out Miss Vermont’s web page: http://www.katyjohnson.com/.

A couple of observations: First, the judge obviously went way too far in restraining the ex-boyfriend’s speech. I guess it’s like business-method patents: if something takes place on the Internet, the technically challenged assume it is something completely new, not subject to the old rules. But it is subject to the old rules; speech is still speech, and telling someone he can’t tell the truth about his life and his experiences is bogus.

Second, Katy Johnson and Tucker Max were made for each other. Both of them are using the Web as a forum for promoting their weird, twisted versions of how they’d like others to see them (and to promote books they’ve written based on that twisted reality). For Katy, it’s about her chastity, and sobriety, and her blonde, wholesome, chirpy goodness. For Tucker, it’s a chance to strut proudly on a stage of his own imagining, where everyone is agog at his incredible powers to seduce, to charm, to bedazzle with amusing anecdotes, to treat women as vessels for his seed, and to get really drunk and throw up on himself.

The reality comes through best when the outside observer can compare each of their accounts with the other. Which, sadly, the judge has said she’s not going to allow.

Thanks to Danthar for the links.

For those who may have watched the movie on FX yesterday on the real-life bank robbery and police shootout with those two heavily-armed, body armor-wearing guys in North Hollywood a few years ago, here is an article on the riveting story’s feeble reenactment to a TV movie. Interesting how often an isolated yet compelling episode of real life becomes listless and full of inaccuracies once scriptwriters and producers get ahold of it and feel the need to add more “drama”.