The problem with writing for a family newspaper — or being a screenwriter for a TV show on basic cable, for that matter — is that there are times when the most apt possible word for the situation you’re trying to describe or the dialogue you’re trying to convey is forbidden by company policy, or FCC regulations, or common decency. That is why I am so frakking in love with "Battlestar Gallactica."

The Sci Fi Channel hit didn’t coin the word "frak." It was introduced in the original 1978 series on ABC, though its meaning on that show was quite a bit more benign; the context in which it was used made it clear that it was a substitute for a harmless euphemism like "darn." In the new version of "Battlestar," which is free of blow-dried haircuts, adorable robot dogs or former "Bonanza" stars, the writers make it quite clear that "frak" means exactly the same as a common four-letter English word that starts with "F" and ends with "K." Hence you get words like "motherfrakker" and "clusterfrak," and phrases like, "We are well and truly frakked."

This all might seem a little childish, but it’s actually incredibly liberating. Screenwriters can write the kind of dialogue for basic cable that’s normally only allowed on a pay-cable channel. (I challenge even the stoutest frat boy to take a drink every time somebody drops an F-bomb on the HBO show "Deadwood.") You simply cannot accurately convey the chatter of a bunch of sweaty, tattooed, futuristic fighter pilots, who make up much of the cast of "Battlestar," without throwing in some colorful language. With "frak," you can do that without offending a soul: Even the most righteous member of the Parents Television Council would have a tough time objecting to a curse word that only has meaning in an alternate universe.

Which is why I hope this whole "frak" thing catches on. When you’re writing about government policy, sometimes the situation is so frakked up, involving people who know frak-all about basic economics or the unintended consequences of bad public policy, that you just frakking want to tell them to frak off.
Frak, that feels good.

Mayoral candidate Walter Moore said Thursday he has begun a drive to put "Jamiel's Law" on the March 2009 Los Angeles city ballot — the same one in which he is trying to unseat Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

If adopted, the law would permit Los Angeles police officers to arrest gang members for breaking U.S. immigration law. It would supersede Special Order 40, a 29-year-old LAPD policy that bars officers from arresting or questioning people solely on suspicion of being in the country illegally. Moore told a crowd of about 200 people — gathered at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre to hear about his proposal — that he decided on an initiative after hearing no response from City Council members to his request for an ordinance.

Jamiel's Law is named for Jamiel Shaw II, 17, who was shot to death by suspected gang members on March 2 close to his Arlington Heights home. Police arrested Pedro Espinoza, 19, who reportedly entered the U.S. illegally at age 4. Police say Espinoza is a member of the 18th Street Gang. He was released from jail, where he was being held on a weapons charge, a day before the killing.

Espinoza had been arrested by Culver City police and jailed and released by the Sheriff's Department, so the LAPD and Special Order 40 did not come into play. But Moore has dismissed that point, saying, in effect, that if his law had been in place, LAPD officers at some point prior to his weapons arrest would have seen Espinoza, identified him as a gang member, and arrested him on immigration charges.

The killing of Jamiel Shaw II, and Moore's advocacy for the change in the law, has united some black and white illegal immigration opponents, threatened to widen a gulf between African Americans and Latino immigrants, and forced city officials to refocus on Special Order 40. At least some LAPD officers appear to believe, incorrectly, that the policy prevents them from cooperating or even communicating with immigration authorities. A senior lead officer who misquoted Special Order 40 in a March newsletter, adding in anti-cooperation language, acknowledged that he got the wording not from the LAPD manual but from the American Patrol anti-illegal-immigration web site.

LAPD Chief William J. Bratton said he would clarify the policy for his officers. He also told the Times editorial board that he would make no changes to the order.

Moore repeated his assertion that the Times caters to Latino illegal immigrants because its parent company, Tribune, also owns the Spanish-language paper Hoy.

"The mayor, the City Council, and L.A. Times/Hoy won't take action," Moore said. "It's up to you."

Also speaking at the event were KRLA radio personality Kevin James and the young victim's father, Jamiel Shaw Sr.

James called for audience members to support Moore's campaign financially. "It's really expensive to run for mayor of Los Angeles against a former gang member who is the incumbent," James said.

Villaraigosa was not a gang member, but the claim that he was has become popular among illegal immigration opponents.

Shaw criticized the deputy district attorney prosecuting Espinoza, saying he worried she would try to portray his son as a gang member because he was carrying a red Spiderman backpack. "I want everybody to know," he said, "the fix is in."

Tomorrow's May Day march may not draw record-setting numbers, but it could see the first large-scale deployment of the LAPD's newest psi-ops gadgets. Captain Dennis H. Kato of the 77th Street Area explains that the police will be keeping in multilingual communication with crowds through the department's new Critical Incident Utility Vehicle, or "Polaris," a sort of souped-up golf cart that will patrol the streets dispensing helpful phrases.

Even more intriguing is the handheld "Phraselator," which will provide English, Spanish, Korean and Mandarin broadcasts of more than 100 useful phrases, with a range of about half a mile. That includes not only old favorites like "Hands behind your back" but some of the following:

Welcome to this event. We are here to help facilitate your First Amendment rights.

If you need medical attention see a police officer.

Please stay up on sidewalk. Please stay off streets.

Please stay out of the trees.

Please do not climb on the poles.

You are on private property. Please move back into this area.

All the phraselators are in the field at the moment, but I'm hoping to get a complete list of the phrases after the march is over. Meanwhile, if you really start trouble tomorrow you may get to hear the full Dispersal Order (text available on Page 53 of this PDF), which combines the urgent, the ominous and the legalistic in a frothy brew of police power. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Further reading:

"You're under arrest you have the right to make one phone call or remain silent so you better shut up," arguably the worst Miles Davis album of all time.

Photos and information about the universal translator from the Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki.

... and soars on hot air from the blogosphere.

After more than a month of studied silence, the reverend has stepped into the public spotlight to defend his controversial remarks on race in America -- and make veiled criticisms of Sen. Barack Obama in the process. On Obama's repudiation of his incendiary statements, the minister had this to say: "He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician."

Obama reacted angrily to his former pastor's comments, calling them "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth." Jonah Goldberg gleefully celebrated Wright's coming-out as "every bit as radical as his detractors claimed."

They're not the only ones with choice words about Wright's recent performances:

The Times' own Top of the Ticket blog asks, "Was Jeremiah Wright's speech set up by a Clinton supporter?"

... we should have been paying a little less attention to Wright's speech and the histrionics of his ensuing news conference and taken a peek at ... who was sitting next to him at the head table for the National Press Club event.

It was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds ... an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

Jeffrey Weiss over at the Dallas Morning News' religion blog wonders why pundits can't take Obama out of the equation:

After the NAACP speech, the all-news networks talking heads were mostly falling all over themselves to do political analysis about whether or not the speech would help or hurt Barack Obama, rather than attempt even a moment of thought about the meaning of what Wright actually said.

The Caucus over at the NY Times does a roundup of its own, observing:

Voices around the blogosphere say they’re tired of the media kerfuffle surrounding Barack Obama and his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but they certainly keep writing about it.

They also say they’re sick of the expression “thrown under the bus,” but they keep using it.

For some Wright-Obama commentary with both local and international flavor, Ha'aretz's Shmuel Rosner invokes the "Bradley Effect," but also snarks at the minister's comments about Israel:

At moments he came off as mocking and somewhat vain, but made an effort to soften the hardliner perception his speech had left behind. He was also asked about his views on Israel. "Apartheid?" he asked, adding that Jimmy Carter used this term, not him.

Israel, Wright said, "has a right to exist". His only desire was that the Israelis and Palestinians live in peace. He made no reference to the sermon in which he connected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the September 11th attacks, but he did make sure to emphasize his "Jewish friends". As it turns out, Jeremiah Wright also has a couple of those.

Daniel Nichanian at the Huffington Post compares Wright's position to one of the 2000 presidential election's most beleaguered political players:

Wright has no obligation to put Obama's interest above his own; dragged through the mud for news, the pastor has an opening to make people listen to him and hear the full context of his theology. Those who today profess themselves appalled that Wright would throw Obama under the bus miss the point that Wright does not think of himself as having any allegiance to Obama or to his election, just as Ralph Nader had no any allegiance to the Democratic Party making it hard to understand why 2004 was "a betrayal."

Wonkette agrees, in an offbeat sort of way:

He's blowing open the racial politics that Obama wants to close and claiming that Obama is insincere when he rejects Wright's "extreme sermons"; he's trying to balance a deserved self-defense with the collateral damage that that brings on Obama. He has an ego. Most importantly, he's just some old preacher and not Obama's surrogate father. He can say whatever he wants and Barry will just have to deal with it. Individual people have a right to defend themselves, and politicians have a right to disown them. That's all, goodnight.

While Sen. McCain had the plug pulled on the North Carolina Republican Party's ad highlighting the Obama-Wright connection, it seems the state party leaders will be getting the airtime they wanted for free.

Right-wing Dutch politicos-turned-producers watch out — free speech cuts both ways. From NPR:

A video portraying aggressive behavior by Christians matched with verses from the Bible is gaining traction on the Internet.

Raed al-Saeed, a young businessman from Saudi Arabia, is the creator of Schism, a six-minute video response to Fitna — a short film released last month that portrays Islam as a violent, fascist-like ideology. "Fitna" provoked anger in many parts of the Muslim world.

In case you don't remember, Fitna (a word meaning "ordeal" in Arabic) overlaid verses from the Quran over acts of violence — suicide bombings, beheadings, planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It was produced by Geert Wilder, a Dutch politician who happens to be unabashedly anti-Islam. Some found the film to be an act of bravery — Jonah Goldberg compared it to the Darwin fish — while Dutch Muslims greeted it with disgusted silence.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see a response to Wilder's celluloid screed — the point being that you can find nasty bits in many different religious texts, including Christianity. Unfortunately, Saeed didn't find footage of many nasty people saying those verses out loud — and his substitution of the political for the religious (such as images of the bombing of Baghdad and the beating of prisoners) detracts from his point.

But, to my utter surprise, Saeed did strike darkly comic gold with some unassuming Christians whose rhetoric runs pretty close to that of radical Islamists. One woman — who looks like she could have run my preschool daycare — explains , "I wanna see [young people] as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, because we have — excuse me, but we have the truth!"

And later, at the center of a roomful of kids, upper arms jiggling with righteousness: "Take these prophecies ... and make war with them .... This means war! This means war!"

But Saeed is quick to point out that this video isn't an attack on Christianity or any other religion. The final text of the video reads,

It is easy to take parts of any Holy book that are out of content and make it sound like the most inhuman book ever written. This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism.

A fair observation, spelling errors aside — and yet, according to NPR,

A day after Saeed posted his video on YouTube, it was taken down for having "inappropriate content." He immediately reposted it with a message arguing that if his video was inappropriate, then Wilders' Fitna also should be removed. For now, both videos are available on the site.

And it still is. Go check it out — there are a few versions up, but the most-watched one has racked up more than 350,000 views so far, and more than 4,000 comments. Looking through what people had to say about Islam and Christianity made me wonder: How many viewers who made generalizations about Islam based on 'Fitna' were fully prepared to give Bible-lady's comments a pass?

And while the film means to make a point about not judging a religion by radicalism, I have to say, those angelic-looking children dancing around with what looks like warpaint on their faces is a little too Lord-of-the-Flies for me to handle.

People are talking about Special Order 40. Take a dip in the hard water of post-modernity, find out what 40 prominent Angelenos are saying on immigration and law enforcement, and please leave a comment. It's 40 on 40, but we're not going to rest until we get all 4 million or so opinions in L.A. You can comment below as well.

I wouldn't get into a theological argument with my fellow Pittsburgh native Archbishop Donald Wuerl, of Washington, D.C.  But the archbishop has an unorthodox view of what goes on in American law schools.

Wuerl is chancellor of the Catholic University of America, the site of an address tomorrow by Pope Benedict XVI. In an interview with Newsweek, the archbishop defended the idea that theology professors at Catholic schools should be monitored for orthodoxy by drawing a comparison with law schools:

"You couldn't have a good law class where the professor said, 'I'm going to teach you what I think the Supreme Court should have said, so forget all these rulings. I'll teach what the law should be.' I think after a while the university would say, 'We need to shape up this law school'."

Likewise, Wuerl said, if a theology professor rejects a papal encyclical, "the university has to look the same way they'd look at a law professor that rejects the Supreme Court."

Actually, law school professors love to tell their students what they think the Supreme Court should have said. Far from getting you excommunicated, "rejecting" the Supreme Court — or at least certain of its decisions — is the path to preferment for a law professor. And it isn't just professors who diss the Supremes. Law students do, too. That sort of disputation is part of a legal education.

Of course, unlike the church, the court makes no claims of inerrancy.  As the late Justice Robert Jackson put it: "We're not final because we're infallible; we're infallible because we're final."

Columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that a narrow definition of genocide often lets mass murderers off the hook:

This can lead to a dangerous way of thinking in which people who are perceived to be standing in the way of progress -- middle-class farmers opposed to collectivization, aristocrats, reactionaries -- can be more forgivably slaughtered than ethnic groups because they're allegedly part of the problem, not the solution. After all, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet.

In general, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge -- and hence the status of ultimate villains -- despite having murdered scores of millions of people in the 20th century, in large part because their victims stood in the way of progress.

Historian Martin Meredith laments that Robert Mugabe's hunger for power prevented him from becoming another Nelson Mandela. And contributing editor Max Boot says the U.S. can still win in Iraq if the troops just stay put.

The editorial board encourages Congress to approve a trade pact with Colombia, observes that the Supreme Court will once again consider a display of the Ten Commandments, and wonders if Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both obscuring their true feelings on trade.

Readers react to columnist Patt Morrison's piece on billboards in L.A. Culver City's Gene Rothman updates Ogden Nash:

I see again an outdoor panel
It's another from Clear Channel
If from its stock we all withdrew
Perhaps we'd hear another view.

This post was updated at 11:48 am Thursday. See below:

From that great city to the north comes news that some art is so shocking even San Francisco hipsters will censor it. An exhibition by the French artist Adel Abdessemed at the spectacularly located S.F. Art Institute has been shut down following an outcry and threats from pro-animal activists. Kenneth Baker's review in the Chronicle describes the show and notes that complaints also were lodged by folks who in other circumstances might be the ones looking to épater le bourgeois:

The animal rights protesters were inflamed by Abdessemed's six very brief video loops, played on separate monitors, each showing an animal - a horse, a pig, a goat, an ox, a deer and a sheep - being killed, apparently without bloodshed, by a quick hammer blow to the head. Abdessemed shot the videos himself in rural Mexico, merely documenting passages in the town's customary food production.

But text accompanying the videos' presentation at SFAI left Abdessemed's role ambiguous.* A viewer had to wonder whether his hand wielded the hammer rather than the camera, whether he shot the video or merely commissioned it, and whether he commissioned the animals' execution.

The shock of the protest lies not only in its vehemence but also in the fact that it involves the rare spectacle of artists, including many SFAI faculty members, advocating censorship.

You could argue that censorship isn't the proper word here, since the objection raised by Eagle Rock's own Diana Thater and apparently others was to the killing of the animals, not necessarily to the art itself. But Thater herself gives that game away by denouncing the show as a "sick exhibit" that "represents the very worst impulses of the human imagination," fails to "raise people's consciousness"  and "will encourage them to accept animal abuse." Those are objections to expression of ideas, not to the acts themselves. (Whether the strict argument against killing the animals holds up is also open to question, since by general agreement these were all feed animals that were going to be done in whether there was a hoity-toity conceptual artist present or not.) *

Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of teasing my long-ago piece "Artists for censorship." Sez me, artists are no more or less censorious than anybody else. Writers and musicians have always believed some ideas needed to be suppressed. The urge to censor is particularly strong when the objectionable ideas show up in a medium other than your own (surprise, surprise). And there may even be some value in the impulse to "take seriously the idea that there may actually be dangerous ideas, and dangerous artistic vehicles for communicating them."

* According to an SFAI representative, the ambiguity Baker refers to is at most a red herring: the artist merely documented an existing procedure. "These pictures were taken by him in an abattoir and not staged," she says, "and he did not participate in slaughtering the animals." If true, this would eliminate the argument over the welfare of the animals (though you might be able to craft a case that the individual animal has a death-with-dignity right that would protect it from non-consensual documentation of the killing), and leave us only with the argument over expression. It may be helpful at this time to reiterate that the show was closed due to threats of violence against the institute, not due to the objections we've been discussing.

My former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette colleague Tim McNulty has a witty piece today about the quest for  "the biggest prey this primary season . . . Pennsylvania's voting-age white male."

McNulty writes: "The species is described -- depending on who's talking -- as either traditional or old-fashioned, proud or angry, straight-talking or racist/sexist. It is rough-hewn. It is gritty. It is a walking, talking cliche."

All true, and the fixation of journalists on angry white males predates my native state's sudden (and atypical) relevance in presidential politics. No convention of political reporting is hoarier than the interview with Joe Sixpack in the local workingman's bar, and the decline of the steel industry in Pennslvania won't prevent reporters from sidling up to big-bicepped bruisers in search of a rough-hewn observation about Obama or Hillary.

But it isn't just political journalists who refer to "males" as opposed to the more appropriate noun, "men."   

"Male" and "female" are adjectives, which have been transmogrified into nouns by laboratory technicians, Personals columns and police dispatchers ("Suspect is a white male with tattoos...").

It doesn't bother me when someone refers to a rat as "a male," but a human bring — even a suspected criminal — deserves to be called "a man," just as a woman is a woman, not a "female." As the Elephant Man (not Male!) famously cried" "I am not an animal."

According to Roman Catholic doctrine, a baptism is valid even if it is performed by a layperson and even if it takes place in private. My sainted mother remembered that when she administered a "kitchen baptism" (head under the spigot) to a grandson she wasn't sure would be dipped by his parents.

So why did Pope Benedict XVI have to baptize Magdi Allam, a journalist from a Muslim background, not just in public but at a televised Easter Vigil service at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome? Was the pope offensively flaunting a prized conversion and giving credence to Osama bin Laden's taunt that Benedict was playing a "large and lengthy role" in a "new Crusade" against Islam? Was this an another affont, intended or not, from a pope who raised Muslim hackles in 2006 when, during a lecture in Germany, he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who accused the Prophet Muhammad of commanding that Islam be "spread by the sword"?

I don't think so. First, Allam was one of seven people received into the fold by Benedict, Second, the  baptism of new Christians is an Easter Vigil tradition. In 2005, the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, baptized five new Christians at the vigil, filling in for the ailing Pope John Paul II. Third, even if Allam was chosen because of his prominence, there is nothing new about Christians (or adherents of other faiths) trumpeting the admission of a high-profile convert. Certainly Buddhists take pride in the fact that Richard Gere is one of them. Fourth and most important, Allam's conspicuous conversion was a matter of his own choice, a choice the Roman Catholic Church would have been bound by a decree of the Second Vatican Council to respect even if he had decided to become a devout Muslim.

It wasn't always thus. You don't have to be Osama bin Laden to recognize that Christianity also has been "spread by the sword" or that in the past the Vatican operated on the assumption that "error has no rights." And Allam's voluntary conversion contrasts dramatically with the 19th century case of the kidnapping and Christianization of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy from Bologna who was seized from his parents by papal police after the local Inquisition discovered that he had been baptized as an infant by a Christian servant girl. Pope Pius IX (whose humongous miter Benedict recently wore) rejected appeals that the boy be returned to his family. Edgardo later was ordained a Catholic priest. (The Catholic League on its website offers a tortured defense of Pio Nono's conduct in this case.)

Intolerance is an occupational hazard for believers of all kinds.   But the Catholic Church of which Allam is now a member eventually joined other Christian bodies in recognizing that belief cannot be compelled and that, in the words of Vatican II, "the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature." It's too much to hope that Osama bin Laden will accept this teaching, but other Muslims do. An increase in their numbers is the best insurance against the "clash of civilzations" between Christians and Muslims.

Someone -- it's not yet clear who -- launched a write-in challenge to six Los Angeles Superior Court judges, making the June 3 ballot just a little bit longer.

The nomination period closed earlier this month with 10 contested races without incumbents and only one sitting judge, Ralph W. Dau, drawing an election challenge. That left the other 144 sitting Los Angeles Superior Court judges (about a third of the bench) who are up for election or re-election this year breathing sighs of relief; since no one filed against them, they were automatically elected without their names even going on the ballot.

But not so fast. A rarely exercised procedural provision for write-in candidates allows challengers extra time to file, and the Metropolitan News-Enterprise reported Friday that a write-in challenge has been lodged against Judges Juan Carlos Dominguez, Hector M. Guzman, Daniel S. Lopez, Daniel P. Ramirez, Jose Sandoval, and Michael Villalobos. All six must now appear on the ballot, even though there will be no opponent listed.

That now leaves 138 judges who were deemed elected in March. Most of them are unknown to people outside the legal profession, unless they were judges who happened to preside over a high-profile case -- O.J. Simpson criminal trial judge Lance Ito, for example, was just deemed re-elected without a vote -- or perhaps related to someone in politics or government, such as May Lou Villar, sister of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, or Fred Fujioka, brother of Los Angeles County chief executive Bill Fujioka. They, too, were among the gross of judges deemed elected this month when no one filed to run against them.

Like the late Rodney Dangerfield, state constitutions "get no respect" in discussions of constitutional law. A rare exception came in this week's oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the District of Columbia's gun-control law. In trying to puzzle out the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Justice John Paul Stevens asked Walter Dellinger, D.C.'s lawyer: "To what extent do you think the similar provisions in State constitutions that were adopted more or less at the same time are relevant to our inquiry?" Dellinger bobbed a bit, replying that various state constitutional provisions  on the right to keep and bear arms are written in "different terms."

Dellinger surely knew that at least one state, my native Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has a venerable state constitutional provision dealing with guns that sounds as if it was written by the NRA: "The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned" Hmm. maybe I was violating the state constitution when I was writing all those pro-gun-control editorials for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (I'm safe now; California's constitution lacks a little Second Amendment.)

Unlike the "real" Constitution, state constitutions are sometimes prolix documents. For example, their protections of religion and freedom of expression often read like the First Amendment on steroids. The First Amendment is content to say that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Here's the equivalent provision in the Pennsylvania Constitution's Declaration of Rights:

The printing press shall be free to every person who may undertake to examine the proceedings of the Legislature or any branch of government, and no law shall ever by made to restrain the right thereof. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man, and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty. No conviction shall be had in any prosecution for the publication of papers relating to the official conduct of officers or men in public capacity, or to any other matter proper for public investigation or information, where the fact that such publication was not maliciously or negligently made shall be established to the satisfaction of the jury; and in all indictments for libels the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.

Whew!

Ironically, in this case more (verbiage) is less: Pennsylvania's version of the First Amendment is less friendly to the press, particularly in libel cases, than the First Amednment as it has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunting is big in Pennsylvania; so are libel suits by public officials, including judges. Too bad the framers of the constitution didn't write: "The right of freedom of the press shall not be questioned"

In honor of the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, "expertologists" Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky study the surge in punditry while cartoonist Ed Stein watches President Bush navigate the labyrinthine occupation. Novelist Andrew Klavan applauds playwright "David Mamet's public coming-out as a political conservative," and Tim Rutten likens Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech on Tuesday to Abraham Lincoln's historic "House Divided" address. Contributing editor Erin Aubry Kaplan also has a thing or two to say about Obama's speech on race:

Obama rebuked Wright, in part, because he knew their association was in mortal danger of morphing him into just another angry black man a la Nat Turner, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan (whom Obama detractors have already attempted to conflate with Obama). Whatever salient points these men made have been entirely eclipsed by the fact that they were just too mad for comfort.

Strange, when you consider that we live in a culture that thrives on vituperation institutionalized by conservative talk radio -- guys such as Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus are paid to be mad. But, of course, white anger is seen as fundamentally reasoned and righteous, and Americans have an almost limitless capacity to forgive it when it isn't.

The editorial board condemns China's manipulation of media coverage as it cracks down on protesters in Tibet, and urges LAPD Chief William J. Bratton to release a private report examining SWAT. The board also finds great value in Obama's address:

It may have begun as an exercise in political damage control, but Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia on "A More Perfect Union" was that rarity in American political discourse: a serious discussion of racial division, distrust and demonization. Whether or not the speech defuses the controversy about some crackpot comments by Obama's longtime pastor, it redefines our national conversation about race and politics and lays down a challenge to the cynical use of the "race card."

Readers react to the McCain campaign's murky plans for Iraq. Harold Tuchel writes:

It is concerning to hear an advisor to John McCain say McCain will not be as robust in military matters as his current campaign speeches indicate.

Although I don't favor any of the presidential candidates because of their policies of amnesty for illegal immigrants, what really concerns me is that they say one thing while fully intending to do another.

We have had enough of this type of chicanery with George W. Bush. 

If you're looking for a little countertonality in the choir of angels praising Barack Obama's anti-disownment speech, Washington Post columnist and former G.W. Bush administration speechwriter Mike Gerson belts it out for you:

The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country.

Obama's excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor...

This accusation [that the government invented HIV as a means of genocide against people of color] does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an "occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy." It makes Wright a dangerous man...

And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama's speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama's grandmother, which Obama said made him "cringe" -- both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference....

What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church -- a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church's pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.

I don't like columns that ask rhetorical questions, then answer them, then invite me to congratulate myself on agreeing with the answer. I have at least one family member who believes the U.S. Government is up to all manner of criminal and murderous activity. And I object to the political prophylactic of denouncing and excommunicating non-violent zealots — in fact I find all attempts to police the borders of acceptable conversation to be self-serving, authoritarian and worst of all boring. So I'm the worst possible judge of this column.

But if there is some theonomist politician out there, considering whether to make a run: You have not yet lost my vote. The odds are you will lose it. (It's not just you; it happens to most guys!) But if you're offering me something good (or better, not offering me anything at all), I won't pull somebody else's lever just because you have some crazy ideas.

Whatever you've got to say about the murder of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw or the arrest of 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza for the crime, start your engines. Please keep it clean: no threats, bullying, bogarting or unamusing ad hominems will be accepted. I'll approve as fast as I can. Some scenes from Shaw's funeral may give the conversation a little focus.

Why do so many women suck it up and stand grimly by, like a prop for the photo op, as the hubby spills his guilty guts for the cameras? Today Silda Spitzer looked like she might have had a gun at her back — or she might have had one in Eliot's back — but there she was nonetheless, "at his side," as they say.

Stick with the marriage if that's what you want, by all means — but let him twist in the wind alone. Just once, as the husband moves up to the microphone, I'd like to see one of these wronged women just walk offstage behind him, suitcase in hand, exit stage right.

YouTube has scored nearly a half-million hits for the video of a well-known broadcaster crashing a big Olympics press conference and, in front of those five emblematic rings, accusing her husband — an even better-known broadcaster — of having an affair. She dodges and weaves like a champion welterweight, shaking off the musclemen who try to hustle her offstage, to say her piece in front of the world's press.

Now that's what I'm talking about!

Samantha Power's "monster" gaffe probably won't turn Barack Obama's primary setback into a full retreat, but it's still great fun. Read the full quotation, with the Pulitzer winner's attempt at an instant backpedal:

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

You can practically hear the wrong-buzzer "EEEHHHH!" sound coming from the interviewer for The Scotsman (which by the way is my second-favorite name for a newspaper, after The Hindu), who not only declined to grant the request to keep the comment off the record but made it the lead and headline of the story. Well played!

Power has written for the Op-Ed page periodically. Here's her piece "How to stop genocide in Iraq," from a year ago. Another piece, "Democrats: Get Loud, Get Angry!" cowritten with Morton Abramowitz, has been disappeared from our site but you can still check it out at Common Dreams.

I take a more liberal view of what sorts of language are haram and halal than many of my colleagues, so it's probably not a surprise that I don't see what all the fuss is about. Why shouldn't you be allowed to call your opponent a monster in a no-holds-barred political campaign? It's a completely generic put-down, falling far short of the intricate jibes that some parliamentary systems consider standard. Besides, as Bugs Bunny understood, monsters are the most interesting people.

The U.S. Supreme Court is continuing its modified limited hangout when it comes to allowing the public to hear (but not see) its oral arguments in newsworthy cases. This week the court announced that  it will provide same-day release of the audio tapes of the March 18 arguments over the constitutionality of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. This is the third argument this term to get the same-day treatment.

March is turning out to be the equivalent of sweeps weeks for judicial junkies: The California Supreme Court this week made available audio and video of arguments over the constitutionality of the state’s limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples.

I analyze court decisions so a living, so I can justify my interest in oral arguments without admitting to be the Supreme Court equivalent of those C-SPAN junkies who watch every congressional hearing, think-tank panel discussion and book signing at Politics and Prose.  For listeners with better things to do, Supreme Court arguments can be soporific. It wouldn’t surprise me if some people who tuned into the three hours (!) of argument over the McCain-Feingold law in 2003 are still asleep.

An argument over gun control is about as sexy as it gets in the court — which isn’t very sexy at all. And if past arguments are any guide, the justices and the lawyers will discuss the Second Amendment  in the same mystifying shorthand they use when arguments aren’t being recorded for release. Don’t expect even Antonin Scalia to offer up a sound bite on the lines of “If you want my gun, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hand.”

But concede that most oral arguments won’t garner a big Nielsen share (or the equivalents for MP3s). Why not make audio of all arguments available on the same day — or even in real time?

Even better, of course, would be video of the argument, an innovation that will be introduced over the dead body of Justice David H. Souter. With video, you can be sure who is asking the question.  Audio alone can lead to confusion unless it’s being aired on television over sketches of the justices. No one would mistake Souter’s New England accent for the Chicago twang of Justice John Paul Stevens, but (especially when they ask short questions) Chief Justice John Roberts could be confused with Justice Anthony Kennedy or Justice Samuel Alito.  And if another female justice is appointed to the court, her voice might be hard to distinguish from that of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — especially if the  new Madame Justice were a New Yorker.

No justice, male or female, will be confused with Justice Clarence Thomas, because he almost never opens his mouth. All the more reason for putting video cameras in the court. At least then we could watch Thomas’ facial expressions.

With the news that Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, the late alleged murderer of two police officers and three city officials in Kirkwood, Missori, was a well known city-council gadfly, we set the wayback machine to 2003, for a Los Angeles Times story by Hugo Martin, explaining some of the tensions involved in giving broad leeway to public blowhards. Here it is in full print-spec glory:

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday September 24, 2003

THE STATE
COLUMN ONE
Freedom's Test, or Just a Pest?
* Gadflies deemed out of order are arrested or ejected from some public meetings. The 1st Amendment and decorum are at odds.

Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
53 inches; 1834 words
Type of Material: Column

By Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer

After greeting the San Bernardino County supervisors with a mock Nazi salute, Jeff Wright, a homeless Air Force veteran, stepped to the public microphone to complain about being arrested at a regional transportation meeting a few months earlier.

Board Chairman Dennis Hansberger told him to stay on the topic under discussion, which was the salaries of county attorneys. Wright then threatened to seal the supervisor's mouth with duct tape, which he had brought with him.

Hansberger responded by ordering sheriff's deputies to eject Wright, who was led out of the building in handcuffs, screaming about police brutality.

It was nothing new -- for Wright or for the board of supervisors.

The March incident was among the more than 100 arrests or ejections deputies have carried out at meetings of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors since 1989, according to an unofficial tally by one local activist.

Although law enforcement officials say they cannot confirm the exact number, they put the tally in the dozens.

In 2000, reports of those arrests earned the Board of Supervisors the "Black Hole" award, a dubious distinction given by the California First Amendment Coalition to public agencies and officials that the group says show disregard for open government and 1st Amendment rights.

In the past year, the pace of arrests and removals at San Bernardino County supervisors' meetings has increased to about one per month, with most speakers being removed for failing to stick to the agenda and then refusing to surrender the lectern.

My feelings on the fabled Sam Zell f-word exchange with a photographer for the Orlando Sentinel pretty much boil down to: Whatever you say, Mr. Zell! How else may I be of service? I'm not going out on  a limb by saying it's bad form for the chairman of a company to curse out an employee. (Based on our story's indication that Zell was seeking to smooth things over with the employee in question, it would appear he feels the same way.) But I'm with Patterico in finding the photographer's "what readers want are puppy dogs" comment to be far more alarming than the four-letter word. A cuss is just a cuss, but there is a lot of journalistic arrogance embedded in that dismissive comment about readers. People on the wrong end of the plummeting-circulation continuum should show some humility, and maybe even gratitude, toward the customers who are still showing up.

Winding up for the winddown

Yesterday at 8:30 a.m., I canvassed the four picketers then on line outside CBS on Beverly. Do they think the Writers Guild is close to a deal? Resonses:

1 qualified yea
1 wait and see
1 I dunno
1 I'm not on the negotiating committee

Same question same place same time same number of writers, this morning:

2 hope we're close
1 I'm on the staff so I don't want to be quoted in any way
1 Yes!

What did writers do online?

What will I miss most about the strike? I'll miss being able to nurse that mad hope that the big, steaming pile of creativity allegedly centered in Los Angeles might start to ooze into these here interwebs — that the experience of total fiscal drought might drive the writers to hustle and do it themselves, proving that they could master this whole online thingee without suckling from the massive studio apparatus.

Preliminarily, I'm saying the strike appears to be winding down with no important developments on the web. Speechless? Zero out of five stars. Why we fight? The entertainment equivalent of that nice boy who liked you way back when. Strike TV? As noted here previously, this effort to raise money and make work for jobless writers spent time in development hell and doesn't seem to have generated actual content (though the Strike TV myspace page did lead me to this, and who wouldn't like a less-challenging version of The Spot?). I'm waiting to hear back from a Strike TV spokeswoman about whether that group, or any other striking writers, did anything worth checking out online; I'll update if or when evidence comes in.

I also canvassed the editorial board for interesting filmmaking writers did online during the strike, with "interesting" defined as "anything more than one micron above the 'Speechless' series in terms of quality and compellingness." That search returned this and this, neither of which peel my banana — your mileage may vary. Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskowitz' experiment in beautiful-people Dada Quarterlife came right out of fantastically-successful-and-connected-award-winner left field to land a spot in NBC's February lineup. But I was kind of thinking of people at a lower level of attainment than master of the message Zwick, the show was shooting or shot before the strike even began and in any event I fully concur with Aaron Barnhart's ruling that it's "a show that old people might make about young people."

If you have other examples of good independent webshows made during the strike, send them my way.

Update: Strike TV press liaison Julie Rayhanabad (who's OK in my book because her one IMDB credit is for a Garret Morris movie) gets back with the following:

Strike TV: Hollywood Unplugged is ongoing.  There are a number of productions currently working towards completing material for the online channel - a few are still in preproduction, while others are in active production.  We haven't released anything yet. We will be doing an announcement closer to the release date, with information about the slates that are being released and the talent behind them. 

The beauty of the Strike TV: Hollywood Unplugged fundraiser is that its about writers doing what they do best, creating, while being proactive during the strike and gaining more experience in creating for the Internet. It's not really about competing with the networks or the studios, because it's not about those parts of the industry. It's about Hollywood being unplugged and seeing what writers can accomplish and what they can experiment with - it's coming straight from the creative people behind film and television production. Further, it helps raise money for the Writer's Guild Foundation's Industry Support Fund, raising money for non-WGA members that have been seriously affected by the strike... 

There have been a number of online pieces created by members that have been in support of the strike - including Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy), members of the writing staff from The Colbert Report and the Jon Stewart Show, members of the Samantha Who writing staff - just off the top of my head.   There's also the "Speechless" pieces and the "Voices4Action" pieces that are available. Those are all strike-related. Non-strike related, recently, a few series have been purchased that were originally webseries and are now going to be aired on network television.  The SCIFI Channel bought a web-series called Sanctuary that they're now planning on making into a series for the network.  Also, I'm sure you already have the information about Quarterlife, which was recently purchased for air on NBC (actually airing this february).

Seven pickets in a row: Survey finds 100% opposition to L.A. Times

Seven picketers on the line outside CBS this morning. I stopped to chat them up. To the following question...

Do you think the L.A. Times' coverage of the strike has been horrible?

...I got seven affirmative responses.

Optimism unbound

Nikki Finki, who has actually covered world issues as a foreign correspondent, hears optimism coming from the labor side of strike negotiations. And more optimism. Nothing but optimism for five days or so. Even the Oscars may go forward.

Who's the only loser in this? I am, the guy who wants the strike to continue for at least one full calendar year.

Media guru Shelly Palmer offered a provocative post this morning about a video channel on magnify.net (a service provider that helps interest groups create their own versions of YouTube) called "Islam Will Dominate." Although he acknowledged that he hadn't seen anything on the channel that was "particularly offensive or dangerous sounding," Palmer tried to build a case for companies like magnify.net to deny service to groups that menace us:

Our constitution prohibits our government from preventing anyone from saying almost anything (other than crying out "fire" in a crowded theater) in public spaces. But this idea of freedom of expression does not apply to private spaces, homes, workplaces or the purview of private enterprise.

Should magnify.net give a voice to Islam? Will it dominate? What does that mean? How about evangelical Christians? Don’t they have to be stopped as well? What about Mormons or Jews? Should we limit the flow of their messages?

To me the answer is very simple – as long as you don’t advocate killing me, you can say anything you like. But, when you are actively recruiting people who will be brainwashed to end my life, you don’t get to use my tools to do it.

He also asked whether general sites such as YouTube should try to filter out content from groups advocating terror. These are interesting questions, but the magnify.net channel Palmer singled out may not be the right example. His complaint mainly was with the name, which has since changed -- it's now called Muslim TV, probably in response to the conversation Palmer had with magnify.net's founder. Based on the time I spent with Muslim TV this morning, the channel's content struck me as broader and more reflective than the earlier name suggested. The first video I clicked on featured an Islamic scholar, Dr. Bilal Philips, discussing tolerance and forgiveness (bottom line: the religion is rich in those qualities, even if some practitioners haven't been). It's hard to tease out any one theme on the site; for instance, although the featured video was "Last two Afghan Jews fighting each other," a video of a verbal spat between two elderly men who happen to be Jewish, the home page also offered this clip about a Muslim intervening to help four Jews being attacked on a New York City subway train.

That's not to say the site is neutral or reliable. It's an offshoot of Muslims for Freedom, a self-described "movement for change" which declares, verbatim: "Islam is the words most misunderstood religion, not by accident it is by design, primarily by individuals and corporations who have a vast fanatical interest in stopping the spread of Islam."

To quote further from Muslims for Freedom's home page:

Many individuals who profit financially from such things as alcohol, interest, pork, pornography,  and gambling are also in positions of influence over media outlets. They use this position to insure that Islam is portrayed as a barbaric evil religion that oppresses women and condones such actions as suicide bombings as well as the killing of non Muslims. Our plan is to wage a counter media campaign in order to spread the truth of Islam by having a fully staffed marketing department that will work towards promoting the truth of Islam by purchasing commercial air time, space in print media as well as utilizing direct mail.

A few clicks around the site take you to nuttier conspiracy theories, such as this one asserting that the 9/11 bombings weren't done by Al Qaeda. Still, Muslim TV is monetized in a decidedly non-revolutionary way. Each video is accompanied by advertisements, such as a link to Amazon products (including this Hannah Montana video game) and Google-powered contextual ads. Islam may dominate some day, but at Muslim TV, Amazon and Google pay the bills.

UPDATE: I finally heard back from magnify.net, which informed me that the name of the channel has always been Muslim TV. But if you look at magnify's channel rankings, where channels are represented by screen grabs instead of their names, the image for Muslim TV is a shot of someone holding a poster that says, "Islam will dominate!" It was the only channel whose name wasn't shown in the screen grab or the channel description, so Palmer's confusion on this point was understandable.

Voluminous reader mail on our recent Blowback "John Ridley goes fi-core." Support, condemnation, and a controversy over who did or did not tell whom to shut up. If anybody out there has audio or video of the meeting in question, please send it along and we'll try to sort out the controversy. Or at least turn it into a ring tone.

Rick Mitchell, Los Angeles

Dear Editor:

John Ridley's comments about the Writers Guild sound very much like those of Thirties liberals who joined the Communist Party but left in frustration over its fascistic attitudes but were made to suffer for that membership in the late Forties. And it was nice to see a different perspective on this strike for a change. More objective coverage would be appreciated.

Roberto Bacalski, Los Angeles

Dear Editor:

I want to publicly voice my support for John Ridley's decision to stand on principle and tread his own path. Writers have always been staunch defenders of free speech. Telling one of their own to "shut up" is a terrible betrayal. As a SAG member, I support the goals of the writers' strike but the WGA will self destruct if they continue to alienate their own members.

Bernard Lechowick, Los Angeles

Dear Editor, There are nearly 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of American and John Ridley is your choice for Blowback? Justify that, please.

Ken Martin, Los Angeles

John Ridley's entitled to his opinion. No big deal. But his complaints about WGA negotiators not being experienced enough is a dated, dead issue. And it was discussed at the meeting in December. Which he should know since he said he was there. Patrick Verrone answered it directly and without any malice to the writer who asked it. And the crack John made about someone at the meeting commenting that: "Anyone who didn't have anything good to say about the strike should shut up." -- That was a member who stepped up to the mike and simply felt that way following the previous speaker. I'm sorry, but isn't that what he said we should all be okay with - speaking your mind? The leaders never cheered. The membership did. That's what happens in membership meetings like that. No leader on stage went into a 'frenzied' state and declared that this would now be the new theme of the night. Here's the truth: John Ridley is a sensitive guy. That's cool. But what he also is is a selfish member of this creative community by blasting the very guild that is trying to protect his and everyone else's future. The leaders aren't perfect - none of us are. So run for one of the WGA board or leadership positions if you're not happy. But don't shit on the sacrifices they and all writers are making by posting an LA Times Op-Ed piece with things like: "Bargaining chips moved on and off the table in the haphazard manner of a first-time gambler at a roulette wheel; interim agreements arbitrarily granted, without the necessary vote by membership."

Arrogant. Selfish. Mis-leading. And incredibly self-serving. I have no problem with John Ridley disagreeing with WGA tactics and policies. What I have a problem with is him giving up after hitting a few roadblocks. Being intimidated by a few writers who said you shouldn't go into the WGA's Santa Monica meeting in December. Then throwing his hands up like a spoiled, angry child and going by way of the LA Times Op-Ed route. Independent thinker: Maybe. A guy who really stands for something: Absolutely not. Cowardly: Absolutely!

Mike Scully, Los Angeles

While it's flattering to think that I helped inspire John Ridley to leave the Writers Guild of America (the union that has fought to make sure he was paid for his work and to protect his creative rights) and declare Financial Core status, I really don't deserve the credit he has so generously given me. I was the "high-profile (thank you again, John) television writer" who made the remarks at the membership meeting that Ridley referred to in his op-ed piece.

The problem is that John was not listening closely. My words: "tell them to shut the ----- up", was a reference to agents and producers (people who make a very nice living off of the work of writers) who were making public statements about the strike without any regard to the damage they were doing to the very people who pay their salary.

I never told other writers in the room that they could not express dissenting opinions, and that is why the Guild leadership did not feel the need to stand up and defend anyone - because nobody was being attacked.

So long, John. Good luck in "the Core"...

Bonnie Garvin, Los Angeles

Apparently John Ridley knows as little about truth as he does about solidarity. He claims by going "fi-core" in the WGA strike he is taking a neutral action. Ridley is anything but neutral. He is a flagrant opportunist who is using the strike to gain the notoriety that has eluded him as a screenwriter. Ridley has taken a page from Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Ann Coulter and other disgruntled reactionaries who try and achieve success at the expense of those who fought on their behalf. I doubt Ridley refused the health and pension and other benefits his WGA membership afford him. What is most disturbing is that Ridley resorts to absolute and total fabrication to make his argument. I too was at the December meeting where he reports "blood fervor" and "threat" carried the day. Sounds more like a page from a bad Hollywood melodrama than the uplifting meeting I attended. His representation of that meeting is not only factuous, it is a slap in the face to the 3000 plus members who voted in favor of a strike. Apparently he thinks we're all stooges. Only John Ridley knows best.

Jack Kenny, Los Angeles

Please. If Mr. Ridley is "done" with the guild, why must he still plead to make his case, and then add two extra paragraphs just to say he's done? If you are so finished with us, Mr. Ridley, then just walk away like a man. Don't back away whining about nobody loving you. And if you think your 1 1/2 % of gross only pays for your subscription to Written By, you may be even more stupid than you appear. Why don't you keep your dues and negotiate with each future employer to pay for your pension and health benefits. I'm sure they'd happily pony up. By the way, membership in the Guild is as mandatory as the mininums you were no doubt paid when you first joined... oh, boo-hoo, you were forced to join the Guild.

Mark Wilding, Tarzana

Obviously John Ridley's fictional endeavors don't stop at just his screenplays or novels. I also attended the WGA members meeting in December. At NO point did anyone ever stand up and say that if a fellow member didn't have anything good to say about the strike, they should shut up. That NEVER happened. NEVER. John Ridley simply made it up. So in addition to being a screenwriter, blogger, novelist and commentator he can now add the work "liar".

If you're delivering stuff to a studio, schedule it for Friday

To end up my week of strike reports, I wanted to hit a different picket line this morning, and so went even further out of my way than usual, to the Fox lot on Pico and Motor...only to look like a cartoon jackass when I discovered that I'd been looking at a Monday-through-Thursday picket schedule from the WGA. There was nobody assailing the house Babes built, which was probably just as well since the surrounding streets house my least favorite form of life: busybody residents who finagle no-parking-any-time rules out of the city. (One of these days, zoning partypoops, the Cavanaugh reign of terror's gonna start!) In fact there seems to be very little picketing activity anywhere on Fridays. I put in calls to a few studios to see if they've begun to arrange their pickup and delivery schedules around picket lulls. Will follow up if I get an answer.

Mixing it up on the picket line, at last!

And here's what I missed at the Fox lot. A little old-school fisticuffs on the line! Nikki Finke blames the "Fox white collar worker" for the altercation, but is big enough to allow that she disapproves of aggressive tactics by the picketers too — although her example of the latter doesn't strike me as all that objectionable.

Please don't throw me in that briar patch, Brer Bear!

I have yet to hear anybody make a non-ludicrous case that waivers, exceptions and other side deals during a strike are anything other than straight-up good news for management and bad news for labor — though stay tuned to Blowback next week, when a guild member will give it another try. But here's an intriguing unsourced item from Nikki's catalogue of producer misbehavior:

Harvey Weinstein received a number of phone calls from the moguls warning him "You shouldn't do it," and "We can get this done with the DGA," when word leaked out that he was making a side deal with the WGA to be able to hire striking writers.

Presuming that there's any truth to this report, I'd expect Weinstein's logical response to be, "Think about it, dummy. Management doesn't need solidarity; labor does. My cutting a side deal is either a wash for you if you're a competitor or a benefit for you if you're a partner."

But it's a crazy world out there. If producers believe (and I mean actually believe, not just claim to believe for public consumption) they stand to lose through waivers and side deals, and writers believe they stand to benefit, I have no choice but to think there's something to this premise even though I see no logical basis for it. Am I missing something?

No Negative Globes, but a funny response

I was hoping at least New Yorkers, who are said to be a hardboiled bunch, might go in for a little gallows celebration of the ongoing awards-show apocalypse, so I asked the writer Rob Kutner where the Big Apple's best Negative Golden Globes party would be. His reply:

I would say Times Square, because nothing looks better on a massive Jumbotron than a star-unstudded press conference!

And now a word from the free market

One of my weird byways in the always tangled paths of libertarianism was to dissent from what I considered a too-forceful opposition to unions. Not that I support organized labor or condone its outsized political clout. But I've always been just a little too ready to view unions as private entities that are entitled to their own freedoms of association and action, and to resist efforts, like Gov. Schwarzenegger's Proposition 75 a few years ago, to rein them in. (You can read through my Prince Hamlet routine on that issue here.) But I do enjoy getting a bracing dose of individualist grit amid all the collective passion. Here's one I just received from the documentarian Dan Gifford:

My take on the Writer's Guild strike is that it is, at its heart, driven by class warfare and capital naivete about the fact that those who put up the money and take considerable financial risk to fund films want changes because they are not making a profit. A recent Global Media Intelligence/Merrill Lynch report made that fact crystal clear as well as the reason: "Most of the income - past and future - that studios and writers have been fighting about has already gone to the biggest stars, directors and producers in the form of ballooning participation deals" as one story summarized the study's findings. But that does not matter to most WGA members I talk to and overhear while attending many film screenings at the WGA. What is being said comports completely with Lawrence O'Donnell's characterization of the WGA several years ago on CNN's Reliable Sources: "The Writers Guild of America, my union, is at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal and, like me, socialist."  And the sentiment I hear O'Donnell's socialists consistently express is that "the rich" are just greedy pricks who don't want to share their wealth.

Dan

Our do-nothing president

I caught up with Melrose Larry Green this morning, while he was working the 76 station at the corner of Highland and his namesake avenue, waving a poster in support of Mitt Romney. Larry, who attended college in Massachusetts and admires Romney for his values and his leadership of the Bay State, despises the Clintons and had this to say about the Writers Guild of America strike:

"The strike is a disaster. The mayor, who has a background as a labor organizer, and the governor, who was a bigtime actor, ought to be working together every day to settle this thing."

Asked to pick a favorite between the two sides, Larry declined, saying, "Probably both sides are to blame. I think President Romney would have intervened, because this is not just Los Angeles; this is the whole country. I think President Bush should intervene and get this thing settled."

Strike TV, where art thou, or, it's 1997 all over again!

The prediction that the strike would lead to an explosion of new media creativity is looking creakier all the time. Strike TV, an online channel promising to feature new, non-strike-related work by WGA members, aims to raise money for the strike's fund. The channel is supposed to be coming in February to YouTube and Google Video, and Strike TV held a seminar yesterday, which is described in detail by Fun Joel.

I'm second to nobody in my nostalgia for the Clinton era, but are people really still holding conferences where they talk about the challenges of monetizing the Internet? There's even a reference to "Hollywood 2.0," a concept I loved when I saw it 11 years ago on the cover of Wired. Seriously, the point of these here interwebs is that you don't have to go to meetings or spend four months on a project. What do you think this is, Hamlet? You're competing against "Leave Britney Alone," folks. Let's see what you can do.

Self-criticism for the self-absorbed

At my Paramount spot today, I watched a BBC crew schmooze the picketing writers. The correspondent's questioning style was to hold forth on how amazingly fantastical the universal public support for the writers has been, and at one point he asked "But the real question is what will happen on Hollywood's biggest night of the year, The Oscars®?" And he said it with such deadpan Brit-fanboy breathlessness (you could actually hear the registered-trademark symbol) that I remembered why it's so hard to take seriously critiques of Hollywood like The Player and such: Because when you get down to it, Hollywood self-criticism is just another form of Hollywood tinsel.

Real criticism from the non-organized

I'm not as confident as the BBC in saying what the public feels about the strike. I spend some time around true Hollywood hangers-on who are not striking but out of work and/or business, and I keep hearing that the worm is turning against writers, with "greedy writers" commentary becoming more prevalent.

There doesn't seem to be much evidence for that claim. Here's an anti-guild screed from somebody whose husband's out of work; that's not exactly a groundswell. If web comments are any guide, the writers still have the upside in the PR war. And every day this week I've heard at least one horn-honk in support of the picketers.

How much value there is in the PR is another story. The ultimate arbiter of public opinion will be my favorite economic concept: revealed preference. If the people don't want to watch, nothing's gonna stop them. Public behavior on this issue may end up looking the way it does on so many other issues: Most people, as the BBC might say, just don't give a toss. That could be bad news for either side, or more likely for both.

One career strategy I considered during my happy time at Reason magazine was to become just enough of a bright boy of the libertarian movement to allow me to stage a very public falling out, write a tell-all book with a title like Ex-Friends or Movement Man or Up From Libertarianism or Whose Freedom?, then build a career as a David Horowitz/Michael Lind-style intellectual turncoat, getting paid to warn the masses about the dangers posed by my erstwhile allies. The strategy was unworkable for many reasons: It was a little too dishonest even for me; libertarianism doesn't generate enough public interest to support a longterm market in defection; and as it happens, defectors from and within libertarianism are a dime a dozen.

But the tactic I was planning to use would have been very effective: Simply collect story after story of the moonlight-and-magnolias Confederate nostalgists, stop-the-war-on-men misogynists, traditionalist homophobes, scientific racists and similar fringe characters who seemed to gravitate toward libertarianism, in numbers that I and others found remarkable.

Actually, I probably wouldn't have been very good at this tactic either: I don't do well with policing unacceptable commentary, "kicking" people "to the curb," writing colleagues out of polite society, defining away extremists and all those other things movement types (in all movements) love to do.

Which is a longwinded way of saying I'm not well suited to commenting on the treasure trove of jarring commentary Jamie Kirchik is publicizing from Ron Paul's old newsletters. Virginia Postrel has a fairly succinct reaction that I agree with (though given the timing and Paul's own tepid response to the matter, I'd be inclined to dial back the ho-hum, been-there attitude), and I'm fascinated by Wendy McElroy's call for the true author of the commentaries (apparently a real person) to reveal him- or herself. And I could hardly improve on the coverage by my beloved former colleagues at Reason.

But I do think there's a discussion to be held among libertarians about why this political philosophy seems to draw so many (classically) illiberal figures; and the hubbub over Paul's newsletters, which are revelatory whether Paul wrote them or not, seems like an opportunity.

The Times' editorial board wraps up its American Values series with 'The blessings of liberty':

The Bush administration soon will be consigned to history, and not a moment too soon. The end of this cynical, mean-spirited presidency provides the opportunity for a renewal of generosity and hope, for a widening of political and cultural horizons, for a return to strength tempered by humility, for an era of decency and mutual respect rather than the blunt exercise of force.

That will be the mission of the next president.

The board also raises an eyebrow at a lawsuit filed by J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. seeking to block the publication of the "Harry Potter Lexicon."

The Opinion page caps off 2007 with a quiz on the year's "hard-to-forget moments," while columnist Joel Stein looks into his Magic 8 Ball and makes some predictions for next year. Under "Presidential election":