Ahh-Pologizzzee: [say that in your best Kevin Kline voice from "A Fish Called Wanda"] Anyway, great take by a female Duke alum concerning the apology that the Duke Womens' Lacrosse Team deserves for standing behind the presumed innocent players throughout the rape-oh-but-it-wasn't scandal:

Last spring, one of the only groups that stood up against a tirade of prejudices were the members of the Duke Women’s Lacrosse team, led by their courageous coach, Kerstin Kimel. While the rest of the world was condemning the Men’s Lacrosse team as guilty, Coach Kimel was actively supporting the students and her players' choice to show their support by wearing wristbands with the numbers of the indicted players. Rather than highlight the fortitude and commitment to the truth of these accomplished female athletes, the media rained criticism down in the most sexist and dismissive ways.

She then goes on to quote from various national and regional media personalities who are quite scathing in their pre-determined judgment over not just the accused, but the womens' team for showing solidarity in the face of such whithering criticism.

The post then makes the greater point of how, when dealing with these type of "perfect storm" scandals, rather than focus on the individual, the great free press instead rushes to throw on generic labels; rather than report, they smear with very broad and dirty brushes:

Instead of highlighting the courage of the women’s lacrosse team, the media brought us Rolling Stone’s pop culture critique of Duke’s campus as half “The Devil Wears Prada” and half “Girls Gone Wild.” The transparently stupid article by Janet Reitman furthered the media firestorm that Duke was chock full of “drunk,” “horny” women whose lives consist of studying while on the treadmill and finding hot guys to hook up with. You see, it wasn’t intelligence, intuition, or courage that caused these women to support the men’s lacrosse team. It was, instead, the fact that they were sex crazed, stupid, and ignorant. (Someday, someone will have to explain to me how this qualifies as a “feminist” perspective.) Reitman completely exaggerated the Duke social scene by following several “core four” sorority girls who happen to support the lacrosse players and, therefore, according to Reitman, have subverted their feminist predecessors in order to emulate Britney Spears.

Personally, I still don’t understand how “laxers,” who make up 0.01175% of Duke undergraduates could that big of an influence on the social scene. I think I remember one from my time at Duke and recall far more Duke women jokingly lusting after the assistant men’s basketball coach Quinn Snyder than any lacrosse player. That’s right, everybody, basketball, not lacrosse, is the sport that dominates the social scene on Duke’s campus.

Anyway, read on...it's well worth it.

h/t Volokh.

Down Under: Just a brief ditty on the opening of the 2007 tennis season. Couple of surprises and some things not-so-surprising.

First off, Serena is winning -- not always convincingly, and certainly not without some degree of awkwardness, but she's winning. By all accounts, she's not in tip-top shape, but with all the rust, injuries and distraction over the past 2 years, it's good to see her challenging, and against a cruising Sharapova (who mind you, was thiiis close to losing in the first round), she will need every ounce of effort.

Roddick can't beat Roger. It wasn't even close. Unless Connors can lace-up, I don't think he's ever going to get Andy to "man up" against Roger in the Slams. It's just not pretty and it's unfortunate that we're not going to see a true rivalry in mens' tennis for some time.

Hingis is back. She hung tough against Clijsters, taking her to three sets (Clijsters had 62 (!) unforced errors), and reaffirms that grace can prevail, at least often enough, against power.

Nadal is his usual mixed bag off European soil. Still can't figure out the shorts concept.

I fear Blake just won't turn the corner. He is starting to remind me of a Henman -- a guy who is a gamer, tough, and undeniably talented, but seems to lack the extra gear to win a Slam. Now mind you, I'm not faulting the guy for not beating up on Federer, but just make a few finals at least to show you have the mental fortitude.

Finals predictions: Serena guts one out (pun intended). Federer in 4.

SOTU: Okay, I'm going to get back into the swing of things here. I've had some personal issues to work out, mostly related to having a new job and all, so apologies all around for being completely (well, nearly so) absent for the past two months.

Flyer -- nice comments on Vodkapundit by the way. I figure if Stephen is back, then so am I. And yes, the Supremes have always had to sit on their hand to show how "impartial" they are to the policy points put forth by the Prez that they will end up tearing into little pieces within a few years. Although I'm pretty sure Scalia was biting through his cheeks on the healthcare talk -- or maybe that was just the remains of his panacotta; either way.....

I think others remarked on this: the Prez seemed beaten (and I guess in a way he was). I was ready for him to come out and say: "And as for the War in Iraq -- I was wrong." and then watch Cheney tackle him, whip out his hunting shotgun, declare W unfit to serve, and announce that he was in charge and henceforth habeas corpus is hereby suspended and a curfew is announced -- temporarily of course.

But somehow, Bushie kept it together enough to stay to his utterly un-inspiring talking points. You know, the SOTU has been in a slow decline for the past, oh 50 years, and it's now to the point where I don't see the point. No president would dare ever say that the Union's state is anything but strong -- even when it's barely getting by on broken rims and the tailpipe is dragging. Moreover, the Constitution requires only that the President inform Congress what is shape of things, not introduce NBA players as model citizens -- although I would have paid money to hear Mutombo give the Democratic response. Here's a much more thoughtful review of the devolution of the SOTU.

Here is the short version: "The State of the Union is Kentucky. Once China goes off the dollar, we're all done for. The Military is completely confused, undermanned, and without morale. Social Security will bankrupt whatever is left, but hey, isn't that Baby Einstein something? I get a little confused watching those tapes, but Cheney says his daughter is buying them left and right in anticipation of her giving birth to the Anti-Christ, so there must be something to them. Ethanol = teh awesome. Madame Speaker, you may now drive this Country into the ground. Thank you and God (you know, the good one) bless America."

Leo D: Women want him, men don't want to be him. Have no idea how this came up at NRO, but Jonah's annoyed by him. I only mention it because I'll always remember his role in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, as Johnny Depp's...ummmm....mentally challenged younger brother. A friend of mine once said, "For years I figured he really was retarded and he's just the best damn actor in the world in every thing else he does." That's just how I'll think of him, no matter how he ages as an actor or what movies he's in. Everything he does seems very overacted, and his portrayal of Howard Hughes gets worse just thinking about it. But standing atop the water tower, he made me laugh my ass off.

Johnny White's never closed: Radley has a piece at Reason about the infamous Johnny White's Sports Bar & Grill, the bar in New Orleans' French Quarter that never closed during Katrina or the aftermath. He visited the bar back in the fall and describes it well.

I snagged a picture of the quite unassuming sign outside the bar when I visited back around Labor Day, so I guess I was one of those tourists he describes, taking pictures outside of the places they probably know best from CNN or Fox News. Can't find the picture right now, but it's not much to see. Neither is the bar it hangs over.

That's one of the challenges with preserving/rebuilding New Orleans. Even before Katrina, the places most people were likely to see was not always very pretty. When I was taking The Skirt around town on our visit I found myself often pointing out some building of interest (to me) or driving down a street that I frequented, and saying yeah this hasn't changed at all. Many times she had just assumed this was neighborhood that had been devestated by hurricane winds and flooding. I mean, streets just aren't supposed to buckle like that under normal circumstances. And bars like Johnny White's would get shut down by the health department in almost any city. It would be easy to say, as a tourist, "Holy shit, this is what we're spending hundreds of billions to save?"

Anyway, I'm just rambling here, with little point, except that I wonder still what New Orleans will look like next month, next year and beyond. Would status quo ante be good enough, or is that even achievable? I don't know, but I keep watching. Occassionally there's a spot of hope, qualified as it may be. Here's one.

Casino Royale, With Cheese: Took a few weeks, but The Skirt and I went to see it last night. I read the book a couple weeks ago (I forgot just how short it, and most other Bond books, was) so I could nitpick it thoroughly. No point in doing that here, though, since Eno would probably still correct me on most of it, if he's still alive that is. I'll just give it the broad brush review, for posterity.

It's so close to being a good movie (Bond or otherwise) that I say it's definitely worth watching, if you haven't already. Daniel Craig pulls off the role just fine, and the reboot to a more authentic, more cold-blooded Bond is, as expected, refreshing. There's still a wry humor, and a vulnerability displayed in the book, that makes Bond more than just a killer, but make no bones about it, Double-O's ain't State Dept. careerists (or the British equivalent, I guess).

But the movie overdoes it considerably. In past movies, Bond is given every gadget imaginable, to the point where he can fly, quite literally. In this one, he may doesn't even need the gadgets. Surely any man with this much testosterone can fly by mere force of will, right? This is part of the modern action movie problem, though, that anything that can be done with stuntmen, camera angles, computers, closed sets and endless planning and rehearsal makes for a perfectly logical sequence. Forget the old action movie nitpicking (how many bullets are in that six-shooter, anyway), heroes these days really do live and work in "The Matrix", or so it seems. But that's criticism of the genre as a whole, not of Casino Royale in particular, so I'll let it go for another time.

The real question is, how true to the book, and Bond in general, does it stay. Well, for about two thirds of the second half it stays about 50% true to the general essential narrative concept, while by no means being all anal about getting the details right. And that doesn't bother me, necessarily, although I wish that where they'd deviated from the book they'd have at least gotten the details of the new bit right. For instance, I'm not bothered with the switch to Hold 'Em Poker from Chemin de Fer as the game central to the story. It's a modernized take on the story, and, for better or worse, Hold 'Em's the game today. But the mechanics of the game were off in many parts,, most importantly the climactic final hand. Le Chifre would never have pushed all his chips in under those circumstances. He believes he has the hand won, naturally, Bond has made his bet and Le Chifre must call. Two words, "I call," or simply revealing his cards and saying "Waddya got?" would have sufficed, and if he wins the game is over. There's no need to actually push the chips to the center of the table. Also, due to the other players in the hand, the dealer really should have made it clear what the side pots were and how much was at stake if they won. It's a pretty complicated final hand, and you better believe they would have been clear about the details at a real table.

The last 20 minutes feels like they crammed way too much in but were determined to keep from hitting the 2 1/2 hour mark. I understand they needed a final action sequence for the climax, but this was a joke. Again, modern action movie kripe, but my hope was that they'd gotten that out of the way in the first half. And the very end, well that was just stupid. Bond would never have sought revenge for Vesper's death, unless it was part of larger mission. It wasn't worth the risk, and besides, "The bitch is dead" pretty much sums it up. It's not "The bitch is dead, and now I'll go seeking out her killer to ease the pain in my heart." Fuck that, she betrayed him. She's not coming back, so why make apologies for her.

Another quibble - the gadgets. There aren't many, which is good, but the one they choose to highlight is about as lame a gadget as Bond's ever had, in any movie. I can barely mention it, because of how lame it is and not wanting to spoil it for those who haven't seen the movie, but let's just say this particular device, kept in the glove compartment of his Aston Martin, shouldn't be a part of James Bond's kit until he's a doddering old geezer, watching his diet and popping pills for high blood pressure. I mean come on, that's where buttons for oil slicks and smoke screens should be, not Bond's emergency medic kit. And it added a worthless 10 minutes to the movie, all to get one passably glib Bond line crammed into the game - "That last hand...just made me sick."

Despite all that, parts of the movie are a rush that make you chomp the popcorn in a way no Bond movie ever has. The opening sequence is fantastic, shot in black and white with short flashbacks to Bond's first "kill." Very cool. Bond as a character is as good as he's ever been, as tough as Connery without all the slapping around of his female co-star (hey, I said it was modernized, didn't I). The stunts are over the top, but dorky gadgets are kept out of it (with the one awful exception) so that evens things out. There's lots that's not in the book (like the first hour), but if you stick to the book's narrative entirely you're left with a 45 minute movie about a card game and a lot of ordering dinner with the fussiness Meg Ryan. Surely we can't be expected to sit through that in the name of accuracy. I don't know if anyone will ever get it right, especially since that means a lot of different things depending on who you ask, but this is the first worthwhile effort in many years.

Peter Boyle: RIP. The show Everybody Loves Raymond is pretty much unwatchable, but any zip that it has is due to Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts. But, I will of course remember him most for the role of a lifetime - The Monster!

Mark Steyn on Ian Fleming: It's not at all a review of the new Casino Royale movie. Steyn comes to stick up for Fleming as a writer and Bond as a literary character.

Happy Thanksgiving: I'm done for the day and week. Hope everyone has a great holiday. I'm hosting 6 or 7 friends for the feast, so the storm of cooking begins. Cheers!

An Inconvenient Rebuttal: Here's a worthwhile corrective to the ManBearPig's bloviating movie. (Caution, enviros: link may contain actual science!)

In a twofer, via Viking Pundit, here's news of new ways to get at evil fossil fuels.

Ten Worst Automobiles Today: From The Truth About Cars, here are the worst automibiles available for sale in the United States during 2006, as voted on by their readers anyway. My favorite review, of the Subaru B9-Tribeca:

Subaru execs may have been stony-faced when TTAC described the front end of
their new SUV as a “flying vagina," but at least they didn’t turn to stone.
Given the unrelenting hideousness of the Tribeca’s design– from its genital
front end to its fallopian dash to its alien eyes rear end — they should count
themselves lucky. The fact that the B9 is also slow, thirsty and cramped proves
that repulsiveness can be more than skin deep. Why Subaru felt the need to enter
the SUV segment when it offers such a wide range of superb four wheel-drive
sedans and wagons is anybody’s guess. Clearly, they shouldn’t have bothered. -
RF

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Subaru and a Saab are the only non-Big Three models to make the list. So way to go, guys. How about a little help from the Uncle?

It's raining and crappy here:

So I thought I'd ruin every one else's day, too.

Kerry's Line: Nah, I agree with Radley here. I believe that Kerry was trying to zing the president as being dumb with the "stuck in Iraq" line, just like he claims. Even Kerry's not enough of a tin ear to mean what his critics say he meant. Of course it was a painful line, and of course he proved himself the moron with this, but it really does look like just a flubbed joke to me.

And Radley is also right that the GOP trying to make Kerry's stumble carry water for them is plain silly.

Then again, I defended Dick Armey when he said "Barney Fag," so what the hell do I know?

More Kerry: Okay, I'll stop after this, but I just read a little bit of the coverage of this deal for the first time today. First, Jonah Goldberg's post here is just absolutely perfect:

....The guy thinks he can be president and he thinks he's doing what the
"fighting Dem" base wants him to do. The problem is he has basically radiated
himself with the isotope Asinine-90 and the only way the rest of his party can
protect itself from radition poisoning is to sequester the guy in some lime-pit
for 10,000 years until his asininity half-life deterioates to managable levels.

Second, you can read Kerry's statement a few different ways, admittedly. I honestly still believe though, that he was making the statement, speaking to a bunch of students, that if you don't work and study hard you won't have a whole lot of options in life and you'll wind up screwed by The Man and sent to fight a war you don't believe in, like him. I honestly think if he had intended to zing Bush a child could have written a more manageable line than the one he spit out.

And besides, for all the flak Bush takes for his malaprops, if that's what this was by Kerry, he should be roasted for this one like never before. It's the king of flubbed lines, knocking anything Dan Quayle said off the podium.

I didn't want to do this: But I'm going to get all political again, and over one of thedumber issues that could possibly come up. You don't expect serious issues debate at FauxPolitik, do you? So here goes.

John Kerry has the IQ of dog crap. This is not meant as an insult to John Kerry. I would never go personal in a campaign like this, unlike these evil Republican henchmen like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. No, I honestly just worry about the Junior Senator from Massachusetts and his ability to feed and clothe himself without serious injury. Perhaps he should be institutionalized?

Seriously, though, I completely disagree with Radley's take on this, although he does allow that Kerry is a "bumblefuck blowhard" which is an excellent descriptive phrase. He buys Kerry's explanation, though, that it was just a muffed line intended to zing Bush. That just doesn't make sense. The language just doesn't work very well, and such an eloquent speaker as Kerry (well, he does have the President beat in that category, even if it's like playing against the "special" team) would have come up with a better way to deliver the intended line. This was most certainly not off the cuff.

Neither, though, do I think Kerry "hates" the military or veterans, though, and there is a lot of opportunistic and over-heated language from the right to this effect. He doesn't hate them, but I think he honestly doesn't understand them, and to an extent pities them. The Vietnam mentality is impossible for him to shake, that you into the military if you're unlucky and/or poor. Bush was rich and lucky, he wasn't (although I don't recall that he was "born a poor black child," either - Navin R. Johnson he ain't). He doesn't understand that some people actually joined the Army knowing they might have to go fight, and in fact expected to. I know a few who have been to Iraq and they honestly looked at it as , if not exactly a positive experience, at least an opportunity to do what they signed up to do, risks understood just fine, thank you.

The fact is the military population is a fairly good cross section of the country, from a racial, education, economic and geographic perspective (here's one example of this). People join for a lot of reasons, including lack of other apparent options. But by no means does his statement that if you don't study and aren't too bright you'll end up in Iraq hold true in any meaningful sense. But I think he still believes that, as do a lot of people I talk to.

I'm not impressed by the statements of indignation coming from the right (and probably from Democrats as well who don't want to get dragged down by this). I don't think it's something to get all rattled about, because I think the feeling is pretty widespread by those of Kerry's generation. Their entire view of the war and confronting Islamic Terrorism is often clouded by this feeling.

If I can't contribute here...: ... at least I can be published elsewhere.

Obviously this post is solely for Eno and Flyer as only they know my secret identity and which of the quoted contributors is me.

That makes the second appearance of yours truly in TMQ....

Casino Royale: I know, I know. Thrashed equine, etc. But just watch the trailer. This one just feels different.

Note: Yes, I realize the nearly unforgivable sin of making Bond play Texas Hold 'Em in a tuxedo. It's gonna be hard to overcome that. But, just maybe...

Shout Out: Hats off to Radley, now on staff as a senior editor at my favorite magazine, Reason. I was so pleased, I cranked my subscription up another year to celebrate.

Hey, let me tell you my Reason story while we're here. When I first subscribed (back in the Postrel years), they messed up my order and I didn't get the special offer of the moment -- a free book of some sort, I don't recall which. Anyhoo, I complained, and they were all out of stock on the book. So they added three -- count 'em: three -- years to my subscription. My first thought: Are these guys really capitalists? But they understood the investment, and I've never let my subscription lapse since then, even as New Republic, National Review, Connie, Weekly Standard, and others came and went, turned old and boring, or got predictable. So subscribe already, fer chrissake!

As for Radley, he was the first blog FauxPolitik linked to back in Dickety-two, and certainly the first blog with more than four readers to blogroll us. He'll bring a fresh perspective to the magazine, too, since he's one of only a handful of pro-life libertarians I know of -- a position I admire for its sheer sail-into-the-wind balls, even if I don't agree.

So raise a glass of your favorite liquid refreshment before the neo-prohibitionists get you (an IPA here, please), light a smoke while you still can (make mine a Camel, no filter), throw on your well worn vinyl copy of Slow Turning (whaddya mean you don't f*cking own Slow Turning?), and join me in wishing him the very best.

Microcredit, ahoy: Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, one of the most successful microcredit institutions in the world, is the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Usually you can tell a lot about people by the company they keep, but Mr. Yunus is too fine a person to be lumped in with people like Jimmy Carter and Yasir Arafat. We'll chalk this one up to "even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes."

I read of the Grameen Bank and its success years ago in (here we go again) P.J. O'Rourke's All The Trouble In The World, which is still one of the best , most fun romps through "global issues" I've ever come across. He features Mohammad Yunus in his chapter on overpopulation, which I believe is called "Just Enough Of Me, Way Too Many Of You."

Not to pick nits, but why does this fall under a Peace Prize category, and not Economics. I get all the root causes blather, but is the Nobel committee afraid to make such a bold statement about free market economics? Maybe I'm just looking for negative spin out of reflex, but it seems weird. I don't remember reading about a civil war in Bangladesh, although there are probably many gripes and feuds I'm not aware of. And I know that his work has a greater impact than just in one country, but isn't its greatest impact on our understanding of market economics and how it rewards postive behaviors and penalizes negative ones?

Oh well, congrats anyway to Mr. Yunus. Hopefully many more will follow in yor path.

Via Viking Pundit.

Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Dept. Forthwith, for no good reason, five albums that are at least occasionally cited as "classics" of rock and roll that have aged poorly (and skipping Dylan, who is just too fat a target).

5. Who's Next, Who. When you're 14, this sure seems like the perfect album. And it is . . . for 14-year-olds. But that's about it.

4. Legend, Bob Marley. Here's an idea: Take a lot of Marley's least confrontational, least funky stuff and sell it to white folks as the "definitive" collection. It worked on me when I was a callow youth. Then I heard African Herbsman, and I realized that Legend was Marley with his balls removed.

3. Surrealistic Pillow, Jefferson Airplane. Is there anyone who doesn't snicker at these lyrics now? These were people who said "groovy" and meant it. And the self-conscious heavyness of the music? You can't play this album with a straight face.

2. The Pretender, Jackson Browne. This was the moment when the California scene began to develop what turned into an astounding case of earnest, nosy self-righteousness. Acoustic fascism.

1. London Calling, Clash. Speaking of things political. Socialism had ground England's once mighty economy into dust, Thatcher had just been elected and was about to end the dole-subsidized defeatism and nationalized mediocrity, and a poseur named Joe Strummer, who was trying to hide his posh background behind co-opted working class anger, became a poet of "the people" with this great tantrum. I do, in fact, remember how bold this seemed, and it's still a true document of its day. But, nearly thirty years on, one wonders what sadist told them they had two discs worth of saleable material here.