A compendium of random thoughts regarding politics, society, feminism, sex, law, and anything else on my mind. POST YOUR COMMENTS BY CLICKING ON THE TIME INDICATOR BELOW THE POST YOU WISH TO COMMENT ON. RSS FEED AVAILABLE AT http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dilanblogspotcom

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THE DYING SPORT:
When I was a kid, my parents used to take me out on occasion to Santa Anita Park, which was a 20 minute drive from our house in Burbank. My mom was and is a huge horse racing fan; my dad likes the sport too, though not quite as much as my mom. Both of them are and were good handicappers, astute bettors, and a great example for anyone who would want to pursue a life of investing one's money on speculation as to what a 1,000 animal might do in the course of a minute and 40 seconds.

I still try and make it out to the track on occasion, but when I do, it is a lamentable experience. You see, when I was a kid, Santa Anita on a weekend was filled with people; 35,000 for an ordinary stakes race, 45,000 to 65,000 for a big race. You needed to purchase a reserved seat or you would end up sitting all the way down at the top of the stretch, more than 900 feet from the finish line. If you wanted to bet, you had to go down 15 minutes or so before post time; the lines were long, as were the lines to cash your tickets after the race. Local sportscasters used to go out to the racetrack and report live for their segments on the news. The best horses were very well known; quite a large segment of America knew who Forego, Seattle Slew, Exceller, Affirmed, Spectacular Bid, and John Henry were. Jockeys such as Willie Shoemaker and Angel Cordero, and trainers such as Laz Barrera and Charlie Wittingham also became famous.

Now, it's all gone. The only time you need a reserved seat is if you go to the Triple Crown, the Breeders' Cup championship day at the end of the year, or some busy days at summer vacation tracks such as Del Mar, on the beach near San Diego, Monmouth, near the Jersey Shore, or Saratoga, with its quaint grandstands at the famous spa in upstate New York. Usually, there are less than 15,000 people at the track on weekends, less than 7,000 on weekdays. And those that are there aren't even sitting in the stands; they are down in the bowels of the track, sitting at tables near the betting windows and watching television. And every year it gets worse, probably because the empty grandstands don't provide any ambience and don't attract new fans.

What happened? Everyone in racing has a theory. Some blame state lotteries and other forms of legalized gambling, which broke up what once was a legal monopoly held by racetracks. (There is some evidence for this hypothesis in Hong Kong, where people are still crazy about horse racing, 70,000 show up at the track and bet $20 million a race, and no other gambling is allowed.) Some blame the simulcasting craze, whereby bettors are permitted to bet on races from other tracks; this drew the fans out of the seats and into the interiors of the grandstands, leaving the seats above empty. Some blame year-round racing, or medication rules, or all sorts of other things that have gone wrong with the sport since the glory days of the 1970's.

All these hypotheses have something to them, but the biggest cause of horse racing's problems today is probably a much simpler explanation. Tastes change. Horse racing thrived in an era with very few major sports. Americans fell in love with horse racing early in the 20th Century, at a time when baseball and boxing were the only other major sports. Races dominated the headlines. The best horses were known throughout the country. Radio and newsreel coverage of major races increased the popularity of the sport. The totalisator (an adding machine writ large, and hooked up to a large digital display in the infield of the racetrack) was invented in the 1930's, displacing bookies and making the game more honest by assuring that everyone bet against each other, not the disintrested house, and that everyone at the track received the same odds. Many states legalized betting on the races, and the sport expanded. (This is the climate in which Seabiscuit thrived; his story gripped the nation and will be the subject of a major motion picture this summer.)

Horse racing survived the transition to television, the rise of professional football and basketball, and the increasing popularity of the Olympic Games. But eventually, the competition became too tough. It was bound to happen. There are so many professional sports now that some of the longer-established sports were foreordained to lose ground. Indeed, even baseball, America's pastime, has suffered declining attendance and grossly declining television ratings. Meanwhile, NASCAR, professional beach volleyball, men's golf, men's and women's tennis, professional wrestling, soccer, and various "extreme" sports have gained in popularity. Since Americans don't have enough additional free time to pay attention to all these new sports while still following the old ones, there's been a decline. And horse racing is one of those sports that Americans have lost interest in.

Of course, this Saturday, for two glorious minutes, many Americans will care again about racing, as they run the Kentucky Derby. 150,000 will be at the track, and millions will watch on television. But those two minutes are never able to arrest the decline of the sport, because horse racing relies on the folks who show up at America's racetracks for the bread and butter product of the sport.

There's no moral in this. I wish it were different. I long for the days when I was a child, and we would sit among the crowds at Santa Anita, who would scream and yell for their selections as the horses turned for home in each race. I still understand the visceral thrill of thoroughbred racing. But those screams and those crowds are no more, and I know perfectly well that they aren't coming back, even if all the problems of the sport were magically fixed.
posted by Dilan at 12:21 AM

 
THE CONSERVATIVES GET A FREE PASS, AGAIN:
It's hard to add to what has already been said by everyone else about Rick Santorum's advocacy of sodomy laws, but what ticks me off more than anything about this is how slippery the Right is on this. Leaving aside the constitutional issue, the reason we have sodomy laws in this country is because state legislatures passed them, and have refused to repeal them. Which means, simply put, that there are some legislators out there who support them. And anyone who has driven through the Bible belt and scanned the car radio during the day will have no doubt as to why this is so-- there are areas of this country where homosexuality is so feared and so loathed that it is all they talk about on religious talk radio. Literally, there are preachers on the radio in the Deep South who talk about homosexuality as if it is the central problem facing this country.

The point is, if the right wing politicians and their supporters in the commentariat decided to buck their constituents and actively oppose sodomy laws, we wouldn't have them. Such opposition requires more than the "sure I oppose sodomy laws, but Sen. Santorum raises a legitimate issue and is being viciously attacked" position that we are hearing from most conservatives. Heck, even Pat Buchanan took that position on his MSNBC talk show the other day. And any position on sodomy laws that is shared with Pat Buchanan cannot be described as a position that confronts the religious right. Rather, these laws exist because those on the right who oppose them nonetheless indulge supporters of the laws as holding a legitimate, debatable position. Indeed, many conservatives have gone so far as to accuse those who oppose Santorum as being motivated by anti-Catholic or anti-Christian bigotry, as if Christian doctrine required that homosexuals be thrown in jail! (Quite the opposite; as I have pointed out before in this blog, someone who "loves the sinner and hates the sin" would never support these repressive laws which only do harm to the supposedly "loved" sinner.)

The reason that the right gets away with their soft opposition to sodomy laws is because nobody seems willing to ask them the tough questions. I have a feeling if that if most Americans, including quite a few who aren't particularly great fans of gay rights in other areas, knew that the Republican party tacitly, and sometimes actively, endorses throwing people in prison for having same-gender sexual relations in the privacy of their own homes, that might be a factor that those Americans would weigh in deciding whether to support Republicans. But somehow, the tactic of obfuscation, of making it sound like the only issue is the broad interpretation of the Constitution to provide a right to commit sodomy, or making it sound like the issue is anti-religious bigotry, or making it sound like the advocacy of jailing homosexuals is a moral tenet rather than a policy prescription, is working.

Of course, the Democrats don't help any. You will hear a lot of cheerleading for gay rights now, when nobody's paying attention, but during the election campaign, Democrats seeking the votes of bigots will tone down their support of gay causes. They always do. But I'd love to see John Kerry, or John Edwards, or Howard Dean, or whoever the Dems nominate, put the question to W in a Presidential debate in simple terms. "Mr. President, why won't you publicly confirm that you disagree with those in your party who say that gays should be thrown in jail just for having sex with each other? You do believe that there shouldn't be laws prohibiting gay adults from having sex with each other in the privacy of their home, don't you?" Of course, it will never happen. And sodomy laws will stay on the books, unless the Supreme Court strikes them down. How depressing.
posted by Dilan at 11:48 PM

 
HOWELL RAINES SHOULD BE FIRED:
Howell Raines is the editor of the New York Times. I don't know that much about his politics, but from what I know, I would agree with him on any number of things. I do know, however, that he is a lousy journalist who, as long as he is around, will give some substance to conservatives' shrill charges of liberal media bias. (So that you know, I do know a little bit about journalism. Just about every member of my immediate family is or has been a journalist, and I was the black sheep of the family who did something else with my life. And even I publish a blog, which I suppose is a form of journalism.)

Under Raines' watch, the New York Times has repeatedly engaged in unethical journalism designed to promote a political agenda:

1. The Times unjustifiably savaged the reputation of scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was practically accused of being a communist spy based on what apparently was very flimsy evidence, apparently in service of grudges that the paper's brass held against Bill Clinton.

2. After conducting a months-long campaign, featuring several stories on page A1, the front page of the paper (not just the sports section), to change Augusta National Golf Club's discriminatory policy against admitting women to the club (a policy that I think is idiotic and wrong (scroll down to "Why is Sexism Bad and Racism OK?")), Raines actually killed two columns by New York Times sports columnists that opposed the position that was taken by Raines' front page and by the editorial page. As a general rule, newsrooms don't interfere with sportswriters, and for good reason-- news editors tend to know very little about sports. Nor should good newspapers prevent their columnists from expressing dissenting views-- and this goes as well for Times sportswriters as it does for Bill Safire on the op-ed page. Raines was eventually forced to back down and run the columns, though the paper still lies about the reason the columns were spiked, claiming it was because the two award-winning columnists turned in substandard work, rather than columns that disagreed with the position being taken by the paper.

3. Now, as Mickey Kaus reports, it turns out Raines killed coverage of New Jersey Sen. Robert Toricelli's ethical misdeeds (the Times covers New Jersey and Connecticut politics, as well as New York politics, as a "local" story, because many of the paper's readers live in those states and commute to New York City), because he didn't want the paper to cause Toricelli to be forced out of the Senate (as he eventually was) resulting in a shift in control of the Senate to the Republicans. As a result, the Times' sources went to a TV station, which broke the story.

The New York Times is the "paper of record", a proud institution with a great professional reputation. Unfortunately, with Raines in charge, it's amateur hour, and the paper is being run like a Fleet Street tabloid. It's time for "regime change" at the New York Times.
posted by Dilan at 6:02 PM

 
AN ADDENDUM TO THE LAST POST ON PUNITIVES:
A reader's e-mail convinced me that I wasn't entirely clear in one aspect of my last post on the Campbell punitive damages decision. So, to be perfectly clear, my criticism is aimed at the conservative critics of the federal judiciary who whine about "judicial activism", and at the majority in the Campbell case, which includes liberals as well as conservatives Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Kennedy. Justices Scalia and Thomas, to their credit, want no part of the Court's punitive damages jurisprudence.
posted by Dilan at 1:04 PM

 
THE SUPREME COURT, FEDERALISM, UNENUMERATED RIGHTS, AND PUNITIVE DAMAGES:
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court decided State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. v. Campbell, holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, imposes sharp limitations on the states' power to impose punitive damages. The decision was drowned out by war coverage, but this decision promises to fundamentally change American law and call into question some of the basic assumptions of our tort system.

There is a longstanding debate about whether America is lawsuit-happy, and whether various sorts of limitations should be imposed on the tort system. This debate is going on in both state legislatures and Congress, who have been egged on by conservative groups (funded by corporate and insurance industry contributions) who want to limit damage awards. While traditionally, state legislatures and state court systems determine the compensation available for the victims of accidents in tort lawsuits, there is at least a colorable argument that Congress might have a role in regulating such compensation, both because it seems somewhat unfair that a defendant in Mississippi might have to pay much more in damages for the same wrongful act than a defendant in Texas, and also because a huge award affects not only a company's business in the state that imposes the damages, but also impacts the company's out-of-state business as well.

What is notable, however, is that these are essentially liberal, big government justifications for federal action. Under the arguments that conservatives have used to strike down civil rights statutes and federal gun laws, these sorts of justifications would probably not permit Congress to regulate state tort actions in this matter. Thankfully for the conservatives, however, the Supreme Court has found another means to nationalize tort reform-- the federal judiciary.

In the Campbell case, the Court held that: (1) no state may impose a punitive damage award that exceeds 10 times the compensatory damages awarded, and that in many cases, a punitive damage award equal to the compensatory damages will be appropriate, (2) the defendant's wealth, recognized since the adoption of the Constitution as a consideration in fixing the amount of punitive damages (a $10,000 penalty means a lot to a middle class individual but very little to a multinational corporation), may not be used as a consideration in justifying a large award, and (3) the facts supporting punitive damages award will be reviewed anew by appellate courts, with none of the traditional and well-established deference given to the facts as found by the jury or the trial court.

None of this appears anywhere in the Due Process clause. First of all, as long as there is a fair trial and a jury determination on punitive damages, there is no sense in which it could be said that a punitive damages award deprives property without due process of law. What is really being talked about is an unenumerated right in the Constitution. And the Court ignores the tests that the Court and most conservatives endorse for determining the existence of such rights, i.e., whether the right has traditionally been recognized and is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. And it is no wonder-- large punitive damage awards have been around since the founding of the republic. Nobody ever thought they were prohibited. (To their credit, Justices Scalia and Thomas have consistently argued that the Constitution imposes no limits on punitive damages based on the nonexistence of any such tradition.)

What is even more breathtaking than the hypocrisy and lack of principle behind the Court's decision, however, is the impact that it will have on future cases. The constitutionality of punitive damages awards will now be an issue in every tort case where they are available. Further, the deterrent value of such damages will be substantially reduced-- especially since it is now unconstitutional to impose an award of sufficient size to dent the finances of a wealthy defendant. Hundreds of years of common law experience that has established punitive damages as an effective means of punishment and deterrence has been thrown out the window in favor of an unproven and contestible theory as to what should and shouldn't be considered by juries and judges in fixing damages. Of course, a state legislature, and perhaps Congress, could decide that this is an experiment worth attempting. But the judiciary has no business doing this.
posted by Dilan at 11:55 AM

 
BLOGROLL BACK UP:
I know you all have been waiting with baited breath. Just look to the left and scroll down.
posted by Dilan at 1:21 PM

 
FRUM AWARD NOMINEE:
John Kerry, running for President, said that we need a "regime change" here in America. Opportunistic Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot (pronounced "Roscoe", if you are curious) responded by not only criticizing Kerry's colorful language (which would be kind of silly by itself, as no reasonable person would read the comment as comparing Bush to Saddam Hussein), but by saying that Kerry was wrong because he "dared to suggest the replacement of America's commander-in- chief at a time when America is at war". (Here's a nice discussion of what Kerry and Racicot each said.) In other words, because we are at war, the President may not be replaced, or at least it is unpatriotic to advocate the replacement of the President.

Mr. Racicot might not have been paying attention in history class, but this debate was settled in 1864, during to a war that, unlike the current hostilities in Iraq, actually involved sustained, disruptive combat within the territory of the United States where there actually might have been a decent argument to make about ordinary political activities disrupting the war effort.

To Kerry's credit, he properly responded to this attack by trashing the Republicans. After all, Kerry served with distinction in Vietnam and needs a lecture from nobody about patriotism. But this incident shows how the GOP is going to follow the Frum strategy right into the 2004 elections if they can, attacking the patriotism of anyone who dares to oppose them.
posted by Dilan at 1:03 PM

 
ROOT ROOT ROOT FOR THE HOME TEAM:
I have spent a fair amount of time here criticizing the Right for slamming everyone who opposes the war as anti-American and unpatriotic. For some reason, that is the default thinking pattern of American hawks at a time of war-- this is something that has happened in just about every previous war.

But as I noted in my last post, there is at least some anti-Americanism out there. What was I talking about? Well, there was a college professor who wished a "million Mogudishus" on the U.S. army last week. There are some people in the anti-war movement who don't want to hear about Saddam Hussein's dreadful history of chemical weapons attacks and systematic torture.

These people are marginal figures. I think they unfortunately give the Right ammunition to paint the whole anti-war movement as unpatriotic. But to resist this charge, the anti-war movement needs to do what the French and German governments did today: make clear that if it is a choice between Iraq winning the war and America winning it, America must win the war. Saddam Hussein is not Che Guevara. He is a ruthless dictator who runs an oppressive totalitarian state. He has screwed his people by refusing to get rid of his weapons and thus ensuring continued economic sanctions that have killed up to a million Iraqis. The Arab world needs more democracies, not more governments like Saddam's.

I didn't particularly care whether he invaded Iran or Kuwait-- those governments are horribly oppressive as well. (Kuwait's is also elitist and racist-- I don't have any sympathy for a government that imports foreigners to do the work to support its lazy population, and then refuses to provide any means for those foreigners to attain citizenship and share in the wealth of the country.) I certainly wouldn't have cared if he had invaded Saudi Arabia in 1991, the threat that caused Bush 41 to start the Gulf War. If Saddam had overthrown the Saudi monarchy and imposed his will on Arabia, Osama Bin Laden might have chosen to turn his formidable fire at Saddam rather than the United States.

But the current war is not Iran vs. Iraq, or Saudi Arabia vs. Iraq. This is Saddam Hussein versus a coalition that, whatever else you want to say about it, is attempting to impose a decent government in Iraq. Even the worst possible government that the coalition could install, full of neoconservatives more concerned with the security of Israel than the aspirations of the Iraqi people, would be a distinct improvement over the Baath dictatorship. The new government will not stockpile chemical weapons. It will not torture dissidents. It will not squander the country's considerable oil wealth building presidential palaces and buying tons of armaments. And it is quite likely that the government that we install will be much better than even that worst-case scenario. Iraq stands a chance of becoming some sort of a democracy, or at least a federated state that protects the rights of its minority groups (unlike any of the other countries in the region).

The point is, rooting for Mogudishu, or Vietnam, in this war, is rooting for the bad guys. Of course, one can still protest for peace, protest American tactics, or seek a pullout from Iraq. Such protests played a role in our pullouts from Vietnam and Somalia, which saved countless lives in needless conflicts.

And I don't flinch from my position that we should not have started this war in the first place. Indeed, I fear that after this war, the US will seek out future conflicts because there are very few remaining checks on American power. (I suspect we could defeat just about any country that doesn't have nuclear weapons.) I also fear that widespread nuclear proliferation will occur because countries with questionable governments (and there are many of them) will seek the security that Kim Jong Il has obtained against American attack. Whoever replaces W in the White House is going to have a difficult task of rebuilding international security mechanisms that W has destroyed with his inept and reckless foreign policies.

Those things are all true. But we must still defeat Saddam Hussein. Even in some of our more imperialist exercises have been good for the world in the long term. (Not all, just some. Kissinger should still face his day of reckoning for what we did in Chile.) Would Panama be better off if they still had Noriega? South Korea has a wonderful government; one hates to think what would had happened if the North had taken over.

The most important thing that we can all do in the coming days and weeks and months is to force the Bush Administration to keep its promises to install a decent government to replace Saddam Hussein. I wish we had chosen the route of peace. But when someone hands you a tub of lemons, you have little choice but to try and make lemonade.
posted by Dilan at 10:13 PM

 
FRUM AWARD NOMINEE:
Taking after Andrew Sullivan, I have decided to create an award for conservatives who inappropriately question the patriotism of war opponents. We name the award after David Frum, who is a serial offender at labeling anyone who disagrees with the war anti-American (see here and here). (One of the delicious ironies of Frum's baiting tactics is that he's Canadian himself.)

In order to be eligible for this award, the commentator must be (1) a prominent conservative hawk, who (2) labels an opponent or opponents of the war as anti-American, (3) where such a label is egregiously inappropriate. Point (3) is important-- obviously, there are some people out there who really do want to see the US go to hell in a handbasket; the sin of the Frums of the world is to assume that a central or even the main motivation of people who take anti-war positions is that they hate America.

Our first nominee comes to us from TAPPED. It is none other than Bill Kristol, one of the neoconservative prime movers behind W's Iraq policy. He viciously attacked Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), saying that Rangel's anti-war position had led him to desire to "see American setbacks in the war to vindicate [his] position". As TAPPED points out, Congressman Rangel is not only a Korean war veteran, but was seriously wounded in battle. Rangel is a black man who risked his life for his country, and suffered great pain and physical anguish in doing so, and, I might add, did this at a time when his country still imposed horrible racial segregation and discrimination against people with his skin color. Kristol, on the other hand, sat out the Vietnam War.

I am not one to buy, in toto, the "Chicken Hawk" argument (i.e., that a person has no business being a hawk if he or she ducked military service). I don't think that those who did not serve in the military are automatically disqualified from taking positions on matters of war and peace. Our system demands that all citizens participate in the process of determining whether we should go to war, whether they have served or not.

But this is not a matter of Kristol simply being a Chicken Hawk. This is the matter of someone who had a privileged upbringing as the son of Irving Kristol and who, like many others of his generation, had better things to do than risk his neck in a war that he nonetheless supported, gracelessly questioning the patriotism of a man took enemy fire for his country at a time when that country considered him to be a second-class citizen. What a warped mind Mr. Kristol has. Being patriotic is not a matter of agreeing with this or that political position. It is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is a matter of being willing to put your butt on the line when your country needs you. Charlie Rangel did so. He deserves better than to have his bona fides attacked by someone who has never had to leave the comfortable confines of the Washington establishment, where Mr. Kristol can safely sit around passing judgment on what everyone else's motives are.
posted by Dilan at 11:40 AM