The Rest of the Week In Review

• Wow, that really was the worst baseball post-season I've ever seen. And, since I only pay even mild attention to baseball in the post-season, the worst baseball season ever, to boot.

• We are just 67 days from the caucuses in Iowa. I'll be devoting time to a lot more Presidential blogging in the coming weeks.

• Jim Webb allows himself to tell the truth about the neocon enablers pushing Cheney/Bush's imperialist vision in Iran. Meanwhile, we're supposed to be comforted by the fact that Bush's body language means that an attack is unlikely. Yeah, David Brooks, keep navel-gazing while the bombs fly.

• Digby takes a look at the Republican hissy fit, the point of which is to control the debate and force the Democrats into a kind of learned helplessness. The antidote is not to throw your own hissy fits, as much as some actions would deserve it, but to refuse to accept the premise. Someday some politician will learn this.

• While California burned, Brent Wilkes took the stand in his own trial in San Diego on Friday. He claimed that he never bribed Duke Cunningham, which would come as news to the spate of federal prosecutors who convicted Duke Cunningham. His excuse on the hookers who accompanied him and Cunningham on a trip to Hawaii was "I never had sex with them." Well, that's something.

• If this hilarious post is any indication, I've got to read John Cole more. Cole exposes the lunacy of the insaneosphere's Zapruder-film-like focus on minutiae when it comes to stories about Iraq, eager to accuse the media of hating America. If you're interested in an example of an issue this is satirizing, read Greg Sargent on the latest on the Scott Thomas Beauchamp embarrassment.

• It's really shameful for Democrats to punish a class of people who have known no home but the United States, who are hardworking and want to contribute to this society, simply because they're afraid of a bunch of election-year ads morphing their faces into Pancho Villa. The DREAM Act is no-brainer legislation. Failure to act is a disgrace.

• One thing on which both parties are comparatively similar: the inability to understand the BCC function:

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee's website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the "strictest confidence."

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".

Dick Cheney got all these email addresses, by the way. That shouldn't be anything to worry about.

• I wonder if we'll continue to see righties using Nicolas Sarkozy as a model of conservative governance after they see that he's backed a corporate carbon tax. Calling Sarkozy a "Republican" in the American sense of the word is ludicrous. There's simply no comparison.

• This article by Courtney Martin about Tom Friedman's frankly dumb article about the younger generation's failure to get in the streets to fix his generation's Baby Boomer messes is a good read.

• Prisoners fighting wildfires for a buck an hour. What a country.

• Finally, The Darjeeling Limited, which I saw last night, is growing on me. My initial thoughts were that it was insubstantial and a little precious, like a watching a doll house. The more I ponder it, while it lacks the laugh-out-loud moments of prior Wes Anderson films, the more I liked it. These are broken people who use their own small processes to fill their incomplete lives, and in the end they are still searching despite the appearance of resolution. This is an outgrowth of an age of narcissism.