I'm going to bed. What a depressing day.

This is an Open Thread.

"Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?" - Paul Simon

With a cloud of steroids hanging over Barry Bonds as he is poised to break Hank Aaron's home run record, with Michael Vick indicted for dog fighting, with NBA ref Tim Donaghy implicated in a gambling scandal, sports seems to be at a new low. It goes lower today in France:

Tour de France leader Michael Rasmussen was removed from the race by his team after winning Wednesday's stage, the biggest blow yet in cycling's doping-tainted premier event. "Michael Rasmussen has been sent home for violating (the team's) internal rules," Rabobank team spokesman Jacob Bergsma told The Associated Press by phone.

Can the Tour survive this? I suppose it will but where have all the sports heroes gone? It is like the entirety of sport is suffering a BlackSox scandal. Say it ain't so Joe.

Via Oliver Willis. Take a memo billo, this is hateful and despicable:

A Boise State University running back who scored the winning points in the Fiesta Bowl, then proposed to his cheerleader girlfriend on national television, has hired security for his weekend wedding because of racial threats, a newspaper reported Tuesday. Ian Johnson, who is black, and his fiance, Chrissy Popadics, who is white, are due to be married Saturday in Boise.

Anyone who watched maybe the greatest college football game ever and then was charmed by the Boise State star proposing to his girlfriend right after the game must be disgusted by this. And here is the reality, anyone who has seen the reports on the disgusting comments posted at billo's site must know it is much more likely to be fans of billo than daily kossacks who would do such a thing.

In a desperate attempt to be demonized by billo, I post this statement from the Catholic Primate:

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith. . . .“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the pope said. “This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

Come on billo, level some invective on me.

We all know that the political news is not the place to find it. And our illusions about sports has long been shattered. But the NBA/corrupt ref scandal is off the charts. One of my favorite writers, Bill Simmons, explores the scandal and what it means for the NBA. My only blog hook on this story is the FBI is investigating. But I think it is quite a story.

Many folks seem to not have a good grounding on defunding and the lessons that the Iran-contra scandal provides for how defunding works. This post reviews Iran-Contra and how Congress' decision to defund the Contras triggered the Reagan Administration's illegal actions.

The Iran-Contra scandal relates to illegal Reagan Administration efforts to fund the contras in Nicaragua after the Congress passed legislation defunding Us efforts to support them:

The Reagan administration's most serious foreign policy problem surfaced near the end of the president's second term. In 1987 Americans learned that the administration had secretly sold arms to Iran in an attempt to win freedom for American hostages held in Lebanon by radical organizations controlled by Iran's Khomeini government. Investigation also revealed that funds from the arms sales had been diverted to the Nicaraguan contras during a period when Congress had prohibited such military aid.

(Emphasis supplied.) The question related to defunding that this raises is why would the Reagan Administration have to direct the secret sale of missiles to Iran (and seek donations from private indiviudals, the Sultan of Brunei, Saudi Arabia and missiles from Israel) to fund the contras if defunding legislation (the Boland Amendment) was not effective to cut off US government funding to the contras? The answer is obvious - because the defunding measure WAS effective. More.

Matt Yglesias points to this snotty review of the Harry Potter craze:

Along with changing diapers and supervising geometry homework, reading "Harry Potter" was one of those chores of parenthood that I was happy to do -- and then happy to stop. But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling's books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over "Harry Potter" with nary a child in sight. . . . Rowling's U.K. publisher has even been releasing "adult editions." That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don't worry. They're the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets -- Cap'n Crunch in a Gucci bag. I'd like to think that this is a romantic return to youth, but it looks like a bad case of cultural infantilism. And when we're not horning in on our kids' favorite books, most of us aren't reading anything at all. More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year . . .

My infantile response is to say 'write better novels.' But I think Matt's response is better:

Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias are having fun picking on Marty Peretz's personal assistant and I can't resist piling on. Peretz's Kirchick wrote:

[ R]egime change in Iraq was the official, bipartisan policy of the United States government years before it became fashionable for journalists to write tiresome, 5,000-word articles linking Ahmed Chalabi, PNAC and Paul Wolfowitz.

(Emphasis supplied.) I am tired of those pieces too. But they at least have the virtue of being true. Chalabi, Wolfowitz and PNAC were intimately connected. Unlike the claims made in those once fashionable articles that connected Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and mushroom clouds.

The other difference between those two types of tiresome articles is one type consists of rather meaningless blather. The other contributed to the launching of the most disastrous strategic blunder since Vietnam.

We'll be reading a lot of these stories for a while:

An attorney who admitted leaking the confidential grand jury testimony of Barry Bonds and other athletes to a reporter was sentenced Thursday to two and a half years in prison, by far the harshest penalty to result from the government's sprawling probe of steroids in sports. . . . White also rejected Ellerman's argument that he should get a lighter sentence because President Bush commuted former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence for perjury to probation. White said to do so would open the door to doling out unduly lenient sentences for other white collar criminals. "If Mr. Ellerman is dissatisfied with his sentence, he should seek a commutation from the president," White said.

Robert Stein, on the departed Lady Bird Johnson:

"My mother," Lynda Bird Johnson once told me, "thinks well of everybody. She's even sure the Devil's been maligned. Just got a bad press.”

I got to know the First Lady during the time her daughter worked for me when I was editor of McCalls. She was womanly in a way that has gone out of style. Without the chic of Jacqueline Kennedy or the country-club cool of Laura Bush, Claudia Taylor Johnson devoted most of her life to herding a bull-in-the-china-shop husband from the Texas panhandle to the White House.

She will be remembered for her dedication to beautifying America with wildflowers, but Lyndon Johnson was her life’s work. She never stopped.

. . . History will have mixed feelings about a President who changed race relations in America forever by pushing through Congress against all odds the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the rallying cry of the movement, “We shall overcome,” and then damaged the country with his stubborn refusal to end a disastrous war.

But whatever he achieved would never have been possible without the loving woman who died today at 94.

RIP, Lady Bird Johnson.

Digby again. Raw Story has the Pope saying take that, you heretic Cal Thomas:

The Vatican set itself on a collision course with other Christian faiths Tuesday, reaffirming the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church in a corrective document which it said was designed to clear up recent "erroneous" doctrine. The document's central claim, that only the Catholic Church is "the one true Church of Christ", is likely to revive a debate which has dogged the Vatican's relationship with rival Christian denominations for decades.

Most political junkies are watching the Democratic debate. Me, I'm watching the NBA draft.

My early reviews as to who is having a good night? Portland got Oden. Traded Zack Randolph to the Knicks for Steve Francis and Channing Frye (other players involved). Since I think Oden will be the modern day Russell, Portland can do no wrong tonight.

As far as who did the most with what they had, I like the Hawks draft, Al Horford and Acie Law are very good value for 3 and 11 though I think Horford went too high and Law went too low. The headscratcher for me, from BOTH ENDS, is the Celtics-Sonics trade, 32 year old Ray Allen for the 5, and that pick is Jeff Green? Worst pick of the draft imo. Green was not a top 15 player in this draft. He disappeared at the end of games.

Most of you don't give a hoot about any of this, but don't worry, it is an Open Thread.