The NBA is a collection of egomaniacal pituitary cases who allow each other to entertain their fans. But as must be clear to everyone by now, they can’t play basketball.

The Americans were sloppy with the ball and couldn’t handle Italy’s zone defenses and 3-point shooting. Italy not only made 15 from behind the arc but also showed superior ball movement and poise in handing the Americans their most lopsided defeat since pros began competing in 1992.

One top GOP operative, who works closely with Bush’s political team, said the White House appeared to overplay its hand, and voters may smell politics behind the warning. A senior U.S. intelligence official said there is no doubt that the United States is in constant danger, but he was concerned enough about the timing of the announcement to ask colleagues in a weekend meeting, “Why? Why now? Why are we raising alarms about this now?”

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from the White House.

You think?

Thanks to FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) for referring to this American Prospect critique of Evan Thomas’s profile of John Kerry in Newsweek. Rob Garver sees Thomas’s latest effort as not more than a re-write of his negative account of Al Gore four years ago. Amazing parallels.

Paul Krugman at the New York Times criticizes TV coverage of the Democratic convention and cites, as I did, that the greatest “makeover” of the convention may have been CNN’s.

One can only hope that President Bush isn’t allowed to get away with his PR push to appear to embrace the 9/11 commission’s recommendation on intelligence gathering.

Last night All Things Considered reported that he didn’t embrace “all the recommendations and that he was bowing to “political pressure.” The reporter also noted that he flip-flopped on establishing the Department of Homeland Security.

CBS last night last reported that the new intelligence czar would not have budgetary control and quotes an expert that without it, the holder of that office would be greatly handicapped. The CBS reporter also noted that Kerry was the first to embrace the commission’s recommendations.

NBC didn’t highlight the differences with the commission’s recommendations.

Fortunately, The Washington Post, despite a misleading headline and sub-head,
and the New York Times did. The Times had the best summary of the politics of Bush’s announcement.

…White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show is still his strongest card against Mr. Kerry.

The Post editorialized on the announcement but again the Times editorial used more forceful language.

At a time when Americans need strong leadership and bold action, President Bush offered tired nostrums and bureaucratic half-measures yesterday. He wanted to appear to be embracing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, but he actually rejected the panel’s most significant ideas, and thus missed a chance to confront the twin burdens he faces at this late point in his term: the need to get intelligence reform moving whether he’s re-elected or not, and the equally urgent need to repair the government’s credibility on national security.

The best summary is by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

In the end, it will be up to John Kerry to make the case that Bush’s prescriptions are pabulum. He must ridicule them as too little rather than just too late.

Addendum: Even better, Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum encapsulates it:

Bottom line: the new director heads no agency, doesn’t have cabinet rank, doesn’t work in the White House, has no budget authority, and apparently has no reporting authority. In other words, he’s just a figurehead.

It appears that at least one of the pundits on MSNBC with Chris Matthews during last week’s Democratic convention was as unimpressed with the host’s antics as I was. Newsweek journalist Howard Fineman, a ubiquitous presence in the world of pundocrity, complained about Matthews’s diarrhea of the mouth.

NY Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove claims is in “hot water.” Fineman, perhaps mindful of either his pundit pay or the ego rush he gets being on TV, is already apologizing to the blowhard.

“Sometimes when you are tired – when you’ve been yakking all week and racing from a convention hall to a political reception to an interview – you screw up, big time, as Dick Cheney would say.

“Well, I did that this morning by failing to defend the best political mind on TV, my loyal colleague and host Chris Matthews … Matthews is the best thing on political TV.”

“The best political mind on TV”? Perhaps. But Howard Fineman is a shoe-in for the best ass kisser on TV.

There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth over Ralph Nader’s campaign, some of it biting Republicans for helping him collect the signatures needed to get on ballots.

Now we have this. Makes me wince. Thanks to Eschaton, I guess, for catching this. Dizzy from Spinning agrees with me.

As is often the case, the White House released bad news on a Friday, knowing that Saturday’s newspapers are the least read of the week. Post convention stories pushed this piece of particularly bad news on to page 2 of The Washington Post. But the more succinct and clearer story was by Reuters.

One in five Americans laid off from a long-term job in the last three years was still unemployed in January, and most who had found jobs were paid less than they were before, government data showed on Friday.

In a report that adds fuel to the debate over the quality of new jobs, the Labor Department said only 65 percent of the 5.3 million workers who were laid off from January 2001 to December 2003 were reemployed by January 2004.

Another 15 percent had left the labor force and were not counted as unemployed.

Of those who lost full-time wage and salary jobs and found new ones, 57 percent earned less than they had in the positions they lost — the worst result in 10 years.

“About one-third experienced earnings losses of 20 percent or more,” the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in the report.

…43 percent of workers cited plant or company closings or moves as the reason they were out of work. The report did not indicate whether the work had moved overseas or elsewhere in the United States.

“Nearly one-third of long-tenured displaced workers lost jobs in manufacturing,” the report said, a stark measure of how much pain the factory sector suffered in the 2001 recession and the subsequent slow recovery.

The re-employment rate for laid-off manufacturing workers was 60 percent, five percentage points below the overall success rate. Factory workers were also paid less in their new jobs, with 64 percent reporting lower earnings.

It’s not just manufacturing jobs but many white collar ones workers are losing and then regaining but with less income. With rising health insurance premiums, property taxes, prescription medicine and gasoline, Dems can make the case that we’re not better off than we were four years ago.

And in a campaign that has freely borrowed slogans from the past and each other, I see no reason the Dems shouldn’t ask Ronald Reagan’s question.

The Washington Post doesn’t seem too enthralled with John Kerry after a Democratic convention that most observers view as successful for its ability to herd the Democratic cats. In addition to its “Missed Opportunity” editorial the day after the convention, David Broder’s column Sunday was titled “A Speech Without Wings.” And Jim Hoagland called the speech “fair to middling” and that Kerry was oblivious to the fact that Bush has built a coalition to fight the Iraq war.

But it was Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who misrepresented Kerry’s speech. He suggests that Kerry’s exhortation that we return to the policy of fighting wars only when we “had to” was based on a fogged view of history and a dangerous doctrine.

The United States has sent forces into combat dozens of times over the past century and a half, and only twice, in World War II and in Afghanistan, has it arguably done so because it “had to.” It certainly did not “have to” go to war against Spain in 1898 (or Mexico in 1846.) It did not “have to” send the Marines to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua in the first three decades of the 20th century, nor fight a lengthy war against insurgents in the Philippines. The necessity of Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War I remains a hot topic for debate among historians.

And what about the war Kerry himself fought in? Kerry cannot believe the Vietnam War was part of his alleged “time-honored tradition,” or he would not have thrown his ribbons away. But America’s other Cold War interventions in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are also problematic. Most opponents of the Vietnam War, like Kerry, believed it was symptomatic of a larger failure of U.S. foreign policy stemming from what Jimmy Carter memorably called Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism.” The other Cold War interventions were premised on the same “misguided” anti-communism and the concomitant democratic idealism, that pulled Kerry’s hero, John F. Kennedy, into Vietnam. The United States, by this reckoning, did not “have to” go to war in Korea in 1950. Nor could a post-Vietnam Kerry have considered Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic necessary. Or has Kerry now retroactively accepted the Cold War justification for these interventions that he once rejected?

Then there were the wars of the post-Cold War 1990s. The United States did not “have to” go to war to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. No one knows that better than Kerry, who voted against the Persian Gulf War, despite its unanimous approval by the U.N. Security Council. Nor could anyone plausibly deny that the Clinton administration’s interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice. President Bill Clinton made the right choice in all three cases, but it was a choice.

Why is Kerry invoking an American “tradition” that does not exist?

Kagan then goes on to suggest that Kerry is advocating isolationism.

If Kerry has revealed himself in an unusual moment of honesty, it’s time everyone took an equally honest look at where he would lead the country if elected. Kerry’s “doctrine of necessity,” if seriously intended, would entail a pacifism and an isolationism more thorough than any attempted by a U.S. government since the 1930s. It would rule out all wars fought for humanitarian ends, all interventions to prevent genocide, to defend democracy or even, as in the case of the Persian Gulf War, to uphold international law against aggression. For those are all wars of choice.

Kagan’s argument is based on the false premise that “we had to” means choice. There is nothing in Kerry’s record to suggest that he doesn’t understand that threats may provoke the U.S. to attack first, or that we must lose 3,000 lives before we attack. Kagan confuses choice with imperatives that may include moral ones.

Iraq, as I have often said, was the right war at the wrong time. Kerry may feel the same and agree that we should use force to end genocide. Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime in another time might be justification for an attack. But with our poor record in the Middle East and the latent hostilities even among moderate Arabs and Muslims regarding our Israeli-Palestinian policy, March 2003 was not the time to attack. We first must prove to the Muslim world that the U.S. is not on a “crusade.”

“We had to” might well mean that there exists a moral imperative to end suffering. One would hope that a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment would understand that and resist simplistic interpretations.

I’ve posted before about newspapers’ corrections policies. They’re reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s excuse re Iran Contra: Mistakes were made. Newspapers rarely say “we” made a mistake or editor or reporter so and so made a mistake.

A letter in Saturday’s Washington Post highlights the absurdity of some corrections. One correction, five possible interpretations of what was wrong and who made the mistake. Was former diplomat Joe Wilson wrong or somebody else or The Post itself? As the letter writer says, it’s “maddening.”