That single moment was a left-wing thrill-seeker’s vicarious nirvana. Every person in this country who has been the object of Bush’s scorn desperately wants to say something mean to his face, or at least something mean about him to the face of someone who actually is close to him. But we all know we’ll never get inside that bubble. And here was Maher, doing it, and doing it in style -- he actually got McClellan to laugh! Priceless.

Earlier in the very same episode, during his opening monologue, Maher announced that with the decision by the Rutgers University women’s basketball team to accept Don Imus’ apology, “our long national nightmare is over.” Then, after his monologue, Maher interviewed Al Sharpton via satellite. (You can watch the interview via YouTube.)

The interview is vintage Maher, who is capable of taking -- and explaining -- complicated positions. Maher condemned the racist comments by Imus, acknowledging that they were the latest example of the “unspeakable” racism that blacks in this country have faced hundreds of years of racism. At the same time, he expressed concern that in going after Imus’ scalp, Sharpton was not only threatening open discourse, but also shifting the civil rights battle from its mission of fighting injustice to a game of cat and mouse.

Maher said:

The civil rights battle used to take place in courts and it used to take place in the United States Congress. Now it takes place in the media, and it seems like when it’s in the media, it’s a lot about gotcha’, it’s a lot about just catching people.

Sharpton replied:

I don’t think that’s true. I think that if you that if you look at the history of the civil rights movement going back to the Montgomery boycott, it took place in the streets, and the national media projected it. That’s how it got to the courts.

Maher’s point is incredibly valuable and I don't think Sharpton's reply directly addressed it. In fact, his reply indirectly reinforced Maher's point: the Montgomery boycott was a true social movement that filtered its way up and led to great change.  In many ways, the Imus affair was a battle waged amongst elites, further alienating all Americans from power structures in our society. It didn't take place on the streets; it took place on radio shows and television studios.

And while the benefits of banning segregation on buses is self-evident, what will the long term benefits of the Imus dismissal be? If the strategic goal was to muzzle him, he’s already back on the air. I’m sure he’ll have a national deal pretty soon. If the goal is to ensure that nobody says anything racist on the airwaves, it’s not clear whether the Imus firing will be successful, especially if it encourages the adoption of alternative distribution channels like the internet or satellite for radio programming.

One obvious negative impact is that it reinforces the precedent that committed groups of activists can get a media personality fired for saying something they find offensive. And that’s something that Bill Maher is acutely aware of. In the late 1990s through 2001, Maher hosted Politically Incorrect which followed Nightline on ABC’s late night schedule. Shortly after 9/11, he said:

We have been the cowards lobbing, cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly.

ABC fired him a few days later.

Imagine what happens when the day comes that Jon Stewart says something that some people find offensive and the media has a slow news day. What will we be able to say then? Maher was fired. Imus was fired. Shouldn’t Stewart be fired?

And don’t you think that right-wing groups are watching The Daily Show every single day, hoping to catch Stewart say something they can protest? The Daily Show is one of the very few shows on television that exposes the Bush Administration’s propaganda for what it is. Don’t you think that the right-wing desperately wants it off the air before 2008 rolls around?

Although I hate the fact that the media is filled with blowhards like Imus, I don’t think his dismissal will do much good, and probably will ultimately provide justification for some retribution against a progressive voice. Whatever the case, it certainly won’t have the impact of a major civil rights victory such as 1967’s Loving v. Virginia decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage.

Meanwhile, as I wrote yesterday, there are examples of terrible injustice in this world. Genarlow Wilson, a young black man, is serving a ten year prison sentence for engaging in consensual oral sex with a girl in his high school. Al Sharpton showed his formidable clout by getting Don Imus fired. But I wonder if he wouldn’t do more good by fighting for Wilson freedom?

Obviously, these need not be mutually exclusive. But I do wonder why I haven’t seen Sharpton out in front on issues like this. Say what you want about Jesse Jackson, but there is no doubt of the man’s convictions. You may hate Jesse’s politics, but you cannot deny that he is genuine progressive.

It isn’t possible to say the same thing about Sharpton. It’s true that he’s a good orator and has a great sense of humor. But it’s also true that he campaigned for New York’s Republican U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato in 1986 and New York’s Republican Governor George Pataki in 1994 against Democrat Mario Cuomo.

One might respond: Surely Al Sharpton isn’t a Republican. Didn’t he run for President as a Democrat in 2004? Well, yes. But do you know who Al Sharpton's chief political operative was at the time, helping him raise hundreds of thousands of dollars? The answer might surprise you: Roger Stone, a Republican operative and donor to Bush-Cheney 2004.

And Roger Stone isn’t your typical Republican hack. No, Stone played a key role in s(t)ealing Bush’s victory in Florida by organizing the mob of young Republicans whose mini-riot stopped the recount in Miami-Dade County. Yes, Al Sharpton's political strategist played a important role disenfranchising thousands of black Floridians and in the process robbing the country of its duly elected President, Al Gore.

So what’s a conservative like Stone doing in bed with Sharpton? Why would a conservative want Al Sharpton to become a powerful force in the Democratic Party?

For starters, Sharpton has demonstrated his willingness to help Republicans. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it does undercut Sharpton’s claim to represent the political left. Perhaps more importantly, however, Al Sharpton is incredibly unpopular. Tying the Democratic Party to such an unpopular national figure – especially one who is actually sympathetic to Republicans – is a good move by Republicans.

In fact, it’s really not surprising that conservatives spend so much more time talking about Al Sharpton than do liberals. A quick Google search for ‘sharpton’  on the conservative National Review web site yields 1,370 hits – almost six times the amount found on the web site of the left-wing The Nation. It’s pretty clear that conservatives want Sharpton to serve as a straw man for progressive politics and as an easy target on matters of race. It’s also pretty clear that liberals don’t trust Sharpton because he has never demonstrated consistent commitment to progressive causes.

The Republican strategy of funding Al Sharpton’s 2004 presidential race might be bearing fruit. Despite his abysmal showing at the polls, his incredible media savvy gave him national prominence. (Some have suggested he achieved prominence solely because of the color of his skin, an assertion which is clearly false. Former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun, also black, failed to gain the media attention won by Sharpton. The fact is that Al Sharpton is a genius when it comes to the media.) Earlier this month, during the Imus affair, Sharpton solidified his position as the mass media’s chosen voice for black America. And now, this week Democratic presidential candidates are visiting Sharpton’s National Action Network conference, seeking his support.

I hope those Democrats understand that whether or not they win the support of Al Sharpton will have little impact on whether they win the support of black Americans in the 2008 primaries, notwithstanding the mass media’s efforts to anoint Sharpton as a power player in the battle for votes from black Americans.

The truth is, that unlike Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton is largely a creation of the media.

Take Jesse Jackson’s performance in the 1984 and 1988 primaries. In the 1984 primaries, he won five contests and 21% of all votes cast. Four years later, he won eleven primaries and seven million votes.

Meanwhile, in 2004, Sharpton not only failed to win a single primary, he failed to win more than ten percent of the vote in any state. Despite predictions from white conservatives like Bob Novak that blacks would support Sharpton simply because he too was black, Sharpton's lack of support crossed racial and ethnic lines. In fact, Sharpton failed to win majority support from any single racial or ethnic group in any election during the 2004 primary season. His best primary performance came in South Carolina, where he won just ten percent of the vote. Among South Carolina’s black voters, both John Kerry and John Edwards outperformed Sharpton, each of them winning more than twice as many votes as Sharpton.

Given Sharpton’s abysmal electoral track record, why does the mass media give him so much prominence? His results are about the same as those of Dennis Kucinich but Kucinich gets almost no attention whatsoever – and he’s actually a presidential candidate!

When the Democratic hopefuls visit Sharpton’s convention, I hope they remember that there is scant evidence that Sharpton’s support has much – if any – electoral value. And even more importantly, I hope they remember Sharpton’s political history. For better or for worse, Al Sharpton has not demonstrated consistent loyalty to the Democratic Party, nor has he proven that he is committed to the same progressive principles that unite liberals and left-wingers.

Compare the attention given the Duke case with that accorded a far more heinous crime, one whose victims have thus far failed to arouse the sympathies or even the notice of those who found so much enjoyment in their condemnation of the lacrosse players. Chances are, unless you live in Tennessee, you will not recognize the names Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Christian, 21, and Newsome, 23, both of Knoxville, were driving through that city together on the night of January 6 when they were kidnapped and murdered. Newsome’s burned body was found along some railroad tracks on January 7. Christian remained missing for two more days until her body, stuffed in a trash can, was found in a home not far from where Newsome’s was found. Police and prosecutors allege both victims were raped before being killed. Yes, both. Three men and a woman have been charged with the crimes in a 46-count grand jury indictment handed down in Knoxville on January 31.

The story was given a few brief mentions on the AP wire, which were in turn carried on the Fox News and ABC News websites, but you’ll find no mention of the crime in the online archives of CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Run a similar search for stories on the Duke case and you’ll be sifting through the results for hours.  It’s not as though these news providers have shied away from crime since being embarrassed in the Duke case. For example, when Tara Grant went missing from her suburban Detroit home in February, the investigation grew and grew in media attention until it became a national story. An AP story appearing on the MSNBC website ran under the headline, “Mich. case a perfect recipe for media frenzy.” And indeed it was. When Grant’s dismembered body was discovered inside her home, triggering a manhunt for her husband and his eventual arrest, the coverage ramped up nearly to the point of Laci Peterson-type saturation. Only the carnival surrounding Anna Nichole Smith’s death kept the Grant murder from being the Story of the Month. Yet the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome are known to almost no one outside Tennessee. Why?

It’s simple: the four suspects accused of killing Christian and Newsome are blacks from the inner city of Knoxville.

Unfortunately, the first part of Dunphy's article, entitled "The Truth About Who Suffers," obscures some important points that he makes in the second part of his article: non-whites in general, and blacks in particular, are disproportionately victimized by crime -- which, in our racially divided society, remains mostly intraracial.

It's too bad, then, that Dunphy dwelled on an inaccurate critique of the media. While I agree that the mass media has not exactly done a stellar job when it comes to reporting on race in the United States, including the false Duke lacrosse allegations, it is frustrating to see so many of my fellow human beings on the right use the case as a political weapon against their enemies on the left. Take Ann Coulter ("Stripper lied ... white boys fried"), for example:

What we need is a little of that skepticism liberals bring to every single criminal case that is not a white-on-black crime or a rape case involving Bill Clinton.

The truth, as opposed to the larger truth, is that the allegedly powerful white males are at risk of losing their freedom at the hands of a lunatic accuser and a power-mad prosecutor. Meanwhile the allegedly powerless poor black woman has destroyed people's lives with her false accusations, for which she will walk away scot-free.

Don't liberals ever have to pony up at least one example of a powerful privileged white male trampling on the rights of a powerless black woman in order to keep droning on about powerful privileged white males? Every real-life example invariably turns out to be a hoax, among the most spectacular the Tawana Brawley case and now the Duke lacrosse case.

By now, it is clear that the Duke lacrosse case is more than an example of just a false allegation, it's an example of a prosecutor run amok, reveling in the media limelight and exploiting the justice system for political gain. It was a perfect case for the media: sex, power, wealth, race...did I mention sex? But for all the media attention on the case, it's far from clear that a liberal conspiracy designed to oppress whites was at work. For example, although the New York Times has been heavily criticized for its coverage of the case (is there anyone who is happy with the Times with these days?), 60 Minutes has been lauded for publicizing the DNA evidence which ultimately proved the rape charges false.

Conservative media outlets have followed the case with intensity, portraying it as an example of liberals gone crazy. As I write this post, the conservative National Review had 176 web pages on its web site mentioning Duke lacrosse. But of those 176 web pages, only 3 mention James Coleman, a law professor at Duke who is both liberal and black. I suspect the reason why the National Review largely ignores Coleman is that he spoke out against the prosecutor -- and a liberal, black intellectual speaking out against the rush to judgment does not fit comfortably within the narrative assembled by conservative storytellers. It flatly contradicts assertions like this one made by Ann Coulter:

Liberal professors believe that crying wolf is valuable for calling attention to the societal problem of wolves, even though there's never a wolf in any particular case.

Unfortunately, I suspect that many of the conservatives speaking out about Duke are motived less by outrage at injustice and more by their desire to caricature liberals as racists.

If conservative discussion of the Duke case was primarily motivated by legal injustice, you would expect major conservative media outlets to also discuss other similar cases of legal injustice involving overzealous prosecutors, especially in interracial rape cases involving athletes.

But my own quick research shows a lack of interest by conservatives in two major examples of legal injustice.

First, as you may know, at least one hundred men scheduled for execution have been exonerated. These are men who have sat in jail, on death row, waiting to die -- only to be cleared of the the crime that put them on death's door. Clearly, by any stretch, these are men who have suffered a greater injustice than the Duke lacrosse players. (Lest I be unclear, they are all victims.) I recently randomly took names of 9 of those men (Charles Ray Giddens, Anthony Porter, Timothy Hennis, Joseph Green Brown, Delbert Tibbs, Peter Limone, Delma Banks, Earl Washington) and searched nationalreview.com to see if I could find any hits. I found two articles, both about Anthony Porter.

(I know nothing about the racial or ethnic background of those men whose names I mentioned. In all likelihood, they are mostly white. Most homicide is intraracial and although about half of murder victims are black, only 14% of the victims of death row murderers are black.)

If outrage at injustice were the primary motivator of the conservative focus on the Duke case, you would have expected more interest in the cases of the men I mentioned above. Yet there is more coverage of the Duke lacrosse case by a factor of 90:1 than all of those cases combined.

An even better example of a case you would expect conservatives to cover (if they are primarily interested in injustice) is the case of student athlete Genarlow Wilson. Wilson's case has striking similarities to the Duke case. According to ESPN:

Once, he was the homecoming king at Douglas County High. Now he's Georgia inmate No. 1187055, convicted of aggravated child molestation. When he was a senior in high school, he received oral sex from a 10th grader. He was 17. She was 15. Everyone, including the girl and the prosecution, agreed she initiated the act. But because of an archaic Georgia law, it was a misdemeanor for teenagers less than three years apart to have sexual intercourse, but a felony for the same kids to have oral sex. Afterward, the state legislature changed the law to include an oral sex clause, but that doesn't help Wilson.

Unlike the Duke players, Wilson, who is black, was -- and still is -- imprisoned. If anything, his case is superior example of a prosecutor run amok.Yet there is not a single article on the National Review's web site about his case. Absolutely nothing.

What's more, if the conservative narrative that the mainstream media is liberal and preoccupied with attacking white men in power were true, then you would surely expect massive coverage of the Wilson case. Yet even that most reviled of rags, the former home of WMD expert Judith Miller (sic), the New York Times, has published a scant five articles even mentioning his name. A quick search of Google News reveals about 45 articles mentioning Wilson and 4,000 mentioning Duke.

Given these double standards, it seems pretty clear that outrage in the conservative media at the Duke case is less a reflection of intellectual honesty and concern for injustice than it is a conscious effort to rally the right and delegitimize the political left.

By far the most frustrating part of my Vista experience has been Nvidia's semi-functional drivers. The problems have ranged from severe (videos will go blank if you toggle between full-screen and windowed mode), to major (you couldn't set custom resolutions for display on your TV if you're using Vista as an HTPC), to minor (buggy control panel wouldn't tweak color settings correctly).

Nvidia cost itself a ton of customer goodwill by shipping semi-functional drivers with Windows Vista. If these new drivers fix the limitations and bugs, I suspect they can begin the process of winning customer loyalty back. At some point soon, I'll get a video card that supports HDCP, the digital content protection standard established by Hollywood to restrict your fair use rights. When I do, I'll consider ATI's offerings, which I never would have even considered if Nvidia hadn't dropped the ball on Vista.

Update, 4/18/07: I have installed the drivers and they are a major improvement. The WMV video playback issues have disappeared and the ability to tweak the color palette is now fully functional. However, the drivers still do not have the ability to change over and underscan for output to HDTV's, a feature that has been in place for quite some time with XP drivers. This is obviously a critical feature for HTPC usage and Nvidia needs to get it working ASAP.

I'm still living here in Las Vegas, finally loving the weather after a brutally hot spring (it feels like Seattle in summer right now, just gorgeous). After spending a few months away from my novel, I've spent much of the last month overhauling it with another rewrite, and I'm feeling really good about where it's going. I've changed its title, improved the flow of the story, eliminated some of the problems I had with character development (particularly Nick's naivete), and strengthened the quality of the writing. I have a few more things left to do and should be done by the time my birthday rolls around in a couple of weeks.

When I'm not working on the book or starting the next one, I'll be using the blog to keep my writing skills from getting too rusty. Some of the topics I'm looking forward to blogging about include technology, especially digital media for home theater, politics, poker, and, of course, Seattle sports.

The point that I'm leading towards is subtle but important. Although I agree that MSM constrains debate on theories that ought to be discussed, that fact alone does not prove that the theory is correct. The theory must stand or fall on its own, MSM's acceptance or rejection notwithstanding.

In fact, there are probably plenty of people who have ideas that will never be debated in the MSM because they are just plain delusional. Do we really want to have a major national debate about whether or not George W. Bush staged 9/11 via MSM? Does the fact that MSM won't engage in this debate suggest that the conspiracy theorists are right? Absolutely not.

Is the notion that racial inequality is rooted in genetics more worthy of debate than 9/11 conspiracy theories? Probably it is, although the evidence for it is pretty weak, and the evidence for the social construction of racial inequality is much stronger. Perhaps we ought to have the debate just so we can get it over with and move on to more important things.

I decided that I need to read these books after a friend of mine pointed me to some conservative blogs discussing what they call "human biodiversity."

The essential notion of biodiversity, as applied to race, goes something like this: there are important differences between races; these differences are immutable because they are either genetic in nature or so deeply culturally ingrained that they are effectively permanent; and that racial inequality is therefore a fact of life over which public policy can have very little impact.

Now, before you get too terribly worried, I have not found any of these conservative ideas appealing in the least. In fact, I'm tempted to use bile-tinged language -- and perhaps even bile-infested rhetoric -- to express my thoughts on that point of view. But instead, I'll take a more sedate approach. One of the smartest people I know warned me to avoid appealing to morality when attempting to determine the veracity of a falsifiable hypothesis. His point is a good one.

So to the extent that I discuss ideas that I'd like to denounce in spectacular fashion, I will attempt to avoid indulgence in that most pleasurable of sports, at least while assessing the claims of my fellow homo sapiens in on the right. (But I can't promise I won't call one of their ideas idiotic after proving it is stupid!)

But back to the books I just ordered and look forward to reading soon. From what I understand, one of them (Taboo) presents the biodiversity argument as applied to sports; another (Blank Slate) doesn't directly address race, but does talk about the heritability of traits; and the last one (Faded Dreams) argues that racial inequality is a socially-constructed phenomenon and shows that public policy has had and can have an impact on racial inequality. (It is obvious that public policy can have a negative impact on racial equality. You need look no further than Jim Crow laws, slavery, or even the 2000 Florida election, to see the truth of that. But Faded Dreams also argues the converse, that public policy can also have a positive impact on racial inequality.)

There is not much point in saying more than that about the books, so in the meantime, I will point out two academic articles on the general topic of racial inequality as it relates to intelligence. The question both articles address is whether inequality is due to nature (genetics), nurture (environment), or both.

The first article, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability," presents the hereditarian viewpoint. The authors (J. Philippe Rushton of University of Western Ontario and Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California, Berkeley) review thirty years of research that they say demonstrates that racial differences in intelligence are caused by genetics and environmental factors. As you read their paper, however, I think you'll see that their initial assertion that the differences are 50% genetic and 50% environmental is a bit arbitrary, perhaps intended to make their position sound like a reasonable compromise between opposing factions. If that is in fact their intent, it is an unfortunate stratagem to employ in an academic research paper.

Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, penned a response to Rushton and Jensen entitled "Heredity, Environment, and Race Differences in IQ." Nisbett's paper offers an excellent analysis of the their hereditarian theory, effectively debunking it. It's a good starting point for research on the theory that environment is the dominant factor in shaping intelligence (as measured by IQ).