It was bad enough when Matt Drudge tried to make a ruckus over an alleged affair between John Kerry and an intern — a total fantasy. Now he’s banging the drum to get Kerry’s old divorce records unsealed, hoping to create an instant replay of last week’s episode with Jack Ryan in Illinois.

This is sickening because it so dramatically goes against the role of the journalist. Any idiot can see in a heartbeat what Drudge is doing. (Whenever Drudge uses exclamation points in his stories, you know he’s trying hard to stir up the shit.)

After last week’s front page headlines over ugly unsealed divorce records in the Republican Illinois senate race, media outlets now face a dilemma: What to do about Democrat presidential hopeful John Kerry’s sealed divorce records!

The race is on in political and media circles to gauge the import of Kerry’s sealed July 25, 1988 divorce from his first wife, Julia Stimson Thorne.

TRIBUNE, which successfully sued a court to gain access to Illinois Republican Jack Ryan’s divorce papers and child custody records [over the objection of both Ryan and his former wife], is considering a similar push on Kerry, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

[TRIBUNE owns WLVI-TV Channel 56 in Boston. It could use its Massachusetts connection as a jumping point to petition the court which granted Kerry a divorce, sources explain.]

Other news outlets may soon follow.

CAMPAIGN CALLS DIVORCE DIGGING ‘GUTTER BALL’

The Kerry campaign late Sunday called any old divorce digging a game of political “gutter ball.”

“This is a trash hunt,” said a senior Kerry source, who asked not to be named.

“No, I do not have a clue what is in the papers,” explained the source. “But it is none of my business. And its none of your business, or any one’s business… You’re playing a game of gutter ball, Drudge.”

“Other news outlets may follow.” Oh, that is journalism at its finest! Why not, “Other news outlets may not follow”? Both are equally true. No, what Drudge is really saying, exactly as he did with the Kerry kerfuffle, is, “I sure hope I can whip up the other news outlets to run with this piece-of-shit smear campaign of mine.”

Drudge is a disgrace, a blight on the profession, a gossip monger and a whore. To hell with him.

Update: Andrew Sullivan comments.

This speaks for itself.

Michael Moore’s anti-Bush “Fahrenheit 9/11” became the highest-grossing documentary of all time on its first weekend in release, taking in $21.8 million as it packed theaters across the country this weekend.

The movie, mocking President Bush and criticizing his decision to go to war in Iraq, was No. 1 at the box office, beating out the popular comedies “White Chicks” and “DodgeBall,” which were playing on almost triple the number of screens.

Theater owners in large cities and smaller towns reported sellout crowds over the weekend, with numerous theaters declaring house records.

The phenomenal opening represented a decisive victory for Mr. Moore and for the Miramax movie executives Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who released the film independently after it was rejected by Miramax’s corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, as too political.

“We sold out in Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg,” in North Carolina, Mr. Moore said on Sunday. “We sold out in Army-base towns. We set house records in some of these places. We set single-day records in a number of theaters. We got standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C.

“The biggest news to me this morning is this is a red-state movie,” he said, referring to the state whose residents voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. “Republican states are embracing the movie, and it’s sold out in Republican strongholds all over the country.”

Harvey Weinstein said: “It’s beyond anybody’s expectations. I’d have to say the sky’s the limit on this movie. Who knows what territory we’re in.”

Update: And here’s what’s in the Wapo:

Jim Welsh, 65, drove more than 120 miles from his home in Salisbury, Md., to see the movie. The editor of a film and literature magazine, Welsh said, “I’d like to see for myself Mr. Moore’s methods and message, unlike those right-wing people who will trash it without having a clue what it involves.”

Kitty Dana, 48, said she cried through two-thirds of it. “It was incredibly moving, not just satirical,” said Dana, who works for the American Friends Service Committee, an antiwar group.

“It says a little about American arrogance and power,” said Chandra Pant, 51, of Delhi, India, who was visiting the Danas.

Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel had no comment on the box office numbers, but suggested that those wanting another view visit www.GeorgeWBush.com and see a compilation of clips titled “Kerry Coalition of the Wild-Eyed.” In general, the campaign has said it did not want to take on Moore because it would lend him credibility.

Moore made no apologies for his partisanship. “Documentaries by their very nature are supposed to have a point of view,” he said during the conference call. He calls his documentary “an op-ed piece — it presents my opinion based on fact.” He said he believes the movie is playing strongly in Middle America, and that it has confounded theories that “it would only speak to the choir.”

“The documentary filmgoing audience is not that large. . . . I would imagine tens of thousands of people came this weekend who had never been to a documentary in a movie theater in their lives,” says Moore.

The distributors say they plan to add a couple of hundred theaters this coming weekend, and additional theaters the following weekend. By then the competition will include one of the summer’s anticipated blockbusters, “Spider-Man 2.”

“We look forward to joining with ‘Spider-Man’ to bringing truth and justice all across America,” Moore said.

Good headline; good photo. Maybe Calvin Klein will offer him a job. Move over, Marky Mark.

[Photo courtesy of the anonymous Philly blogger.]

Billmon on why the right is so frightened of Michael Moore, and so willing to adopt a double standard when discussing him.

For years now, Limbaugh, Coulter and their inferior imitations have been passing off their slanted misreadings, unproven allegations and flimsy lies as factual reporting. When caught out on a lie or a smear, they either ignore the evidence, or – like Limbaugh – retreat into the phony defense of arguing that all they’re doing is expressing a subjective opinion. “I’m just in the entertainment business,” Rush likes to say.

Well, now there’s someone on the left who knows how to play their game, and play it brilliantly. Moore may be an egomaniac, and a huckster showman in the best (or worst) tradition of P.T. Barnum and Walter Winchell, but man, he’s effective. He’s learned to play the mainstream media like a Stradivarius.

No wonder the right wingers are scared of Moore – he’s even better then they are at using the media as an unwilling amplifier. Which is why all the conservative caterwauling and all disapproving tut tuts from the “responsible” press have only helped ensure Fahrenheit 9/11 a wider distribution.

In other words, Moore’s managed to break the code. He’s figured out how to sell an angry radical (or at least semi-radical) message to a mass audience.

That’s a major accomplishment. And if the end result isn’t exactly my idea of a civilized political discourse (I’ll reserve judgement for now) it clearly is a powerful and successful example of fighting fire with fire.

And right now, a little fire may be what the American left needs most.

The right has been giving us much, much, much worse than Moore for a decade. Now when given a mild taste of their own recipe, they go bonkers. They curse. They hiss. They shout treason and “liar!” At least Moore backs up what he says with evidence, usually self-incriminating video clips of those he’s criticizing.

Very funny. Dowd looks at how Cheney is roaming the nation, wreaking havoc on Bush and his image. (His intimate invitation to Patrick Leahy to “Fuck yourself” hasn’t helped.) He comes across as a deranged and dangerous man.

After reading this rundown of the past few days’ headaches for our dear leader, all I can say is “Heh.”

Poor guy. My heart goes out to him.

A detailed Newsweek article takes a look at how recent politcal pressures have forced Hong Kong to mature from a commercial center relatively uninterested in politics into an epicenter of political consciousness, as the Mainland faces off against politcal activists in the SAR. A true baptism by fire.

For decades the conventional wisdom was that Hong Kong was almost solely a commercial city—the politics could be left to Taiwan, thanks. Some analysts even tried to explain away last year’s massive rally as more a reaction to Hong Kong’s moribund economy, and the public-health panic over SARS, than the dawning of a new political era. Not true. Today, in defiance of a Beijing —ruling in April, many Hong Kong citizens are asking for something they’ve never had before—universal elections. And led by a savvy new generation of activists, they’re digging in for a long, hard struggle with the mainland’s conservative elite and their proxies in Hong Kong. “People have to keep coming back, year after year, until we get [direct elections],” says lawyer Audrey Eu, one of the democratic movement’s new leaders and a first-time Legco member. “Hong Kong will never have universal suffrage until you stand up for it….”

The democrats are not the only ones demonstrating a new political purpose. Even the stodgy pro-Beijing DAB party, which claims 2,000 members, is seeking a new image. After a dismal showing in the November 2003 elections for district council seats, it’s been promoting younger, better-educated personalities such as chairman Ma Lik, who’s praised the new surge in political activism. Last year’s July 1 turnout was a call for better governance and accountability, Ma says. “Hong Kong’s political paradigm is shifting, and it’s doing so for the better.”

The article implies that things have cooled substantially since last year’s half-million man march on July 1, and that Hong Kong may well be resigned to no free elections for several more years. As always, money is the No. 1 consideration for the practical-minded Hong Kongers, and the Chinese tourists are spending lots of cash in HK. So maybe rocking the boat too much will be counterproductive, at least in their eyes.

Nevertheless, with the July 1 anniversary next week there will be another massive protest, and from all I can tell there’s still plenty of dissatisfaction with the Mainland’s plans for Hong Kong’s political future. Has rebellion been replaced with resignation? I guess we’ll have a good idea next week.

A commenter told me a few days ago that I shouldn’t paste entire articles here, and I rarely do. But this is going to be my second exception in a week, as this review of Fahrenheit 9/11 is very special and I want every visitor here to see it. I want them to realize just how powerful Moore’s depiction of our government in action, of our tax dollars at work, actually are. I want them to get that it is almost impossible to walk out of the the theater the same person you were when you walked in.

Those with small minds who refuse to see the movie and who take comfort in their pre-conceived notions and hearsay-based prejudices may be unreachable. But because of the type of person I am, I won’t stop trying. I apologize in advance if it is redundant, tiresome, and annoying. But people have to wake up to what is going on here. They have to know what forces were at work to get us into this war. They have to know why their children are dying. They have to know who their president is. And Moore doesn’t need to tell them — his clips of Bush do all the talking. In other words, Bush himself tells you just who he is, in a way you’ve never seen him before.

Here is the review I just read, that I found more powerful than any other because it does not review the movie — it reviews how people reacted to the movie. What it did to them, and to their belief systems. And that is a powerful story indeed.

Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

“I prayed the Lord would open my eyes,” she said.

For months, her son, Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He’d tell her she shouldn’t trust President Bush. He’d tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely.

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son’s fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. “My emotions are just… ” She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. “I feel like we haven’t seen the whole truth before.”

That’s the reaction Moore hopes to provoke with his film, which explores the ties between the Bush family and Osama bin Laden’s relatives, the president’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq. Moore has said he aims to shake the apathetic, move the undecided — and inspire voters to deny Bush a second term.

Even teens ‘glued to screen’

Riding a week of enormous publicity, and controversy, Fahrenheit 9/11 was a hit at the box office, taking in $8.2 million to $8.4 million in its first day, positioning it as the weekend’s No. 1 film. Opening Friday on 868 screens, the movie grossed more than the farces White Chicks and DodgeBall, even though those films showed on far more screens.

Industry sources estimated that the weekend gross for Fahrenheit 9/11 could top the $21 million that Moore’s Bowling for Columbine — until now, the highest-grossing documentary ever — took in during its entire run.

Fahrenheit 9/11 got a shot of free publicity when Walt Disney Co., concerned about the movie’s partisan edge, barred a subsidiary from releasing it. The buzz only grew last month when the film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yet its appeal seemed to take some by surprise: In the heavily Hispanic and Asian community of Downey, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles, theater manager William Vasquez was a bit astonished at the line, which was so long that he decided to show the film on two screens simultaneously Friday night.

“I don’t know of any documentary that has created this kind of stir,” he said, noting that even teenagers seemed “glued to the screen.”

In many cities, and even in conservative suburbs, the crowds were predictably (and loudly) liberal, hissing and hooting their reactions to Bush on-screen.

In suburban St. Louis, in a multiplex catering to well-off neighborhoods that were flocked with Bush/Cheney signs in 2000, the rowdy throng cheered when a man in back stood to shout an appeal for Democratic Party volunteers. “Anyone here for Nader?” another man called out. He was soundly booed.

In another conservative neighborhood, the audience at an Orange County, Calif., multiplex chanted: “Throw Bush out, throw Bush out” as the lights came on.

College student Jebodiah Beard, 25, characterized the crowd this way: “I think we’re preaching to the choir.”

Moore has acknowledged as much but sees no need to apologize.

“It’s good to give the choir something to sing,” he said at a politician-packed premiere in Washington last week. “The choir has been demoralized.”

If so, the movie was an electric wake-up call.

Outside a sold-out screening Friday in Santa Monica, Calif., activists stamped hands with peace signs and passed around petitions calling for universal health care, gay rights and the repeal of the Patriot Act.

“I can’t imagine anyone coming out of (the movie) and not working their brains out to get rid of this administration,” said Mimi Adams, 70, who was holding a sign that said: “No One Died When Clinton Lied.”

In theaters nationwide, many viewers said they couldn’t imagine loyal Republicans coming to see a movie the Bush administration has dismissed as a twisted montage of misleading innuendo and outright falsehoods. But for all the partisan hooting, the movie did appear to draw at least a strong smattering of the Republican and the undecided voters that Moore most desperately hopes to reach.

And some of them said they were deeply moved.

Moved enough, perhaps, to consider voting for Kerry in November.

For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: The raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

“Seeing (the war) brings it home in a way you don’t get from reading about it,” he said. “I won’t be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time.”

Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

She didn’t vote for him in 2000, but Butler, 48, said that until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. “In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable,” she said.

Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore’s film made her rethink.

After showing faces of the men and women of America’s military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: To send them into harm’s way only when we absolutely must.

That got Butler. She doesn’t feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that one sentence — a filmmaker’s accusing voice-over — might cost Bush her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: “This is probably the strongest I’ve ever felt about voting against him,” she said.

‘An impact of some sort’

Many viewers seemed especially moved by the story of Lila Lipscomb, the mother at the heart of Fahrenheit 9/11. When Moore first encounters her in Flint, Mich., she speaks with pride of her children’s military service, of all the opportunities the armed forces can give them. Then her son is killed in Iraq.

Appearing with Moore at the film’s premiere in Washington, Lipscomb received a standing ovation.

“President Bush said he was a president of war,” Lipscomb said. “Well, I stand before you tonight as a mother that is now a mother of war. I urge all of America to stop being ignorant. Open your eyes to see. Open your ears to hear. Open your mouth to speak.”

Many who watched Fahrenheit 9/11 over the weekend vowed the movie would spur them to do just that — to look deeper, listen closer, to speak out with conviction.

In the end, however, some doubted whether a summer movie, however pointed, could really affect the outcome of November’s election.

“It will have an impact of some sort,” said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who is interviewed by Moore in the film, “but I’m not sure what.”

Of course, the long-term effect has yet to be seen. It should be out on DVD before the election, so those who may have forgotten can enjoy a healthy reminder.

As for myself: After seeing it yesterday, I drove to the Kerry volunteer office and got my Kerry bumper stickers and tickets to see him here in town next week. And I gave money — a sizable sum for me while I’m trying to get on my feet. Looking at the effect the film had on people in the above article, I expect that by the time the weekend’s over, millions of others will have done the same or more than I did.

Despite China’s much praised “leniency” toward cyberdissident Du Daobin, China’s net surfers and bloggers (and especially Shanghai’s) need to know they are being closely watched by the CCP, which is ruthlessly revving up its control of the Internet, according to the NY Times. Emphasis added:

Both in China and abroad, some commentators quickly applauded what seemed like an official show of leniency toward the accused man, Du Daobin, a prolific author of online essays on issues of democracy and free speech.

But many among China’s rapidly growing group of Internet commentators are warning that what appears to be government magnanimity in this high-profile case conceals a quiet but concerted push to tighten controls of the Internet and surveillance of its users even though China’s restrictions on the medium are already among the broadest and most invasive anywhere….

As its first line of defense against what in another era China’s Communist leadership might have called ideological pollution, Beijing controls the Internet by insisting that all Web traffic pass through government-controlled servers. Now, coming on top of these measures, which are all deployed at the national level, China’s provincial governments are getting into the act, introducing regulations of their own that critics say severely impinge on privacy and freedom of speech.

In recent weeks, Shanghai, China’s largest and most Internet-connected city, has quietly introduced a series of controls, arguably the country’s most far-reaching yet, and critics fear, a model eventually to be used nationwide. Described by city officials as a measure intended to combat pornography and to bar entry for minors to Internet bars, the Shanghai regulations require customers to use swipe cards that would allow administrators or others to record their national identity numbers and track their Internet use.

The regulations have kicked up little public debate, in part because they have received little publicity here during the planning stage. But fierce protests have appeared online, where many active Internet users are interpreting the new regulations as an extension of the police state….

Some experts on China’s Internet censorship say that in releasing Mr. Du recently, the government may have been making a subtle bow to China’s own domestic public opinion, as expressed through online communication and debate.

International analysts who follow China’s Internet scene say that the government has been particularly taken aback by the explosion in a new form of online communication for China – the Weblog, or blog. It started last year with a celebrated case of a young woman who made a running online commentary about her own sex life, and now hundreds of thousands of people take enthusiastically to this form.

Ah yes, Muzi Mei (or is it Mu Zi Mei?). No matter how the blog phenomenon caught on in China, it certainly appears to have the CCP in a tizzy.

According to the analysts, the country’s censors, always eager to contain waves of public opinion before they get out of hand, particularly in matters of politics, have become alarmed that despite their intense efforts, Internet technology is quickly making free expression far harder to control.

“With the Du case, the government is saying, ‘Look, our actions may be nicer than in the past, but fundamentally, the judgment of the crime is unchanged, so don’t be fooled, we are also willing to be harsh,’ ” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. “No matter how hard they try, though, it is a fact that the volume of online information is increasing vastly, and there’s nothing the government can do about that. You can monitor hundreds of bulletin boards, but controlling hundreds of thousands of bloggers is very different.”

I wonder if the new controls have anything to do with recent remarks I’ve seen in some Chinese blogs about problems connecting to certain sites, and long page-load times. If I remember, some of these were from Shanghai blogs (but I’m not certain). I also have to wonder, what is to stop China from banning blogs altogether. First blogger, then typepad and some native blogging services. If blogs pose such a threat to social stability and harmony (gimme a break), why not impose a blanket ban?

In any case, it’s not good news. It also seems wasteful, because most of us believe, sensibly, that the government simply can’t win the battle to wrap its tentacles around the hydra that is the Internet. So the fact that they’re so intent on investing huge numbers of renminbi and man-hours to do so is irrational — but it is also completely in keeping with the government’s mindset. Sadly, it is proof positive that the change for which so many thirst is arriving more slowly and less impressively than anticipated. This is a step in the wrong direction, perhaps even a Great Leap Backwards.

I switched to Firefox after reading this post, and this article.

I am definitely glad I did. Firefox is quick (it took seconds to install), easy to use and, most important, it isn’t Microsoft. It’s great.

Update: Amazing. For two weeks my Yahoo email has been loaded with bugs, ever since they upgraded the service and increased the storage. I was totally unable to send attachments; when I clicked “attach files” it said “Your browser does not allow attachments.” I was totally screwed. After I switched to Firefox today, not a single problem — I can attach as many files as I want. I was having other serious problems — pages on Living in China and many other sites failed to fit on my screen; I simply couldn’t read any article posted to that site and others. Now they are all perfect.

Fuck Microsoft! How come no one told me about this before??