Remember all those years when Monday Night Football had dog games week after week? With what ABC had paid in rights fees, you can see why they thought they needed Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Miller in the booth. The choice of individuals made no sense, of course, just like "Jeannie Zelasko in LA" means nothing to anyone tuning in to watch baseball on a Saturday afternoon. But the idea was "let's give them something they'd watch even if the game is a clunker."

The fact is that if the game is a clunker, nothing short of a naked Angelina Jolie mudwrestling Brad Pitt in the booth is going to make anyone stay tuned. And if the game is great, having a managerial interview, a pretty sideline reporter or a talking baseball is merely a distraction.

The same goes with "storylines." Remember the game earlier this year where the "storyline" was Dice-K versus Ichiro, and surprise, surprise, Felix Hernandez pitches a near no-hitter and steals the show. To me, the glory of sports is that you never know what is going to happen, but that can mean just as easily a rainout or a blowout or a game played with the essential quality of little league by highly paid professionals, as well as an instant classic.

Most hometown announcers I've been exposed to in my life--and I've been lucky--are flexible and savvy enough to change their calls when the hometeam is being blown out by the Suns by 25 points, or when the Devil Rays have called up some AAA starter on a Thursday in August. In my experience, network announcers are more pampered and thus respond worse. No one asks them anymore to announce Kansas City against Tampa Bay.

Remember the Administration's theory on Guantanamo, that it wasn't part of the United States so the Constitution didn't apply? Their theory of the Vice Presidency is the same. It's not part of the executive branch, it's not part of the legislative branch, no one can say squat about what the Vice President does or question who he meets with or read his papers, yet the President can delegate anything he wants to him and not change the extra-Constitutional character of the office.

Elegant, but wrong. Just like the claims about Guantanamo. The Vice President may preside over the Senate, but that doesn't make him a Senator. Ask Lyndon Johnson, who tried, after he became Vice President, to head the Democratic caucus in the Senate.

If you break the law in the service of administration policy, the President will take care of you.

There's another organization that has a similar policy. It calls the policy "Omerta."

The Marc Rich "pardon" didn't work, don't you all remember? Rich has not been allowed back in the US because the President can only pardon for federal crimes. Rich was subject to state indictments. The whole thing is a nonsequitur masked as an argument by the same propaganda machine that conflates Clinton's lies with Libby's lies.

The ultimate question is whether you care to live in a country where lying to federal investigators of a leak of a CIA agent's identity is unpunished, or in a country where lying in a deposition in a civil case about your own personal infidelity is the one that is more punished. Clinton's lies were the same lies that are made in divorce cases all around the country all the time and no one gets a perjury charge for them. Libby's lies could potentially put real people in danger. This administration gets by with the calumny that questioning its policy puts troops in danger, but has no problem sending the message to every CIA agent that their lives will be endangered if Dick Cheney thinks it might help the air conditioning work better in his office for an hour next Thursday.

In 1974, Doonesbury showed two Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee exasperated with their Republican colleagues who kept saying "no impeachable offense" to every disgusting item of Nixon's conduct during Watergate. One finally says to the other, "If only he'd knock off a bank or something," and the other replies with glee, "Then we'd have him!"

In 2007, I can see the editorial in the Wall Street Journal: "Vice President Cheney may have been caught red-handed at the Bank of America branch in downtown Cheyenne, but we must look more closely at the facts. Yes, he was carrying a shotgun, but that was his right as an American. Yes, he demanded that the teller hand over all her cash to him. But as Vice President, who are we to say that the use to which he intended to put the money--financing an invasion of San Marino--was not an appropriate and Constitutional one. We do not intend to live in a country where a mere county prosecutor, even one who was prosecuted abortionists and gays, can decide whether the Vice President of all the people, the co-commander-in-chief, has broken the law. That power resides only in Congress, and Congress has not spoken. Free Cheney now!"